Climate Change Mitigation and the Economy

We’ve all heard the claim that decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors will harm the economy.  This narrative is critical to the far-right-wing’s claim that environmentalism is anti-capitalist, and, in particular, anti-American.

But does it make sense?

Granted, there are a great many “moving parts” to an analysis, but at a minimum we need to take into considering the cost of current-day and long-term environmental damage, including climate change (storms, droughts, wildfires, loss of land mass), ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, increasing levels of disease and death from pollutants, and the wars that take place over oil.