GAO: Climate change already costing US billions in losses | Hacker News Reader

GAO: Climate change already costing US billions in losses

apnews.com

47 pointsghouse17 comments

Report summary: we spent over $350 B in the last 10 years on disaster recovery, we expect that to continue to be very expensive in the future. They expect the cost by 2055 to be consistently $35 B / yr, though it appears this is mostly just a guess, and at best "really bad weather periods are expensive" which is obvious.

Article: mostly just attacking Trump's administration, entirely non-constructive.

I don't understand why this is on HN.

That's one half of the story. We need to know how many billions in losses are cost as a result of climate-related regulations. And economically, how much money is 'saved' due to those regulations.

It's hard to model the dollar cost ("all of them"?) of runaway climate change, or of individual actions that are necessary but insufficient to avert it.

Ideally we would want an accurate trajectory of forecasted change to map the cost/savings, but the trajectory keeps getting readjusted and the cost/savings is fairly subjective, so modeling this is pretty much fruitless.

Cost fails to account for economic development as a result of the hurricanes and subtract that from economic damage.

Savings measurement requires accounting for theoretical scenarios which by nature are malleable.

Or you could just assume we're all gonna die and no actions will be sufficient, then we can all just stop working on climate change and save some extra dollars for the ride out.

Cost fails to account for economic development as a result of the hurricanes and subtract that from economic damage.

Letting things break so that money will be spent replacing them is not 'economic development' [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

This article is illogical. It simultaneously calls the report "non-partisan" while also pointing out that the current administration disagrees with it.

Furthermore, it gives the impression that the cost of every natural disaster is being associated with climate change.

Lastly, I do not see any mention of what it would cost to implement so-called climate change prevention strategies. For that, they would have to acknowledge that this is a global issue.

Somebody disagrees with 'x' does not make 'x' partisan.

Finding one (moderate) Republican congressperson and one Democratic congressperson who will sponsor a report also does not make it "non-partisan" which is a clear attempt to characterize it as "not political"

The GAO is obviously political, but that doesn't make it partisan. A non-political GAO would be rather odd, since it exists specifically to inform congress as to the impact of policies.

Non-partisan doesn't mean nobody disagrees with it.

If well established practices and fact are disputed by one party, that doesn't make it objective to abandon them. If non-partisan means splitting the difference between the major parties, then there would be an incentive for each party to tack as far away from center in order to sway the GAO.

Nonpartisan means not associated with a political party.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisanism

If the entire Trump administration disagrees with it, I think it it's fair to say that his political party is not on board.

The article/report is leveraging one Republican (moderate Susan Collins) to label it as nonpartisan.

If the Trump EPA says the sun appears blue to everyone, then is it a partisan issue to say they're incorrect?

Partisan means pushing a political agenda based on ideology or party. NOT that a particular party agrees or disagrees with them.

You're using the straw man argument, which is vacuous. You are also ignoring the correct definition of nonpartisan, which I linked above.

Not much of a straw man, since we are nearly certain about the fact that mean temperatures are rising as we are about the color of the sun.

Whether or not the changing climate is anthropogenic is somewhat less certain, (and more politically contentious), but we ought to be able to discuss the effects of these absent the cause without calling a report partisan.

It's called analogy, and I believe I am still correct. If a report aligns with a particular party, that does not make it partisan. The motivations and affiliations of an organization may make it "left leaning" or "right leaning", but the GAO is pretty well established as non-partisan.

The GAO is not associated with a political party. It meets that definition. In particular:

> in most cases, nonpartisan refers specifically to political party connections rather than being the strict antonym of "partisan".

Why would it matter whether his political party is on board? The GAO puts out a report regardless of whether it expects one party or the other to disagree with it.

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