Climate change is already imposing modest to significant costs of climate inaction on U.S. households, especially affecting poorer families and households in the Gulf Coast, Florida, and some parts of the West, suggests a paper discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on September 26.

The paper examines some, but not all, costs of climate inaction under two different scenarios that vary in terms of what share of weather variability is attributed to climate change. “We find sizable costs to U.S. households from recent climate change patterns, ranging from $220 to $570 each year,” write the authors, Kimberly A. Clausing of the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law, and Christopher R. Knittel and Catherine Wolfram of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.

Clausing, in an interview with The Brooking Institution, said the less-conservative scenario may be “closer to the truth.” Under it, the authors write, 10% of counties “have annual household costs exceeding $880  … [and] there are large swathes of the country … where damages are concentrated and exceed $1,000 per household per year.”

The paper focused on two types of climate change costs: the effects on household budgets and the effects on mortality from extreme weather and natural disasters. Households’ direct and indirect insurance costs, for instance, are roughly $350 higher a year under the less-conservative scenario. Energy costs (both direct costs and costs passed on by businesses in the form of higher prices) are about $20 higher.

Using standard metrics that value lives lost, the authors also estimated the per-household cost of deaths attributable to heat, wildfire smoke, and natural disasters such as storms and flooding. The per-household cost of deaths attributable to wildfire smoke, for instance, is $140. The net cost of deaths from temperature change, however, is negligible because a reduction in deaths from extreme cold offsets an increase in deaths from extreme heat.

Read the full article about the costs of climate inaction by Kimberly A. Clausing, Christopher R. Knittel, and Catherine Wolfram at Brookings.