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How the Aurora Mass Shooting Cost More Than $100 Million

by mlodyseo7 Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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What Does Gun Violence Really Cost?


16 Charts That Show the Shocking Cost of Gun Violence in America


This Is What It’s Like to Survive a Gunshot


Methodology: the Data Behind Our Investigation


Watch: The Total Cost of Gun Violenceâ&#128;&#148;in 90 Seconds

“We focus on the proceedings. We focus on the death penalty. We focus on the perpetrator. But we don’t focus on the people affected.”

That was how Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was among the 12 people murdered in a movie theater in July 2012, described the American public’s perception as the trial of mass shooter James Holmes got underway on Monday in Aurora, Colorado. It’s a fair point given the inordinate attention that such killers crave, and tend to get, from the media. Yet as Phillips also noted, “that ripple effect of how many people are affected by one act by one person, one animal, is incredibly large.”

She’s right—not just in terms of the trauma and suffering borne by the victims (an additional 58 wounded and 12 others injured in the chaos), their families, and their communities, but also in terms of the literal cost. The price tag for what was one of the worst mass murders in US history is in fact stunningly high: well over $100 million, according to our groundbreaking investigation into the costs of gun violence published earlier this month.

For a quick explanation of the data behind the large sums our country pays for this problem, watch the following 90-second video, with more details on the Aurora tally continuing just below:

The economic impact of Aurora: For starters, long before the attorneys gave opening statements this week, legal proceedings for Holmes had already topped $5.5 million back in February, including expenses related to the unusually large pool of 9,000 prospective jurors called for the case. Add to that the total costs for each of the 12 victims killed: At an average of about $6 million each, that’s another $72 million. For the 58 who survived gunshots and were hospitalized, with an average total cost for each working out to about $583,000, add another $33 million. (Costs for some of the gunshot survivors may have varied widely, of course.) And these figures don’t even begin to account for what the city of Aurora, the state of Colorado, and the federal government have since spent on security and prevention related to the attack.

Indeed, a mass shooting like the one in Aurora doesn’t just have an outsize psychological impact but also a financial one. And these days, fiscal conservatives may want to note, we’re paying that price more often.

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How the Aurora Mass Shooting Cost More Than $100 Million

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3 Times the Old Ted Cruz Contradicted the New Ted Cruz

by JodiBtvcgw Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) talks a good game as an uncompromising conservative. But before he vowed to destroy Obamacare only to admit he may use it, before he forsook rock’n’roll—back when he was a private appellate lawyer charging $695 an hour, Cruz forcefully argued positions that contradict what he now espouses. Some examples from the Ted Cruz Wayback Machine:

Federal stimulus money

THEN: In 2009, he wrote a brief arguing that giving federal stimulus money to retired Texas teachers “will directly further the greater purpose of economic recovery for America.”

NOW: Obama’s economic program is “yet another rehash of the same big-government stimulus programs that have consistently failed to generate jobs.”

BIG JURY AWARDS

THEN: As a lawyer, Cruz defended a $54 million jury award to a severely disabled New Mexico man who had been raped in a group home, asserting that “a large punitive damages award is justified by the need to deter conduct that is hard to detect and often goes unpunished.”

NOW: Wants to spread Texas-style tort reform—which caps punitive damages at $750,000—to the rest of the nation.

The death penalty

THEN: Cruz worked on the Supreme Court case of a Louisiana man who’d been wrongfully sentenced to death, stating that prosecutorial misconduct undermined “public confidence in the criminal-justice system.”

NOW: “I trust the criminal-justice system to operate, to protect the rights of the accused, and to administer justice to violent criminals.”

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3 Times the Old Ted Cruz Contradicted the New Ted Cruz

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Could Rubio’s Past Slip-Ups Haunt a White House Bid?

by JermainDuCane Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

Every day seems to bring Florida Sen. Marco Rubio closer to a presidential run. In recent weeks, the first-term senator has toured the early primary states, including Iowa and New Hampshire, to promote his new, and very presidential-sounding book, American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone.

