Climate change for Coloradans is not a hoax. It’s a verifiable phenomenon with an actuarially sound price tag, according to a new report from the Colorado Fiscal Institute.
The study largely avoids scare scenarios about climate vortexes and unlivable homelands, zeroing in instead on predictable costs of higher heat and more frequent drought from now to 2050.
The conclusion?
What the report calls a conservative estimate of real costs to Coloradans will be $33 billion to $37 billion, depending on which of two temperature bands materializes over that 25 years. One band will result from a more optimistic forecast of carbon emissions reductions, the other on a more realistic estimate based on current policy.
“Across sectors, extreme heat is the dominant driver of projected economic impacts through midcentury, followed by infrastructure stress, especially building cooling demand and bridge resilience needs, and wildfire impacts, including property damage and smoke-related mortality,” says the study by nonprofit CFI, which uses research to promote equitable economic policies. Building cooling, for example, becomes a very expensive proposition in regularly scorching summers, as current equipment and ventilation is not designed to handle higher loads.
Colorado environmental leaders say the need for state policymakers to act on the report’s findings grew even more urgent last week, when the Trump administration reversed the “endangerment finding” from the Obama era that allowed for federal laws limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The reversal blew up long-standing policies such as minimum vehicle fuel economy for new cars and trucks. Now more than ever, green-minded states like Colorado need to step up, said Micah Parkin of 350 Colorado, a nonprofit that helped gather individual voices affected by climate change for the study’s Jan. 30 unveiling.
Victims of the 2021 Marshall fire spoke at a state Capitol news conference, as did a woman who said she lost her healthy mom to heat stroke on a vacation during a scorching Caribbean heat wave.
Activists mean to “bring home the human toll as well as the economic costs that we have to prepare for,” Parkin said, in an interview. “And so the top line things we were trying to do were to call on state leaders, to prepare for these human and economic costs. We need to do everything within our power to try and mitigate the pollution that’s causing climate change.”
The study comes packaged with a host of eye-opening quotes from nonprofits and businesses around Colorado that are well positioned to tally the local impacts.
“Aspen has lost over 30 days of winter since 1980. That loss hits the mountain economy first — from lift crews and restaurant workers to hotels, retailers and local tax bases. Protecting winter isn’t optional for us; it’s the business model,” said Chris Miller, senior vice president of sustainability and advocacy for Aspen One, which operates the four ski areas around Aspen and Snowmass.
The study summary says that “because not every climate impact can be modeled with available data, these estimates should be viewed as conservative.” For example, while the study records the cost of potential extra deaths from extreme heat, it does not try to add in the potentially substantial costs of harm to people who suffer from the added heat but with less-than-fatal illnesses.
The human toll is also the most expensive, the study highlights. Very small increases in body temperature and stress from outside forces can wreak havoc on outdoor workers, the elderly and households with no cooling.
The extreme heat is likely to result in extra deaths, beyond the expected, of 1,800 to 1,900 Coloradans over the 25-year period, the study found. Study author Pegah Jalali from the fiscal institute said excess heat deaths were estimated using a widely accepted climate impact tool that combines “daily temperatures, baseline mortality, and an epidemiological risk-with-heat relationship.”
The costs from those extra deaths make up $24 billion to $25 billion of the study total, with the toll on infrastructure coming in at a price tag of between $8.3 billion and $8.7 billion.