‘Green New Deal’ Architect: There Is No Reality Where Climate Change Doesn’t Cost Us Money

EXCERPT:

GUNN-WRIGHT: "I think there are two things. Like you said, there's the benefits that are not talked about, there's also the cost of inaction. Just last year we lost $91 billion to the U.S. economy from climate change alone. There is no reality where climate change doesn’t cost us money. And we just have to live in that reality and the Green New Deal is about deciding how we want to spend money and how we want to invest so there are actual returns. The other response I have to that is there’s a ton of data out there. I was just talking with a group yesterday that works on this about how much money will be saved. They include only market mechanisms and it’s $5 trillion saved and it grows the economy by 2 1/2 times, right? So it’s just very difficult to talk about costs right now without talking about the benefits, which we know are significant."