A talented orator, a Spanish speaker, and a legislator from a key swing state, Rubio could be a strong GOP contender. But his political career in the Florida State House from 2000 to 2009 dovetails with a golden age of corruption in Sunshine State politics. The FBI and the IRS descended on Florida in 2010 to investigate how Florida Republican officials and top pols, including Rubio, used their state party credit cards. He was not the worst offender. Others were criminally charged; Rubio was not. But by the time Rubio was running for the US Senate in 2010, the St. Petersburg Times noted the “sheer number of public corruption investigations under way appears unprecedented in Florida.”

During that race, Rubio’s opponents hounded him over these issues. Still, Rubio was elected. But a presidential bid would bring national scrutiny to his record in Florida. Here are some of the scandals that Rubio has survived…so far.

Continue Reading »

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Could Rubio’s Past Slip-Ups Haunt a White House Bid?

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Renewable Fuel Pays Off

by Posted on February 25, 2015

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Renewable Fuel Pays Off

Posted 25 February 2015 in

National

As Growth Energy CEO Tom Buis notes in The Hill, the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has been an important driver of economic growth in the United States since its passage in 2005.

“With the RFS opening up the fuel market to new fuel sources, the renewable fuels industry has been able to deliver economic, national security and environmental benefits. We need the Renewable Fuel Standard to break the monopolistic stranglehold of Big Oil and give American consumers the choices they deserve.”

With the Obama administration finalizing the volume of renewable fuel that must be blended into our nation’s fuel supply for 2014, efforts to repeal or “reform” the RFS will only serve to harm our economy, threaten our energy security, and cost consumers at the pump.

Read the full column in The Hill.

Fuels America News & Stories

Fuels
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Renewable Fuel Pays Off

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We’re Destroying the Planet in Ways That Are Even Worse Than Global Warming

by GeorgetDabney Posted on January 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Humans are “eating away at our own life support systems” at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases and releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment, new research has found.

Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.

Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels: human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change, and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertilizer use.

Researchers spent five years identifying these core components of a planet suitable for human life, using the long-term average state of each measure to provide a baseline for the analysis.

They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilization has advanced significantly.

Carbon dioxide levels, at 395.5 parts per million, are at historic highs, while loss of biosphere integrity is resulting in species becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times faster than the previous norm.

Graphic: Guardian; Source: PIK PR

Since 1950, urban populations have increased sevenfold, primary energy use has soared by a factor of five, while the amount of fertilizer used is now eight times higher. The amount of nitrogen entering the oceans has quadrupled.

All of these changes are shifting Earth into a “new state” that is becoming less hospitable to human life, researchers said.

“These indicators have shot up since 1950 and there are no signs they are slowing down,” said Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center. Steffen is the lead author on both of the studies.

“When economic systems went into overdrive, there was a massive increase in resource use and pollution,” Steffen said. “It used to be confined to local and regional areas but we’re now seeing this occurring on a global scale. These changes are down to human activity, not natural variability.”

Steffen said direct human influence upon the land was contributing to a loss in pollination and a disruption in the provision of nutrients and fresh water.

“We are clearing land, we are degrading land, we introduce feral animals and take the top predators out, we change the marine ecosystem by overfishing—it’s a death by a thousand cuts,” he said. “That direct impact upon the land is the most important factor right now, even more than climate change.”

There are large variations in conditions around the world, according to the research. For example, land clearing is now concentrated in tropical areas, such as Indonesia and the Amazon, with the practice reversed in parts of Europe. But the overall picture is one of deterioration at a rapid rate.

“It’s fairly safe to say that we haven’t seen conditions in the past similar to ones we see today and there is strong evidence that there are tipping points we don’t want to cross,” Steffen said.

“If the Earth is going to move to a warmer state, 5 to 6 degrees Celsius warmer, with no ice caps, it will do so and that won’t be good for large mammals like us. People say the world is robust and that’s true, there will be life on Earth, but the Earth won’t be robust for us.

“Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem.”

Steffen said the research showed the economic system was “fundamentally flawed” as it ignored critically important life support systems.

