It is time we shift the cost of climate disasters away from the American taxpayer and to the industry that is largely responsible for the damage. That means putting a price on carbon instead of subsidizing their dangerous pollution.
Storms in 2017 cost American taxpayers more than $300 billion, more than any year on record. That’s enough money to feed every food insecure household in the United States — all 17.6 million of them — for an entire year and still have money left over to provide free healthcare to 9 million low-income children for the next 30 years.
It is easy to glaze over this stunning amount in the news headlines and ignore the staggering cost of these storms, but this is exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants you to do. We should pause before taking a conventional course of making the payments only to do the same thing all over again when another awful climate disaster happens in the months ahead.