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The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found.
By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has caused greater harm to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world’s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper.
About 25% of this GDP dampening has occurred in the US itself, although other countries have borne a heavy toll, with economic losses disproportionately felt in the poorest countries. Since 1990, US emissions have caused an estimated $500bn of economic damage to India and $330bn in damage to Brazil, the research finds.
“These are huge numbers,” acknowledged Marshall Burke, an environmental scientist at Stanford University who led the new work. Burke added that the US has “a lot of responsibility, our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world”.
The new study, published in Nature on Wednesday, attempts to attach dollar amounts to “loss and damage” – a term used to sum up the harm suffered by societies baked by dangerously rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Developing countries have called for wealthier nations, which have emitted most of the greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution, to assist them financially to deal with loss and damage stemming from disastrous heatwaves, floods, droughts and crop failures worsened by escalating temperatures.
This damage is summed up by the new research, which calculates how much global heating has constrained GDP and assigned responsibility for this to countries based on their emissions since 1990. This metric does not include all consequences of rising temperatures but does show when economies are hurt by heat that wilts workers and strains public health systems.
“If you warm people up a little bit, we see very clear historical evidence, you grow a little bit less quickly,” said Burke. “If you accumulate those effects over 30 years, you just get a really large change by the end of 30 years. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. And you have people being harmed who did not cause the problem, and that feels just fundamentally unfair.”
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said that “past emissions add up fast, and the damages from those emissions add up faster still. Paying the full social cost of carbon for future CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions pays for itself many times over.”
The US has long resisted the idea of being held legally liable for its planet-heating pollution, which has helped push the world into climatic conditions that haven’t existed in all of human civilization.
Donald Trump has accelerated this abrogation, however, withdrawing the US from a loss and damage fund set to up aid vulnerable countries, as well as removing the country from global climate treaties, urging a “drill, baby, drill” approach to oil and gas extraction, and taking extraordinary measures to hobble domestic clean energy projects.
“I don’t think our numbers can force the Trump administration back to the sort of negotiating table around loss and damage, but it certainly says it should,” Burke said.
Frances Moore, an expert in the social costs of the climate crisis at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research, said the study is “useful” but may still not fully account for all of the weight of damage suffered by poorer countries from a climate crisis they did not cause.
“Many economists would argue that the consequences for wellbeing of a very poor person losing a dollar are much larger than for a much richer person,” she said. “This differential effect of dollar-valued damages on wellbeing in rich as opposed to poor countries is not considered in the paper.”