“It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive,” he said. “History has shown that civilizations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.”

The two studies, published in Science and Anthropocene Review, featured the work of scientists from countries including the United States, Sweden, Germany, and India. The findings will be presented in seven seminars at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which takes place from January 21 to 25.

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We’re Destroying the Planet in Ways That Are Even Worse Than Global Warming

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Marco Rubio Has the Hots for Uber

by RefugioDurbin Posted on January 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) obligatory presidential aspirant book, American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone, is out this week. National Review has published an excerpt in which Rubio draws on his experience as a part-time college professor teaching political science at Florida International University to make the case that the car service app Uber is America’s best argument for deregulation. He writes:

The students in my class were genuinely intrigued by this innovative service and wondered why they didn’t have it in Miami…Politicians, I said, had passed rules to stifle competition that might threaten their constituents and supporters in the existing taxi and sedan-service industry…As my progressive young students listened to me explain why government was preventing them from using their cell phones to get home from the bars on Saturday night, I could see their minds change.

Rubio, realizing that he’d converted “a bunch of 20- and 21-year-old anti-regulatory activists,” goes on to claim that government regulation too often stifles innovative “little guys” like Uber—”little guy” being a relative term, in this case, when referring to a company that worth a reported $40 billion.

Other Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, have voiced support for Uber, but Rubio has been the GOP’s most vocal and prominent Uber advocate. Last spring, Rubio gushed praise for the company while touring its DC offices. Following the senator’s lead, the Republican National Committee released a petition last August asking people to support “innovative companies like Uber” against bullies in the government and taxi unions. “I can’t overstress the importance of finding a real-life example for us to contrast what we believe in with what the other party believes in,” RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told Townhall about the petition effort. The implication was clear: Democrats want to choke the life out of the sharing economy by overregulating services like Uber and Airbnb, while Republicans want to see them thrive.

Republicans certainly have an incentive to align themselves as the official party of the sharing economy. They see it as a chance to win back the tech-savvy young voters who’ve spurned much of the GOP platform in the past. Democrats, unsurprisingly, see it as “pandering.”

The strategy ignores some Uber realities. Without tougher regulations on driver background checks, for example, the already lengthy list of violent and abusive behavior by Uber drivers could grow longer. Some low points from the past two years: An Uber driver with a prior felony conviction was charged with battery of a passenger, another one took a Los Angeles woman 20 miles out of the way to an abandoned parking lot, and another driver beat a passenger in San Francisco—with a hammer. In response to concerns over safety, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick pushed for more thorough background checks for drivers—a dreaded regulation for Uber that might be popular among some of Rubio’s former students.

But even if Uber remains a symbol of free enterprise and entrepreneurship, it’s close to becoming seen as an enemy of free speech and the press. Last November, Uber senior vice president Emil Michael suggested digging up dirt—“your personal lives, your families”—on journalists who produced coverage critical of the company. Some argued the issue was overblown, but ultimately the incident earned Uber a few enemies within the press. The company made a sharp U-turn after it was criticized, saying later that it was not going after journalists, but rather against its opponents in the taxi business.

Uber’s rapid expansion from tech upstart to indisputable giant could present a catch-22 for Rubio. In its quest to stave off regulation, Uber has hired a legion of lobbyists—including former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe—to achieve its goals. “More often than not, big business co-opts big government—and vice versa—and they work together,” Rubio writes in his book. He’s referring to how regulations help entrenched interests, but his argument can apply to Uber’s push for deregulation too. “After all,” he writes, “big corporations can afford to influence government, and the little guys can’t.”

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Marco Rubio Has the Hots for Uber

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Obama Sounds Like He’s About to Reject the Keystone Pipeline

by LoganCrookes Posted on December 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Speaking at his end-of-the-year press conference on Friday afternoon, President Obama sounded very much like he’s poised to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. He gave his sharpest assessment to date of its potential costs and benefits—lots of costs and few benefits.

