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global economy
Climate-Fueled Extreme Weather Costs US Nearly $100 Billion a Year
The increased frequency of natural disasters caused by climate change is having major economic effects, according to reinsurance company Swiss Re.
Feb 28, 2024
The climate crisis is already having a major impact on the U.S. economy, and the damages are only going to increase.
A new report from the reinsurance company Swiss Re estimates climate change is currently costing the U.S. roughly $97 billion per year. This cost comes from the increased frequency of natural disasters that are connected to climate change, which is driven by the burning of fossil fuels.
"Climate change is leading to more severe weather events, resulting in increasing impact on economies," said the Swiss Re group's chief economist Jerome Jean Haegeli. "Therefore, it becomes even more crucial to take adaptation measures."
Swiss Re looked at data from 2022 and analyzed the impact of natural disasters on the GDP of 36 countries, including the U.S., to establish its findings. The report focused on the effects of floods, tropical cyclones, winter storms, and severe thunderstorms.
While the effects of climate change on the U.S. economy were significant, the country that was most affected by it was the Philippines. The report says climate change impacted 3% of the country's GDP. The U.S. saw a 0.4% impact on its yearly economic output.
The report states that all countries must do whatever possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to help lessen the potential economic costs of climate change-related natural disasters. It says countries must also better prepare for the effects of climate change to reduce these costs.
One effect of climate change, increased heatwaves, was not factored into this report. A study from 2022 found that human-caused increases in heatwaves potentially cost the global economy over $29 trillion between 1992 and 2013.
Some experts have suggested the effects of climate change are actually costing the U.S. over $120 billion per year. While there's no universally agreed upon number, it's clear that the costs of the climate crisis are high, and they'll only increase as it gets worse. Decarbonizing the economy isn't a cheap endeavor, but letting climate change spiral out of control would have much more dire economic effects.
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From Global Chaos and Danger to Understanding and Cooperation
The management of a multipolar world is fraught with difficulties and that is why a better understanding of the New World Economy is essential.
Jan 12, 2023
Belém, Brazil – I inaugurate this new series of columns in a New Year and a new beginning for Brazil with the inauguration of President Lula da Silva. His well-wishers poured out across the country in a revival of hope for Brazil after four years of disastrous rule under his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who had fled Brazil for Florida on the eve of Lula’s inauguration. Bolsonaro left behind a mob that rampaged government office buildings before being arrested in large numbers by the police.
The mob tactics will not stop Lula, nor will they have a long-term effect in the US, where Donald Trump’s similar maneuvers on January 6, 2021, were also shut down. In both cases, demagogic politicians used social media to rile up a mob; in both cases, the mob was put down within the day.
The real issue, in my mind, is not the mob, but the deeper changes in the world that are generating growing tensions in world politics and economy. The deep changes can’t and won’t be stopped by mobs. Our real challenge is to understand the deeper changes at play so that we can manage them for the common good. Such an understanding is the aim of my future columns.
The biggest turmoil is geopolitical. We are no longer in a US-led world, nor even a world divided between the US and its rival China. We have already entered a multipolar world, in which each region has its own issues and role in global politics. No country and no single region can any longer determine the fate of others. This is a complex and noisy environment – with no country, region, or alliance in charge of the rest.
The deep changes can’t and won’t be stopped by mobs. Our real challenge is to understand the deeper changes at play so that we can manage them for the common good.
One reason why Lula’s return to the presidency is so consequential is that Brazil will be a key regional and global actor in the years ahead. Lula will work closely with like-minded progressive presidents in Chile, Columbia, Argentina, and elsewhere in South America. Brazil will also hold the Presidency of the G20 in 2024, part of a four-year run in which major emerging economies hold the G20 presidency (Indonesia in 2022, India in 2023, and South Africa in 2025).
The management of a multipolar world is fraught with difficulties. We urgently need more dialogue with other countries, and to move beyond the simplistic propaganda of our own governments. Here in the West, we are bombarded daily with ridiculous official narratives, most originating from Washington: Russia is pure evil, China is the greatest threat to the world, and only NATO can save us.
These naïve stories, spun out endlessly by the US State Department, are a great hindrance to global problem-solving. They trap us in false mindsets, and even in wars that should never have occurred and which must be stopped by negotiation rather than escalation.
When we accept the reality of a multipolar world, we will finally be able to solve problems that have so far eluded us. First, we will understand that military alliances such as NATO offer no answers to the real challenges that we confront. Military alliances are in fact a dangerous anachronism, not a true source of national or regional security. It was, after all, the US attempt to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine that triggered the wars in Georgia (in 2010) and in Ukraine (2014 until today). Nor did the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, or fifteen year failed mission in Afghanistan, or bombing Libya in 2011, accomplish any real objectives.
Neither is China the grave threat that is portrayed today in the West. The US tries to pretend that we still live in a US-led world, and that China is a dangerous pretender that must be stopped. But reality is different. China is an ancient civilization of 1.4 billion people (almost one in five in the world) that also aims for high living standards and technological excellence. We will solve our global problems not by vainly trying to “contain” China, but by trading, cooperating, and yes, also competing economically with China.
