Short Wave - 3 Major Ways Climate Change Affects Life In The U.S.

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

Every five years, the United States government releases the National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive analysis of how climate change is affecting the country. The fifth assessment was recently released. It's the first to include includes standalone chapters about climate change's toll on the U.S. economy, as well as the complex social factors driving climate change and the nation's responses. Climate reporters Rebecca Hersher and Alejandra Borunda walk us through three major takeaways from the report: the economics, the negative human health effects and the unequal burden people face. Plus, a silver lining: All the ways the U.S. is making progress to slow the effects of climate change. Read Rebecca and Alejandra's full piece here.Want to hear a climate story? Email us at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. So far, 2023 is the hottest year ever recorded. Big exhale. But that means it seems like it's a good moment to check in on how climate change is affecting people across the U.S. And luckily, there's a monumental new national climate assessment that just came out and can help us do just that. Rebecca Herscher and Alejandra Barunda from NPR's Climate Desk have been covering it. They've read all 1,700-plus pages. Hello, Alejandra.

Hello. And Becky, I hope your eye strain's not too bad. Yeah, I'm holding up. So can you both just break down what the national climate assessment is? Yeah, it's the most important climate report in the United States. It comes out every five years, and it gets used for all sorts of. things. It gets used to make laws, to help governments decide where to build roads or houses, as evidence in court cases about who should pay for the costs of climate change. It's super

influential. Okay. And what does it say this time? Yeah, there are three big takeaways this time. And these are topics where there's been a lot of new research since the last time this report came out. The first is pretty dark, honestly. Climate change is really bad for. for people's health. Wildfire smoke, for example, it is not great to breathe that in. And insect-borne diseases like malaria or lime, they're spreading more now, which is kind of wild, honestly. Yeah, and to say nothing about summer heat waves that lasted this year all the way into October. Yeah, exactly. The second big takeaway from this report is that climate change, it's really, really expensive. So disasters like that, they cost us a lot of money. It's heat waves, but it's also

hurricanes and wildfires and floods and droughts. They're all getting more severe. And I talked to the person who led the National Climate Assessment about this. My name is Alison Krimmins, and I'm the director of the fifth national climate assessment. So I asked Allison if she had a statistic she could share, like off the top of her head, about how expensive all of these climate-driven disasters are. I do have that in my brain. I have it. in my brain because it's, it is a little bit shocking. Like it shook, you know, shook me when I first read it. The statistic is that in the 1980s, our country experienced on average $1 billion disaster every four months. So that means about every four months in the U.S., there used to be a disaster that caused

at least a billion dollars of damage adjusted for inflation. And now we experience one every three weeks. So it's just an incredible increase in the frequency of these extreme weather events. Wow, that is a lot to take in. Yeah, it really is. And we'll get into it more later. But for now, the last big takeaway is that all of these effects, they hit some people harder than others. People who can't afford to rebuild after a disaster, for example, or people who live in places that aren't going to get as much FEMA money after a flood. And in this country, this is all really tied up with systemic racism and historic inequality.

So today on the show, we dive into the three big things you need to know about how climate change is affecting people in the United States. And why it's not all bad news, we promise. I'm Rebecca Herscher. I'm Alejandra Bodunda. And I'm Aaron Scott. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. All right. So this report had a new focus on the economic impacts of course.

climate change and it found it's going to be really expensive for people in this country. Do we have any concrete numbers? Sort of. So some things are easier to measure than others. For example, the new assessment estimates that wildfire smoke leads to more than a hundred billion dollars in lost earnings every year already. And that's because when it's too smoky, some people can't go to work. For example, farm workers or landscapers. Right, or construction workers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Another thing that we know is that weather disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, floods, droughts, they cause about $150 billion in damage every year in the U.S. And that's on average. Some years, it's way higher, like last year. Here's President Biden in a recent speech. Last year alone, natural disasters in America caused $178 billion, $178 billion in damages. They hate everyone. matter what their circumstances, but they hit the most vulnerable, the hardest, seniors, people

with disabilities, people experienced in homelessness who have nowhere to turn. Wow, $178 billion is a lot of money. I mean, that's like more than the entire annual GDP of some European countries. Yes, it is. And I will not ask you how you know that. Becky, I listen to the indicator from Planet Money. Oh, yes, an excellent NPR podcast. But as the president I can point it out, you know, some people have a lot more trouble bearing these costs, right? Whether it's repairing your home after a hurricane or finding a safe place to shelter from wildfire smoke or dangerous heat. Yeah. And just to point out, those costs, they don't even include all heat waves, first of all. And they don't take the health costs into account. So all the people going to the ER during fires or heat waves, that's extra.

The best estimates we have of the health costs from climate change are about a billion dollars a year, for the U.S. And I'm guessing that's why the profound health toll of climate change is your second big takeaway. Yeah, exactly. And I can see why this one is probably the most surprising for a lot of people because, I mean, we see houses get burnt down, but we don't see people going to the ER because they've inhaled a whole bunch of smoke and contamination. Yeah, right.