Climate hawks rejoiced, not only because of Obama’s implied opposition to Keystone, but because he finally confronted American ignorance of how the oil market works, and attempted to reorient our energy policy around reality.

At the press conference, Obama took a question from The Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin on what he will do about the Keystone XL pipeline, which congressional Republicans plan to try to ram through in January. Eilperin said Obama has in past comments “minimized some of the benefits” of Keystone. Obama responded that he has merely accurately characterized the benefits, which are objectively minimal, and walked Eilperin through a lesson in macroeconomics.

Here are the highlights:

I don’t think I’ve minimized the benefits, I think I’ve described the benefits.

At issue on Keystone is not American oil, it is Canadian oil that is drawn out of tar sands in Canada. That oil currently is being shipped through rail or trucks, and it would save Canadian oil companies and the Canadian oil industry an enormous amount of money if they could simply pipe it all the way through the United State down to the Gulf. Once that oil gets to the Gulf, it is then entering into the world market and it would be sold all around the world… There is very little impact, nominal impact, on US gas prices, what the average American consumer cares about, by having this pipeline come through.

And sometimes the way this gets sold is, let’s get this oil and it’s going to come here and the implication is that’s gonna lower oil prices here in the US It’s not. There’s a global oil market. It’s very good for Canadian oil companies and it’s good for the Canadian oil industry, but it’s not going to be a huge benefit to US consumers. It’s not even going to be a nominal benefit to US consumers.

And video of Obama’s whole answer:

It has been a source of aggravation to climate hawks that Obama has often pandered to the economic ignorance of the American public when it comes to gas prices. Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy falsely asserts that increased domestic production of oil will reduce “our dependence on foreign oil,” as if there really were any such thing. Oil is a global commodity. Prices are set by global supply and global demand. Whether the oil we buy happens to be drilled in the US, Canada, Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or Libya makes no difference. We are subsidizing our adversaries who produce oil as long as we are filling our gas-guzzlers with it. More oil production in the US, or oil importation from Canada, will not inoculate us against the price shocks caused by supply disruptions in the Middle East or elsewhere.

The whole American debate around energy policy has been perverted by the public’s failure to understand this basic concept. Republicans, of course, eagerly fan the flames of economic illiteracy. Obama’s approach has usually been to try to split the difference between this foolishness and smart energy policy by promising to increase domestic production of both renewables and fossil fuels. But now Obama has confronted these public misperceptions and tried to educate the public so that energy policy can be decided on a more rational basis.

As for Keystone, Obama went on to observe that the other supposed benefit, construction jobs, is real but small and temporary. Meanwhile, our transportation and clean water infrastructure crumbles and Republicans refuse to appropriate money to fix and improve it, which would create more jobs and lasting economic effects than construction of any pipeline. “When you consider what we could be doing if we were rebuilding our roads and bridges around the country, something that Congress could authorize, we could probably create hundreds of thousands of jobs, or a million jobs,” he said. (In fairness, Obama has refused to propose raising the gasoline tax to fund more transportation investment.)

And Obama mentioned the cost of climate change and the possibility that Keystone would exacerbate it. “If we’ve got more flooding, more wildfires, more drought, there are direct economic impacts on that,” he said.

The main Keystone drawback Obama neglected to mention is the local environmental risk to the communities the pipeline would pass through due to possible leaks.

Nonetheless, green groups were overjoyed. NextGen Climate, the organization funded by Tom Steyer, immediately sent out video of Obama’s answer with the subject line, “KEYSTONE XL GETS THE PRESIDENTIAL SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL.” We don’t actually know that, yet, but it’s looking likely.

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Obama Sounds Like He’s About to Reject the Keystone Pipeline

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These Stunning Photos Show China’s Daily Onslaught of Toxic Smog

by NCSEmelybnkz Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

During the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing, something remarkable happened, as it does every time the world’s news cameras train their sites on the Chinese capital: The toxic gray air turned blue. The state-run press even gave it a name: “APEC blue”.

