More than 1,700 of the nation’s most prominent scientists and economists released a joint statement last week calling on policymakers to require immediate, deep reductions in heat-trapping emissions that cause global warming.
The statement marks the first time leading U.S. scientists and economists have joined together to make such an appeal.
The U.S. Senate begins debate on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill this week.
"There is a strong consensus that we must do something about reducing the emissions that cause global warming," said James McCarthy, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and one of the statement’s authors. "The debate right now is about how much we need to cut. The fact that so many scientists and economists have spoken out and signed this letter should give policymakers the confidence that we can avert serious adverse climate impacts."
Besides McCarthy, the statement authors include Mario Molina, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry; Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author; Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University climatologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS); and Geoff Heal, an economist at Columbia University’s Business School.
The signatories, compiled by UCS, include six Nobel Prize winners in science or economics, 31 NAS members, and more than 100 IPCC authors and editors, who all shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
The statement notes that acting quickly to cut global warming pollution would be the most cost-effective way to limit climate change. If the United States delays taking action, future cuts would have to be more drastic and would be much more expensive. Those costs would come in addition to the increased cost of adapting to more climate change.
Conversely, the statement says smart reduction strategies would allow the economy to grow, generate new green jobs, protect public health, and strengthen energy security.
The statement concludes that the United States should reduce global warming pollution "on the order of 80% below 2000 levels by 2050" and that the first step should be reductions of 15 to 20% below 2000 levels by 2020.
Columbia University economist Heal said the cost of inaction far outweighs the cost of addressing climate change. The costs of cutting emissions to safe levels would be between 1 and 2% of gross domestic product (GDP), he said, while the costs of allowing climate change to proceed unabated would be on the order of 10 to 20% of GDP.
Heal sees the challenge of reducing global warming emissions as an economic opportunity. "Limiting global warming emissions is a great investment," he said. "When you compare the cost of acting to the cost of not acting, cutting emissions would give the world a return of 10 to 1. That’s attractive even to a venture capitalist."
In related news, the Committee on Energy and Commerce and its Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality issued the latest in a series of Climate Change Legislative Design White Papers addressing an economy-wide climate change program. Titled "Getting the Most Greenhouse Gas Reductions for Our Money," the paper discusses ways to keep costs as low as possible while still achieving environmental goals.
Also, the Bush administration finally released its climate change assessment–as required by law–four years late. The report is required by a 1990 law which says that every four years the government must produce a comprehensive science assessment of global warming. It had not been done since Bush took office.
While the report offers nothing new about the effects of climate change, it brings together information from a range of sources and can serve as a reference document for legislators debating the climate-change legislation.
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