Whether we realize it or not, we are all paying for the impacts of climate change. These costs are large and growing and have effectively become a tax on the public. While climate change did not create wildfires, hurricanes, floods, or droughts, it is making extreme weather more frequent, destructive, and costly. Presidential major disaster declarations, which trigger funding of emergency and recovery efforts led primarily by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), tripled from 200 in the 1960s to 600 in the first decade of this century. Taxpayers spent more than $120 billion responding to 2017 disasters.

To put the high costs of federal disaster spending into perspective, 2017 disaster spending exceeded the annual discretionary budget of every federal agency except the Pentagon that year.

A federal agency funded at an amount equal to the 2017 disaster spending would have received more funding than the combined fiscal year appropriations for the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps Engineers.

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