Magic! Not exactly. In a push to impress (pretend?), the magic wand that Beijing authorities waved to banish the smog was in fact a massive bureaucratic effort that could only be pulled off in one-party-rule China. Ten thousand industrial plants were temporarily shuttered, and nearly 40,000 others limited operating hours. An army of 434,000 staff and officials from provinces surrounding Beijing were called up to inspect the plants and enforce the order, according to the South China Morning Post.

In China, extreme tactics like this are not uncommon. The skies for 2008’s Beijing Olympics were cleared in part using cloud-seeding, a process that involves lacing clouds with chemicals to increase precipitation. The country boasts “the world’s largest rainmaking force, with 6,902 cloud-seeding artillery guns, 7,034 launchers for chemical-bearing rockets, more than 50 planes and 47,700 employees,” according to the Washington Post.

But now that APEC is over, so is APEC blue. The smog is returning with a vengeance as cars clog the streets and production gets back online:

To get a real sense of just how bad the air is in Beijing most of the time, check out this extraordinary series of photos taken by one Beijing man, who has been waging something of a social media war against the city’s toxic air since the beginning of 2013. Zou Yi has been taking photos of the Beijing sky every day and uploading them to his personal Weibo account (the rough equivalent of Twitter). The result—which we first saw in Petapixel and which was also reported in That’s, a Beijing expat magazine—is frightening:

A toxic view. Zou Yi/Sina Weibo via Petapixel/That’s

The daily photos of the Beijing Television Station building are taken from Zou’s apartment. They include the date and Beijing’s Air Quality Index readings. Independent US readings of the smog taken from atop its Beijing embassy were reportedly censored during APEC.

The photo series has even been picked up by Chinese state-run press, in a further sign that the constraints around reporting the pollution problem in the media have been gradually loosening over the last few years. China Radio International’s website quoted Zou Yi as saying, “I hope the activity will cause more people to realize the significance of protecting the environment.”

According to environmental policy experts, China’s air crisis was a major driver behind the landmark US-China climate deal announced last week. Under the agreement, China’s greenhouse gas emissions would peak around 2030. China’s pollution—which is now a political headache for its leaders, not simply an environmental concern—has been central to its pursuit of alternative energy sources, including natural gas, that could wean China’s economy from dirty coal.

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These Stunning Photos Show China’s Daily Onslaught of Toxic Smog

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We can provide power to everyone without a huge leap in emissions, study finds

by KarolinZinnbaue Posted on October 20, 2014

We can provide power to everyone without a huge leap in emissions, study finds

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20 Oct 2014 2:51 PM

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When we talk about international climate action, it’s often taken for granted that developing countries need room to pollute as they pull their citizens out of poverty. More than a billion people worldwide don’t have access to electricity, the argument goes, and getting them connected will require major development projects that will come hand-in-hand with significant new emissions.

But that might be a false assumption, according to a new paper in Nature Climate Change.

Shonali Pachauri, a researcher with the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, finds that the world’s poorest people use so little energy at the moment that initially, upon being connected to the grid, they will not make much of a difference at all.

New Scientist writes:

The test case is rural India, where more unplugged people live than anywhere else — 400 million of them. But that is changing. India has connected an estimated 650 million people to the grid in the past 30 years, and Pachauri analysed government data on electricity use to find out what difference it made.

She found that the emissions of the newly connected, most in poor villages, amounted to just 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That was less than 4 per cent of the increase in national emissions during that time, which was overwhelmingly from cities and industry.

The big reason for this relatively tiny increase is that many poor households in developing countries just don’t have that much stuff to plug in. The average Indian household uses less than one tenth of the energy of an American household.

Of course, as nations become wealthier and more electrified, this will change: Their people will get more stuff, and use more energy. So getting growing countries’ energy economies on the right track now will help to keep their emissions from spiraling out of control in the future.

Fortunately, in the case of India, recently elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been touting a plan to get the rural poor hooked up to solar power. As chief minister of Gujarat, a state in the western part of India, he encouraged the rapid development of solar — and he’s now pushing to expand similar incentives across the country.

But in an essay this summer in New Scientist looking at central Africa, Fred Pearce noted that it is important that development efforts like this be big enough to actually make a difference.

