News & Analysis
July 25, 2023
How much will it cost to protect Pennsylvania communities from the worsening impacts of climate change? At least $15.47 billion by 2040.
That’s the finding of CCI’s latest study, “Pennsylvania's Looming Climate Cost Crisis: The Rising Price to Protect Communities from Extreme Heat, Precipitation, and Sea Level Rise,” which we’re releasing today in collaboration with Resilient Analytics and Scioto Analysis.
Over the past two months, Pennsylvania has been overwhelmed by extreme weather events that once would have been considered freak, isolated acts of nature. Torrential rain triggered flash flooding in Bucks County, killing at least five people. Extreme heat forced nearly 100 Philadelphia schools to close early rather than keep students in stifling classrooms. On June 8, Philadelphia had the worst air quality of any major city in the world.
This relentless onslaught has delivered a clear message across the commonwealth: the climate crisis is here and will continue to endanger Pennsylvanian’s lives and health if local governments don’t make significant investments to ensure their communities are resilient to our new unforgiving reality.
We calculated that it will cost more than $15 billion to stave of worsening impacts of hotter temperatures, increasing precipitation, and rising sea levels — a narrow scope of the climate impacts the coming years will bring. Even with a conservative estimate, adapting to climate change could have calamitous impacts for Pennsylvania municipalities.
Not only will climate adaptation burden municipal budgets, but the costs will disproportionately fall on rural, high-poverty, and high-disability municipalities that will suffer from higher adaptation costs.
Pennsylvania taxpayers are currently on the hook for local municipalities’ climate adaptation costs, but they shouldn’t have to be. A more just alternative is to make the polluters most responsible for the climate crisis pay their fair share of the costs facing Pennsylvania communities. Major oil and gas companies knew for decades that their products could lead to catastrophic environmental conditions, yet they intentionally obscured climate science and misled the public, while communities in Pennsylvania and across the U.S. paid the price for their pollution. We’re in a climate crisis because Big Oil companies lied about their products for decades; it’s only right that they pay their fair share of the costs they have imposed on communities.
Dozens of states and communities, including the neighboring states of New Jersey, Delaware, and three Maryland municipalities, have filed lawsuits to recover the costs of climate damages from major oil companies. Pennsylvania and its local governments should consider similar legal action to ensure that taxpayers aren’t left to pay the bill alone.
A new poll we’re releasing today found that 90 percent of Pennsylvania voters agree that oil and gas companies should pay at least some of these climate costs. It’s time to make polluters pay.
