More aggressive climate policies could save us $1 trillion each year

(credit: Jerry Raia)

One of the obstacles to making the case for environmental policies is that the financial cost of an action can be easy to calculate, while the benefits can be much more difficult to fully quantify. Good deals can be made to sound like money pits when the costs are emphasized without the context of the benefits.

When it comes to action on climate change, there has been some effort to put numbers on the costs and benefits of certain courses of action. But a new study from Drew Shindell and Yunha Lee of Duke University and NASA’s Greg Faluvegi looks at the benefits of more aggressive US actions—ones that could actually put us on the path to meeting the goal of limiting climate change to less than 2ºC warming. While the 2ºC limit is the stated goal of international negotiations, it is quickly slipping out of reach. So what would happen if the US went for it?

The researchers look at a scenario in which the US cuts emissions to 40 percent below their current levels by 2030, focusing on energy and transportation. That’s a trajectory that would ultimately fulfill the US contribution to meeting a 2ºC goal, assuming it were continued. But for the purposes of this study, emissions stay steady after 2030 so that we’re purely talking about the benefits of actions in the next 14 years. This isn’t just about CO₂—all the other air pollutants that are emitted from the same smokestacks and tailpipes were analyzed as well.