Costs of Producing and Using Fossil-Fuels

(Plastic – AKA Fossil-Fuel Industry’s Plan B)

In Bill McKibben’s book Here Comes the Sun, he outlines the costs of climate change from fossil fuels. Here are some examples:

• “…climate change has already badly damaging the economy, and that the damage could grow far worse. “If the world fails to halt the rise in temperatures,” CBS reported, “one study found that the impacts globally could cost $551 Trillion by 2099, roughly 19 times the size of the U.S. economy.”  CBS News, November 2024.

• By 2070, the world could face a 50% loss in its GDP from climate shocks.  On the current path, the earth’s systems could become so degraded that “humans could no longer receive enough of the critical services they relied on” to support our civilization. “You can’t have an economy without a society,” the report’s lead author explained to The Guardian. – Planatary Solvency Report by London-based Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, January 2025.

• In May 2024, the World Resources Institute estimated that in the developing nations alone, the annual cost of the climate crisis will reach between $497 – $884 Billion before this decade is out; meanwhile, the world has set aside $702 million in a climate loss and damage fund to pay those countries.  It’s as if you’d set up a college savings fund for your newborn and plunked a nickel a week in the jar.

As wildfires and deluge have spread across the country, so have the number of insurance agents informing customers that their policies have been cancelled.

Want Insurance? Want to Afford Insurance?  You can’t get a mortgage from a bank if you can’t get insurance on the home you want to buy.  All of a sudden, getting insurance is hard work. 

• Autumn 2024, Hurricane Helene, carrying an ungodly load of water that it’d picked up over the record-hot waters of the Gulf, dumped nearly 4 feet of rain on Mount Mitchel, north of Ashville, North Carolina.

• January 2025, Los Angeles fires now seem likely to be the costliest disaster in American history.

• February 2025, State Farm, California’s largest insurer, applied for a 22 percent emergency rate hike in order, it said, to send a message to “solvency regulators” and “ratings agencies” that the company had a “chance to begin rebuilding capital to sustain itself.”

• December 2024, Senate Budget Committee report on rising rates of “Non-Renewals” for home insurance.