There are just so many ways that climate change hurts people. like heart attacks, for example, and strokes, they go way up during wildfire smoke events and heat events. It's not just like hurting your lungs when you're breathing in the smoke. And all of that, too, is like not including the long-term effects of these events. Like hurricanes flood people's houses, and then a couple months later, they might end up breathing in a lot of mold. I could give you examples all day long, but it really goes beyond that too. I talked to Mary Hayden about this. she led the chapter in the assessment about human health.

We tend to focus just on physical health. But when we're talking about flooding and displacement, when we're talking about wildfires and displacement, we're talking about people's mental health. For example, we know from research that kids who live through multiple climate disasters are much more prone to depression later. Yeah, and it can play out at the community level as well. You know, entire communities are getting pulled apart by climate change.

Yeah, totally. Like a big flood, for example, when people have to move away from a place they've lived their whole lives, they're losing their networks, their communities, and that's a huge source of stress. And tribal communities, many have lived with and protected culturally important foods like salmon for generations. But on the Yukon River in Alaska, for example, they haven't been allowed to fish since 2020. That means less food in the short term, and it's also a really big hit spiritually and emotional. Yeah, I've heard many Native folks talk about losing salmon is like losing a relation, a family member. So one theme I'm picking up here is that there are some places and some groups of people who are really disproportionately affected by climate change in this country. Yeah, and that's why it's the third big takeaway from this new climate assessment. And I should say this is the first time that a federal report of this magnitude and influence has acknowledged this bluntly that climate change, has these profoundly unequal effects. This is a big deal for this report to be saying it this strongly. So who then is at most risk from climate change in this country? Does the assessment say? Yeah, it does. So basically it's people who are already vulnerable. So that's poor people, older people,

children, people of color, including black and indigenous communities who have faced centuries of racist government policies, like restrictions about where people are allowed to live, for example. Right, through policies like redlining. I talked to Ali Zaidi, who's a climate advisor for the White House. A product of our racist housing policy of the past, redlined communities today have more pavement and fewer trees. And so it's literally hotter there. Folks feel it more in their bodies because of that historic injustice. We saw this play out in real life.

in the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. That heat wave would have been virtually impossible without climate change. Almost a thousand people died. But it definitely hit some neighborhoods harder than others. In Portland, for example, most of the people who died lived in lower-income neighborhoods that were way hotter than the surrounding areas, like just a couple blocks away, even sometimes. And we're talking like a lot hotter.

It's like 13 degrees hotter. Yeah. Even here in politically progressive Portland, there is a major discrepancy in everything from the tree cover that Ali was talking about to who can afford AC units. So at the beginning, you both promised that this wouldn't be all bad news. I'm feeling like all I've gotten is bad news. We are not done yet, Aaron. You're not done. It's not bait and switch.

Okay, so what's the good news? Oh, I didn't say it was going to be good news. I said it was not all bad news. So here are morsels of hope for you. And I'm not just throwing you a bone. These are also big takeaways from this climate assessment. So first, the U.S. is making some progress. So greenhouse gas emissions have been falling in this country since 2007.

That's great news. Yes, but they've been falling extremely slowly, like way too slowly to avoid catastrophic global warming, exactly. But, you know, falling nonetheless. and the cost of renewable energy is plummeting. So the solutions are there. It really is possible to halt warming very quickly if we choose to. Okay. Thing number two then is that a lot more places are actually trying to do things to protect people from climate change.

Like way more than when the last one of these reports came out five years ago. There are so many more cities and states and communities that actually have plans in place to deal with extreme heat for example, or flooding or whatever their particular issue is. Are they doing enough? Probably not. But are they trying? Like, yeah, that's good. Participation counts, okay?

Yeah, participation trophy. And lastly, you know, a lot of the solutions to climate change, like cleaner transportation or safer housing, less fossil fuel burning in general, they can also help undo some of that unfairness that we were talking about that's baked into our society. Yeah, and I actually think this is really, I don't know, just a really interesting message. There's this idea, you know, that there's going to have to be big change, you know, like we're going to have to change the way that we use energy, the way that we build a lot of things in this country. But with change comes the opportunity to undo some of the injustices of the past and also to make life better, not worse for a lot of people. It doesn't have to be scary. It can actually be really good.

Okay, so we are making progress. We need to make a whole lot more, but we can do it if we really work at it and hold out hope. I can take that as our closing. Rebecca Alejandra, thank you both for reading your way through this massive report and letting us know what was in it. Yeah, of course. Yeah, it was a lot of pages. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez.

Alejandra and Becky Check the Facts and Maggie Luthar was the audio. engineer. Special thanks to Lauren Summer, Nila Bannergy, Sadie Babbitts, and Rachel Waldholz. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Anya Grundman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Aaron Scott. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.