Cost Can Be Social Too

The seventh installment of a blog series of 13 sharing art, articles, and abstract ideas that spark a contagious conversation.

The economic hit caused by COVID-19 and the climate crisis is clear, but the social implications can be just as devastating. When circumstances change for millions of people and every country all in a short period of time, the social ramifications should be considered just as critical as the economic ones.

During the global COVID-19 shut-down, many are finding themselves without work. Unemployment has long been associated with a significantly increased risk of death in general, particularly for low-skilled workers in the U.S. The risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. at almost 650,000 deaths per year, has been shown to increase by 15–30 percent in men unemployed for more than 90 days. Among older workers, involuntary job loss can more than double the risk of stroke, which already claims 150,000 lives in the U.S. per year, as well as increase the likelihood of depressive symptoms that then persist for years.

Such harms are likely exacerbated by concomitant longer term social isolation, which in of itself is associated with a 30 percent increase in mortality risk. Loneliness and social isolation have been associated with a 29 percent increase in risk of incident coronary heart disease and a 32 percent increase in risk of stroke. The scale of these elevated health risks is significant—comparable to that caused by taking up light smoking or suffering from obesity.

Income itself, of course, is strongly associated with poorer health across the income distribution, whether measured by life expectancy, health status or infant mortality. The gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1 percent of individuals in the U.S. is around 14 years, a gap that, unlike in other high income countries, has continued to grow in recent years. These are just a few of the non-economic crises taking place in response to COVID-19.

And then there is the environmental crisis. The social cost of climate change was actually calculated. It’s a policy tool that attaches a price tag to the long-term economic damage caused by one ton of carbon dioxide, hence the cost to society. It’s related to a carbon tax, and it serves as a way to distill the vast global consequences of climate change down to a practical metric. Suppose every country in the world suddenly wakes up tomorrow in ecstatic cahoots on climate change and decides to implement a carbon tax at the level of their respective social costs of carbon. Will that solve climate change?

Not even remotely.

That’s because there are some countries that emit very little and will be hit hard by climate change, while others emit a lot and won’t see as many damages. So for a country to set a meaningful carbon tax, or any other price on carbon, it has to include damages caused to other countries, as former Obama adviser Jason Bordoff wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

“Unlike other regulated pollutants that have almost entirely domestic consequences, CO2 impacts are global, and climate change is a “tragedy of the commons” problem. A ton of CO2 contributes equally to climate change regardless of where it comes from. If all nations looked only at the impact of a ton of CO2 on their own nations, the collective response would be vastly inadequate to address the true damages from climate change.”

This is part of why the global social cost of carbon, $417 per ton, is so much higher than it is for any individual country. The costs of climate change are greater than the sum of their parts. Yet it also shows that many of the wealthiest countries, which contributed the most greenhouse gases, stand to be the best insulated from its costs.

That makes climate change a global justice concern. In limiting global warming, wealthy countries face a moral imperative to look beyond their borders and GDPs, pushing even harder to cut their own emissions. The social costs of carbon also show why climate change really has to be tackled as a global problem rather than by individual nations.

Written by Tatum Eames, Western Washington University Senior and Climate Justice Now Intern.