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Polluters accountable for costs of climate change
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As the owner of a construction company, I鈥檓 angry that politicians say we can鈥檛 do anything about climate change because it would hurt business. From my perspective, not doing enough about climate change is already hurting business 鈥 and will do much more damage in the future.
Here鈥檚 just one small example:
When we prepare a bid for a construction project, we typically start by providing line item pricing for all of our general conditions expenses. These usually include things like project supervision and labor, waste disposal and equipment rental. In the past (we鈥檝e in business since 1998), we did not have to include costs for protection against the elements. Sure, we always anticipated having to cover parts of a job site with tarps for waterproofing, but this was never enough of a cost to identify it as its own line item. It just wasn鈥檛 significant.
However, in recent years we see that the rainstorms that bear down on our projects are more intense. Conventional blue tarps that are inexpensive and that we have used for years no longer protect our job sites from such intense rainstorms. So we have had to purchase new hurricane-strength tarps and to put much more time into securing these tarps to our job sites to effectively waterproof them.
10 times more costly
The new tarps cost nearly 10 times what conventional tarps cost, and the additional labor time adds up to thousands of dollars per project. So now all of our bids for new construction projects include a new line item that we call 鈥減rotection against the elements.鈥 This line item is listed as an allowance, which means that we will bill for all the work required, but will have no idea how much work and cost will be incurred given the increasingly unpredictable and intense storms.
Our situation is not unique. According to the EPA, 鈥淚n recent years, a higher percentage of precipitation in the US has come in the form of intense single-day events. Nationwide, nine of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events have occurred since 1990.The occurrence of abnormally high annual precipitation totals (as defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has also increased.鈥
In fact, these trends are exactly what the climate change models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been predicting. Simply put, the enormous increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, most notably carbon dioxide and methane, from the burning of fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) has resulted in a greater amount of heat from the sun being trapped inside the Earth鈥檚 atmosphere. With greater heat, the atmosphere temporarily stores more water that later falls in greater-intensity storms.
So who should pay for these costs? My clients? Me? The government? How about the responsible party: the fossil fuel industry? In a responsible market economy, costs are included in the pricing structure and so the producers are responsible for them. But in our current dysfunctional market, the costs of climate change have been hidden, and producers have received windfall profits. Economists call these hidden costs, externalities. I call them unfair and irresponsible.
One simple way to pay for these costs and hold those who pollute responsible would be to put a price on carbon.
Imagine a scenario in which these carbon fees were allocated toward infrastructure projects that are known to create very high-paying jobs along with a corporate and personal tax cut. The economic stimulus from this program would be enormous and we would get a major push toward a more sustainable energy sector and a more sustainable economy.
Politzer is president and CEO of Greenstreet Inc., a construction and development firm based in New York City. Copyright: American Forum.
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