#this extremely depressed outlook about Milton

[cultivating-wildflowers]

I have come to the conclusion that Richard Armitage is far too pretty to have played John Thorton

[rjzimmerman]

Rising disaster costs leave U.S. confronting fiscal risks of climate change (Washington Post)

Excerpt from this Washington Post story:

A second catastrophic hurricane in as many weeks has forced the U.S. government to grapple with a harsh reality: Climate calamities are becoming more frequent, deadly and costly in a country already facing massive fiscal challenges.

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The earliest estimates suggest the latest storm, Hurricane Milton, may have unleashed roughly $50 billion in damage across Florida, destroying countless homes, businesses and critical infrastructure that will need to be repaired or replaced, probably with the help of urgently needed federal aid.

But Milton is only the most recent extreme weather event in a nation that experiences on average a billion-dollar climate disaster roughly every three weeks, according to some federal estimates. As these storms, droughts, wildfires and floods strike with greater frequency and intensity, the work to rebuild after them has grown more expensive, too. That has exacerbated the many financial strains on the federal government at a time when the national debt exceeds $35 trillion.

“I think the cost of climate [change] is increasingly a threat to our already very fragile fiscal outlook,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. Factoring in the prospect that the government must spend “tens of billions or hundreds of billions more each year to help mitigate the fallout of climate events,” he added, “the outlook looks even darker.”

“It’s one more reason to be nervous about our fiscal future unless we make some changes,” Zandi said.

The nation’s souring fiscal health is the result of many factors, including increased spending, a rapidly aging population and inadequate tax revenue, especially after the tax cuts adopted under the Trump administration. Generally, budget experts agree that climate change threatens to add to these woes, harming economic output while forcing the government to spend more, and generate less, as it grapples with the consequences of dangerous emissions.

Two years ago, the White House tried to calculate the potential costs: Top budget advisers to President Joe Biden predicted that Washington would face up to $128 billion in new spending every year in the coming decades just in response to certain climate emergencies, including hurricanes, wildfires and floods.

But federal officials acknowledged at the time that their estimates were incomplete: They could not account for all of the ways climate change might deplete federal coffers, depress tax revenue, overwhelm government programs, drain the economy or compromise Americans’ health and well-being, all of which, ultimately, could add to the burden on taxpayers.