In June 2009, a bill that would have regulated carbon pollution and set up a national cap-and-trade system passed the House of Representatives and went to the Senate. After the American Petroleum Institute and coal industry lobbyists argued that such legislation would raise energy costs and spur unemployment, the Senate’s Democratic leadership failed to bring the bill to a vote.
“The big boys made this about jobs versus the environment, and the environment loses that argument every time,” Steyer says. “We need to get rid of this idea that going the way we are, with the status quo, is a smart economic thing to do.” That’s Steyer’s goal in funding a detailed risk analysis.
“The next time lobbyists go from Senate office to Senate office saying this is how many jobs you’re going to lose in your state, we’ll have an intellectual response: ‘Bulls---. That’s bulls---,’” he says.
The Risky Business project will be directed by a 10-member interdisciplinary team of economists and climatologists. It will divide the U.S. into eight regions and present findings for each part of the country as a range of probabilities, similar to an insurer’s actuarial table.
Rather than prescribing solutions, the researchers aim to provide state and municipal policy makers, business leaders and investors with a data-rich framework they can use to understand the climate risks they face.
“This cannot be a liberal narrative about an apocalyptic future,” says Kate Gordon, director of the energy and climate program at Next Generation, a nonprofit Steyer co-founded in San Francisco. “People have to feel they can do something about climate change that’s grounded in what they know and where they live,” says Gordon, who’s helping to direct the study.
The Risky Business analysis will draw on climate models used by the IPCC and the National Climate Assessment, a U.S. government effort that combines information from 13 agencies to create region-by-region predictions of the effects of global warming.
Stressed-out Crops
The Great Plains, stretching from Montana to Texas, likely will experience more heat waves and more extreme swings in precipitation, for example, and droughts will put pressure on diminishing water supplies, according to the assessment.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts that over the next few decades, these changes will reduce harvests and may force cattle producers to set up air-conditioned shelters for their herds, meaning the cost of staples such as meat and milk will probably go up.