Other great global challenges lie elsewhere: the deep dangers of environmental catastrophe; the rising inequalities in our own societies; and the onrush of new technologies that can disrupt the world if these technologies are not properly harnessed and controlled.
Brazil is the epicenter of the environmental challenge. Can the Amazon, constituting half of the world’s rainforests, be saved? Lula came to power promising to do just this. He won the vote of the Amazon states of Brazil. Globally, Europe is in the environmental lead with the European Green Deal. Europe’s main geopolitical opportunity is to encourage other regions, including the African Union, China, India, the Americas and others, to adopt their own bold green deals. That’s a far better task for Europe than expanding NATO, fighting an endless war in Ukraine, or confronting China.
Brazil is also an epicenter of inequality, with one of the highest degrees of inequality in the world. That inequality was originally created by European imperialism that suppressed indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of Africans. Their descendants continue to pay the price. Social justice is Lula’s calling, and our global calling, after centuries of racial and social injustice.
Brazil can also be an epicenter of the new technologies, for example a leader in the new bioeconomy in which the wonders of the Amazon’s and Brazil’s biodiversity are not destroyed for more cattle ranches but instead to produce new life-saving medicines, nutritious foodstuffs (such as the açai now booming worldwide), or advanced biofuels for green aviation.
Technological change is perhaps the deepest driver of global change. We need the new technologies to confront the crises of climate change, hunger, education, and health. Yet we also suffer from the new digital technologies when they are misused, such as to mobilize mobs, or weapon killer drones in Ukraine. Advanced biotechnology may well have created the virus that causes Covid-19 (we still don’t know). Every day we confront the disruptions and inequalities caused by artificial intelligence, robotics, and the rapid overturning of jobs.
The confluence of global change, disruption, and danger is astounding. Solutions lie in understanding, cooperation, and problem solving. A better understanding of the New World Economy will be the aim of this column in the months ahead.
This column originally appeared in Italian in la Repubblica here.
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Wake Up Democrats, Warns Sanders, This Populist Unrest Cannot Be Ignored
Brexit win has much to teach Democrats about Trump threat, warns senator, and elites ignore frustrations of workers and the poor at their own peril
Jun 29, 2016
In a New York Timesop-ed published late Tuesday evening, Sen. Bernie Sanders issued a stark warning to the Democratic Party leadership that if they don't wake up to the profound dissatisfaction of the poor and working classes in the United States, they may very well experience a similar shock to the one experienced by many in the United Kingdom last week when a majority—fueled largely by financial frustrations—chose to leave the European Union.
"Could this rejection of the current form of the global economy happen in the United States? You bet it could." --Bernie Sanders: "Surprise, surprise. Workers in Britain, many of whom have seen a decline in their standard of living while the very rich in their country have become much richer, have turned their backs on the European Union and a globalized economy that is failing them and their children," Sanders writes.
"Could this rejection of the current form of the global economy happen in the United States?" he asks. "You bet it could."
Citing troubling metrics of massive income and wealth inequality both in the U.S. and around the globe, Sanders said the xenophobia and regressiveness represented by the rise of Donald Trump within the Republican Party and Friday's vote in favor of Brexit in the UK is the result of increasing numbers of people around the world who recognize that the economic system is designed to benefit the rich and powerful, not them disproportionately.
Progressives voices in the U.S. and Europe have been warning throughout the economic downturn which began with the financial meltdown of 2007 that if governments continued to ignore the root causes of inequality and the political demands of working class people, they would ultimately empower the xenophobic and fascist forces of the far-right.
Sanders' public warning comes as many establishment figures within the Democratic Party and in the corporate media express increasing frustration that Sanders has yet to formally suspend his campaign and endorse the presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. However, many rank-and-file Democrats have said they support Sanders' staying in the race to the convention. Meanwhile, besides saying he will vote for Clinton in November, he has repeatedly explained that his primary goals are to push the party in a more progressive direction while ensuring that Donald Trump is not elected president in the fall. The warning contained in his op-ed does not appear to contradict any of these aims.
"Let's be clear," Sanders writes. "The global economy is not working for most people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change."
What's not needed and must be vigorously opposed, he added, is "the demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment that punctuated so much of the Leave campaign's rhetoric--and is central to Donald J. Trump's message."
What's needed instead to combat those forces, according to Sanders, is:
- A president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war;
- A president who respects the democratic rights of the people and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies, and other powerful special interests;
- To fundamentally reject our "free trade" policies and move to fair trade;
- To end the international scandal in which large corporations and the wealthy avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes to their national governments;
- To create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world's energy system away from fossil fuels;
- International efforts to cut military spending around the globe and address the causes of war: poverty, hatred, hopelessness, and ignorance.
Amid an ongoing battle over drafting a new Democratic Party platform, Sanders argues that it is precisely the wrong time to put a lid on the populist demands that so many Democratic, progressive, and independent voters so clearly desire.
"The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States," the Sanders op-ed warns. "Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class."
But in what is a "pivotal" historical moment, he concludes, "the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires."
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