(Boston Herald)
A landmark U.S. climate change study by 13 federal agencies brings greater urgency to the question of what Americans can do to avoid an unprecedented shift in how they live in coming decades. What it doesn’t do is provide any answers.
“The report does not make policy recommendations, but it is abundantly clear that there are strong policy implications,” said Andrew Light, a co-author and a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. “Every single one of them is, unfortunately, not something that the U.S. is pursuing at the national level.”
The National Climate Assessment catalogs the environmental and projected financial damage from a climate that’s broken free from 12,000 years of relative stability. It looks forward to 2090, when even in a lower-carbon projection the added cost to American society will be more than $100 billion in 2015 dollars, and maybe as much as $200 billion — annually. And that’s a best case scenario.
Unstated in the report is that the U.S. government, like most around the globe, isn’t doing enough to slow a planetary march toward the cliff’s edge Read more