{"id":357906,"date":"2026-03-25T21:07:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T21:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/357906\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T21:07:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T21:07:09","slug":"us-has-caused-10tn-worth-of-climate-damage-since-1990-research-finds-climate-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/357906\/","title":{"rendered":"US has caused $10tn worth of climate damage since 1990, research finds | Climate crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions<\/a>, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found.<\/p>\n

By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has caused greater harm<\/a> to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world\u2019s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper.<\/p>\n

About 25% of this GDP dampening has occurred in the US itself, although other countries have borne a heavy toll, with economic losses disproportionately felt in the poorest countries. Since 1990, US emissions have caused an estimated $500bn of economic damage to India and $330bn in damage to Brazil, the research finds.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are huge numbers,\u201d acknowledged Marshall Burke, an environmental scientist at Stanford University who led the new work. Burke added that the US has \u201ca lot of responsibility, our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world\u201d.<\/p>\n

The new study<\/a>, published in Nature on Wednesday, attempts to attach dollar amounts to \u201closs and damage\u201d \u2013 a term used to sum up the harm suffered by societies baked by dangerously<\/a> rising<\/a> global temperatures<\/a> caused by the burning of fossil fuels<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Developing countries have<\/a> called<\/a> for<\/a> wealthier nations, which have emitted most of the greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution, to assist them financially to deal with loss and damage stemming from disastrous heatwaves, floods, droughts and crop failures worsened<\/a> by escalating temperatures.<\/p>\n

This damage is summed up by the new research, which calculates how much global heating has constrained GDP and assigned responsibility for this to countries based on their emissions since 1990. This metric does not include all consequences of rising temperatures but does show when economies are hurt<\/a> by heat that wilts workers<\/a> and strains<\/a> public<\/a> health systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Demonstrators march to protest against the 2026 S&P Global energy conference in Houston, Texas, on 23 March. Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you warm people up a little bit, we see very clear historical evidence, you grow a little bit less quickly,\u201d said Burke. \u201cIf you accumulate those effects over 30 years, you just get a really large change by the end of 30 years. It\u2019s like death by a thousand cuts. And you have people being harmed who did not cause the problem, and that feels just fundamentally unfair.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said that \u201cpast emissions add up fast, and the damages from those emissions add up faster still. Paying the full social cost of carbon for future CO\u2082 and other greenhouse gas emissions pays for itself many times over.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US has long resisted<\/a> the idea of being held legally liable for its planet-heating pollution, which has helped push the world<\/a> into climatic conditions that haven\u2019t existed in all of human civilization.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump<\/a> has accelerated<\/a> this abrogation, however, withdrawing<\/a> the US from a loss and damage fund set to up aid vulnerable countries, as well as removing<\/a> the country from<\/a> global climate treaties, urging a \u201cdrill, baby, drill<\/a>\u201d approach to oil and gas extraction, and taking extraordinary<\/a> measures to hobble domestic clean energy projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think our numbers can force the Trump administration back to the sort of negotiating table around loss and damage, but it certainly says it should,\u201d Burke said.<\/p>\n

Frances Moore, an expert in the social costs of the climate crisis at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research, said the study is \u201cuseful\u201d but may still not fully account for all of the weight of damage suffered by poorer countries from a climate crisis they did not cause.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany economists would argue that the consequences for wellbeing of a very poor person losing a dollar are much larger than for a much richer person,\u201d she said. \u201cThis differential effect of dollar-valued damages on wellbeing in rich as opposed to poor countries is not considered in the paper.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-357906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}