EPA Warns Climate Action a Must to Avoid Thousands of Deaths, Trillions in Economic Damage

The United States must take aggressive “climate action” to avoid tens of thousands of  deaths annually and prevent economic damages of up to $5 trillion, according to the Obama administration’s latest—and most alarming—assessment on the ills of global warming.

It’s yet another call to action by the administration, which has repeatedly used scare tactics to gain support for its outrageous and disastrous “green” initiatives. In this case the frightening government warning got delivered in an extensive report published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The document, compiled by a group of expert environmentalists, is being promoted by the bloated agency as “one of the most comprehensive analyses to date on the economic, health and environmental benefits to the United States of global climate action.”

Like a Hollywood movie, the report compares two future scenarios—one with significant global action on climate change and the other with no action. The government’s handpicked experts quantify the differences in health, infrastructure and ecosystem impacts under the two scenarios and magically predict the future, producing accurate estimates of the costs of inaction and the huge benefits of reducing global emissions. Perhaps they can launch a hotline where the public can call for winning lottery numbers.

“This report shows us how costly inaction will be to Americans’ health, our environment and our society,” Obama’s EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, says in a statement promoting the outlandish findings. “But more importantly, it helps us understand the magnitude of benefits to a number of sectors of the U.S. with global climate action. We can save tens of thousands of American lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars, annually in the United States by the end of this century, but the sooner we act, the better off America and future generations of Americans will be.”

As an example, the EPA asserts that by 2100 global action on climate change is projected to avoid an estimated 12,000 deaths annually associated with extreme temperatures in 49 U.S. cities, compared to a future with no reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. An astounding 57,000 people will die annually in 2100 “from poor air quality,” the government experts predict, warning that future generations will either benefit from or be burdened by our current actions. “The decisions we make today will have long-term effects,” the experts warn.

Investing in projects that combat global warming will definitely pay off by saving the government trillions of dollars, according to the climate experts that compiled this laughable assessment. As an example they offer this; without climate action they estimate up to $10 billion in increased road maintenance costs each year by the end of the century. “With action, we can avoid up to $7 billion of these damages,” the experts assure. In a future without greenhouse gas reductions, estimated damages from sea-level rise and storm surge to coastal property in the lower 48 states are $5 trillion through 2100, the report says. “With adaptation along the coast, the estimated damages and adaptation costs are reduced to $810 billion,” the global warming gurus proclaim.

Critical as this may seem, it’s hardly the first time the Obama administration injects panic into a government report to make a case for its costly green boondoggles. In the last few years a variety of government-funded studies have warned that global warming will make food and water dangerous, cause mental illness, cancer and threaten national security. In fact, under the Obama administration, a consortium of scientists from several government agencies—including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department and National Institute of Environmental Health Science—have confirmed that global warming is one of the “most visible environmental concerns of the 21st century.”

The Obama administration has also spent billions of dollars to save the developing world from the presumed ills of global warming, mainly through a program called Global Climate Change Initiative. The cash started flowing in 2009 with a generous $323 million allocation that nearly tripled to $939 million in 2010. Every year since, the U.S. has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Global Climate Change Initiative as well as other international programs like renewable energy in Africa and a $50 million project to replace inefficient cook stoves that contribute to climate change in developing countries.