Quantifying the Economic Benefits of Climate Legislation

There is a blitz of news this week about global warming surrounding the United Nation’s Summit on Climate Change. The stage is being set for international negotiations at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. Despite early momentum for climate change legislation in the United States, with the passage of the Waxman-Markey Bill in the House, the momentum for legislative action is foundering in the U.S. Senate.

Without bold action from the United States prior to the Climate Change Conference, it’s feared that little progress will be made in Copenhagen. There was much noise yesterday surrounding the addresses of President Obama and China’s president Hu Jintao to the UN. Both gave assurances that action was necessary, but little details or commitment came forth.

Climate change mitigation is a difficult thing to quantify with very little data on what will work. Countries are busy defending themselves against economic impact, so they’re reluctant to commit to restrictions that factor in the full cost of their damaging emissions. Amid all of this back and forth, there’s little large-scale analysis taking place to take into account both costs and benefits of proposed strategies.

Today, a report has been released by the New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity. The report titled, “The Other Side of the Coin: The Economic Benefits of Climate Legislation,” strips out some of the political rhetoric to take a hard and cold look at the economic bottom line of the Waxman-Markey sponsored American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454).

This report goes into great quantitative detail regarding the worth of a ton of carbon that’s not emitted into the atmosphere, and compares that to estimates of how much emissions will be saved if the Bill goes into effect. The bottom line estimates for this Bill are a savings of roughly $1.5 trillion compared to a cost of just $660 billion. That translates into a benefit of $2.27 for each dollar spent.

More work needs to be done in advance of the global meeting on climate change to model the economic cost of climate change on individual nations, to assess the harm to the climate from individual industries and countries, and to quantify the benefits of different strategies. Geospatial technologies are a critical tool for the communication of these complex climate issues.

It’s good to see that Google has mad the commitment to use Google Earth to communicate and explore the potential impacts of climate change. Other geospatial technology companies need to step forth and display the power of geospatial analysis to address this issue, and to uncover the bottom line benefits of coordinated action.