… a couple of panels on the roof can charge phones and run a few lights and a radio but would be no good for anything more demanding, like boiling a kettle. Most Kenyans would probably prefer to be hooked up to centralised power, but the grid only reaches one-fifth of the country. …

That is especially troubling if the main argument for solar power is to tackle climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argues that reducing poverty is vital to helping poor communities become more resilient. So it would be criminal if green technologies were imposed on poor people to help hold back carbon emissions — only to leave them even more vulnerable.

So off-grid, low-capacity solar arrays might not be the whole answer. Bigger, more robust renewable energy projects would be better. Finding the right form for those projects will be the challenge.

Source:
Powering up the poor shouldn’t hurt the climate

, New Scientist.

Access to electricity in India has no impact on climate change

, The Economic Times.

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We can provide power to everyone without a huge leap in emissions, study finds

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

by EmeliaRunyan Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on the Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As climate change increases the intensity and (possibly) the frequency of major coastal storms, what will be the economic consequences?

Answering this question requires two big pieces of information: the economic consequences of such storms (typhoons, hurricanes, and tropical cyclones) and the patterns of those storms in the years ahead. As it turns out, it’s that first bit—the economic consequences of storms—that was difficult to pin down.

For years economists have debated whether destructive storms are even bad for a country’s economy. To a non-economist, the ill effects of a storm might seem intuitive, but economists have a knack for finding plausible counterintuitive explanations. When it comes to a major natural disaster, they had four competing hypotheses: Such a disaster might permanently set a country back; it might temporarily derail growth only to get back on course down the road; it might lead to even greater growth, as new investment pours in to replace destroyed assets; or, possibly, it might yet even better, not only stimulating growth but also ridding the country of whatever outdated infrastructure was holding it back. Woohoo.

Hsiang and Jina

Interesting theories, but time to test them out against some empirical data. And that’s what economists Solomon M. Hsiang of Berkeley and Amir S. Jina of Columbia set out to do in a paper released this week.

Hsiang and Jina looked at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes observed from 1950 to 2008 and the economic fortunes of the countries they struck in the years that followed. With their data, Jina and Hsiang can decisively say: These storms are bad—very bad—for economic growth.

“There is no creative destruction,” Jina told me. “These disasters hit us and their effects sit around for a couple of decades.” He added, “Just demonstrating that that was true was probably the most interesting aspect for me to start with.”

Hsiang and Jina find that such storms (which they group under the umbrella term “cyclones”) can be as bad as some of the worst sorts of man-made economic challenges. A cyclone of a magnitude that a country would expect to see once every few years can slow down an economy on par with “a tax increase equal to one percent of GDP, a currency crisis, or a political crisis in which executive constraints are weakened.” For a really bad storm (a magnitude you’d expect to see around the world only once every 10 years), the damage will be similar “to losses from a banking crisis.” The very worst storms—the top percentile—”have losses that are larger and endure longer than any of those previously studied shocks.”

Here’s a little chart they made comparing these different sorts of disasters:

Hsiang and Jina

The effects are lasting: Overall, they find that “each additional meter per second of annual nationally-averaged wind exposure lowers per capita economic output 0.37 percent 20 years later” (emphasis added). Put simply, economies “do not recover in the long run.”

So what does this mean for a planet with a changing climate?

Projections for storm patterns as the planet’s climate morphs are, as Jina put it, “a very complex area.” How do you choose which model to rely on? You go with, Jina says, “the best”: those of Kerry Emanuel at MIT, world expert on cyclone patterns.

When they meshed their backward-looking empirical calculations with Emanuel’s forward-looking projections, the number they got was startling: $9.7 trillion—the present discounted value “of expected losses due to enhanced cyclone activity” if we don’t take any action to dial back greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the calculation they make at the 95 percent confidence interval, though the figure could range from $3.9 trillion to $15.5 trillion.)

“For me,” Jina says, “it is a very convincing argument to say that we need to mitigate as much climate change as we can.”

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

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