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”.
Link to study - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10272-6
There isn’t a lot of great news coming from the US nowadays is there?..
Does anyone else find dollar figures for environmental damage hard to assign real meaning to?
I am always surprised at how cheap it would be to save the world - for example decarbonize to stop global warming. $10 trillion is 1/4th the US national debt. That kind of stuff is payable, if we want to.
But, but GDP!
severe understatement
The danger in linking climate risks to dollars is making misleading math. The actual opportunity cost of climate disasters is incalculable/infinite.
Add up all the potential economic activity for tens of thousands of years of a flourishing sustainable human civilization, and subtract it because we are risking ecological collapse and even possible near term human extinction. The numbers to measure the damage done in dollars suddenly require scientific notation and approaches infinity.
In this article, they tried to measure only the past opportunity cost. Now multiply it by our future costs and you’ll get a sense of how badly we fucked ourselves and everything else.
Same first thought. You can’t just “pay back” that amount of money and have everything fixed. A lot of very wealthy people have to do a lot of things that will “cost” them.
It’s so unbelievably stupid that we have to frame destruction in economic terms for it to resonate with people. A society that is rational, empathetic, or even simply pragmatic would not need to rely on financial incentives to stop killing the planet.
Ha! This administration hasn’t even begun to create more damage. Trump to the world, “Hold my water…no, seriously, hold my water, I can’t.”
He only drinks diet coke
