Grist: "How the Trump administration’s climate math doesn’t add up"
by Kate Yoder
It’s clear that taking action to prevent such disasters doesn’t hurt the economy as a whole, said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, but it does hurt some industries — namely, oil companies. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has been promoting the story that taking action on climate change is too costly. “There is this prevailing narrative out there, and I guess what I would say is that this is not by accident,” Wagner said. In the early 1990s, the American Petroleum Institute began commissioning economists to produce research that made any effort to rein in greenhouse gases appear prohibitively expensive. One industry-funded study in 1991 calculated that imposing a carbon tax of $200 a ton would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.7 percent by 2020. It ignored the cost of failing to act on climate change.
And if buying clean technology costs you money — well, that’s a boost for the economy, too. “If the government forced you to cut your gas line and install an induction stove and a heat pump, OK, you might hate it because you are forced to pay money for it, but somebody is going to benefit,” Wagner said. “The economy benefits.” He spent $100,000 to renovate his 200-year-old, 750-square-foot loft in Manhattan, installing energy-saving appliances — including a heat pump, an induction stove, and a more efficient fridge — switching to LED light bulbs, and improving insulation, among other measures. “So we spent a lot of money,” Wagner said. “That added $100,000 to the economy.” Eventually, it should save his family money too: The changes cut their utility bill down to about $100 a month, from a high point of $450, though it could take decades for them to recoup the upfront costs.
“Look, there are some hard choices that we need to make, right? There are,” Wagner said. “At the same time, I think it’s pretty darn clear that when most people say that there are trade-offs — when most people say it’s the climate versus the economy — they’re wrong.”
Quoted in: "How the Trump administration’s climate math doesn’t add up" by Kate Yoder, Grist (10 April 2026).
