Politicians pay close attention to opinion polls, especially those that claim to reveal voters’ priorities. That’s one reason why political candidates pay so little attention to climate change. Polling services report that “the economy”—often paired with “jobs” or “inflation,” depending on which is the crisis of the day—always tops voters’ list of greatest concerns.
Climate change, on the other hand, generally appears at the bottom of the list. In a May 2024 Pew Research Center poll, 62% of respondents identified inflation as a very big problem, while only 36% said the same about climate change. There are several reasons for this. Climate change, for many, remains distant in space and time, irrelevant to their daily concerns. Some politicians dismiss global warming as an economically stifling obsession by extreme environmentalists.
This is wrong. In a recent article in Slate titled “Climate is the Economy,” the author points out that climate disasters are already draining the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s budget.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2024 is on track to surpass 2023 in terms of billions of dollars in climate disasters. Insurance premiums are rising in storm- and flood-prone states like Florida and Texas, as well as in states suffering from wildfires like California and Colorado. Some insurers are abandoning these states entirely, leaving taxpayers to cover the cost of relief and rebuilding.
The annual financial burden from home insurance losses in the United States is $97 billion.
But it’s not just insurance. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco concluded that extreme heat could cause long-term damage to the economy by affecting worker productivity, particularly in the construction sector. Even Consumer Reports weighed in, with an analysis showing that an American child born today could face between $500,000 and $1 million in lifetime costs from climate change.
Ripple effect
So let’s acknowledge that climate change costs money, and it’s only going to get worse unless we take stronger action. But what about those other public concerns? A Pew poll found that 57 percent of Americans consider “health care affordability” a very big problem. What does this have to do with climate change?
Indeed, health-care costs in North America could exceed $1 trillion over the next 25 years, largely due to floods, storms, wildfires, and extreme heat. Climate change is thus seeping into health-care costs.
What about “illegal immigration,” which has dominated the news cycle for years now, and which 51% of Pew survey respondents cited as a major concern, still far ahead of climate change? Isn’t that a separate issue?
No, climate change is one of many factors that are convincing people to abandon their homes just to survive. Zurich Insurance predicts there will be 1.2 billion “climate refugees” by 2050.
In November 2020, two Category 4 hurricanes struck Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, unleashing heavy rains and landslides that destroyed homes, livelihoods and access to clean water. Desperate people streamed into Mexico and then toward the United States. But when the storms aren’t raging, the same region—what the United Nations has called the “dry corridor”—is uniquely vulnerable to heat-induced droughts that make it impossible to grow crops for 11 million people.
I could go on about other issues that worry voters. National security? NATO calls climate change a “threat multiplier.” Federal deficit? The Congressional Budget Office says climate change is deepening the deficit by cutting revenues and increasing mandatory spending.
The lesson here is that pollsters and experts do the public a disservice by ignoring the deep connections between climate change, the economy, health care, immigration, and other important concerns. As long as voters view climate change as a matter of concern only to environmentalists and science nerds, political leaders will not elevate it to its rightful place in the hierarchy of national issues.
Whether we like it or not, the unchecked burning of fossil fuels, though it has brought great prosperity, has now reached a point where its costs are prohibitive.
Fortunately, we have the technologies we need to solve this problem. All we need is the political will to challenge the status quo. I urge everyone to put aside partisan prejudices and tell their elected officials that they want to take swift, rational action on climate change to protect our economy. You could be the one to tip the balance.
Rick Knight is a chemical engineer and research coordinator at the nonprofit Citizens' Climate Education Corp.
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