Climate deniers often talk about the cost to businesses and industry that will come as a result of climate legislation, but far too often, they gloss over the costs we’ll endure if we do nothing about climate change. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has recently published a new report, entitled “Climate Change in the United States: The Prohibitive Costs of Inaction,” which gives an overview of 60 studies that focus on the financial consequences of ignoring the problem of global warming.

Costs will be incurred as a result of hurricanes and flooding of greater intensity, rising sea levels, strained water and energy resources, wildfires, human health problems related to a warmer climate (vector-borne diseases, etc), and so on. The bill for these impending environmental problems will be somewhere in the neighborhood of hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century.

Lexi Shultz, deputy director of the Climate Program at UCS, makes this comment:

If we don’t address global warming, you can imagine a cash register going ‘ka-ching’ all across the country.

The report isn’t all doom and gloom. They take pains to point out that it will be much more affordable for us to address climate change now through preventative actions. Although there will be some financial costs to fighting global warming—the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration suggests that in 2020 it will amount to about $10 monthly for the average US household—these will be significantly less than what taxpayers and businesses will have to pay if we ignore the problem.

There are also separate reports for the Southeast, Midwest, and Western states of the US, outlining more thoroughly the local implications of climate change.