Sen. Carper Reacts to New EPA Climate Change Report

WASHINGTON – Today, Sen. Tom Carper, ranking member of the Environmental and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, released the following reaction to a new report released by the Environmental Protection Agency on “Climate Change in the United States: Benefits of Global Action.”

“The scientific evidence is clear: our climate is changing at a troublesome rate and the effects are devastating. This report outlines the hard and alarming truth that failure to act on climate change will result in dramatic costs for our environment, our public health, and our economy.

“The findings are particularly concerning for low-lying coastal states like Delaware. It projects that inaction on climate change could lead to extreme temperatures and cause thousands of deaths throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. But the report also brings good news – there are many steps we can and must take to avoid these catastrophic outcomes. In fact, global action on climate change could result in avoiding nearly all of the projected deaths.

“The report also identifies the economic benefits of action. By investing in combating climate change and slowing the rise in global temperatures, we can reduce the costs of adaptive responses, such as beach nourishment and property elevation, that are projected to total $21 billion in Delaware and New Jersey over the next eight decades. The point this new study underscores is that the choice between curbing climate change and growing our economy is a false one. Instead, we must act on curbing climate change in order to protect the future economic prosperity of our country.

“Congress cannot continue to shirk its duty to act on this issue – one of the most critical of our generation. We simply can’t afford it.”

The peer-reviewed report looks at twenty United States sectors and is a product of the Climate Change Impacts and Risks Analysis (CIRA) project, led by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Pacific Northwest National Lab, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and other partners. According to the EPA, this is one of the first efforts to quantify the benefits of global action on climate change across a large number of U.S. sectors. The full report is available at http://www2.epa.gov/cira.