Americans have made a habit out of making even the most universal issues politically polarized. The serious weather risks we’ve faced recently are no exception. But is our warming climate really a political issue that divides Americans? The reality is it should be a powerful opportunity to modernize our infrastructure, create permanent new jobs here at home, and build entire new industries of the future. This is an economics issue, not a political one.
The economic consequences of climate change are growing more serious by the day. The wildfires that raged across Southern California last month caused property damages on the order of $40 billion and total economic impacts in excess of $250 billion. Just four months earlier, Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across the US Southeast before causing catastrophic destruction in North Carolina, with the estimated economic damage likely to exceed $53 billion.
According to JP Morgan, the costs of natural disasters in the United States have averaged in excess of $140 billion per year over 2020-2024, compared to average annual costs of roughly $20 billion per year from 1980-1989.
Climate change is caused by an increasing concentration of “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gas emissions come from a variety of sources, with the largest single source being the fossil fuel industry. But at the same time, fossil fuels create strong jobs, ensure American energy independence, and made much of the modern world.
Most importantly, fossil fuels are the backbone of the U.S. energy system, providing 83% of our energy supply. Over the past 25 years, Democrats and Republicans have held office roughly equal periods of time, all while fossil fuels have consistently remained the primary energy source in the U.S.
In 2000, fossil fuels provided 88% of the US energy supply; in 2023, fossil fuels comprised 83%. The only major change has been the shift away from coal, which declined from 23% to 9% of total US energy from 2000 to 2023. Natural gas has increased from 25% to 36% and renewables have grown from 4% to 9% as a share of total US energy over the same period.
We have to acknowledge two things that are true at the same time: 1) Fossil fuels are going to remain the primary energy source in the US for the foreseeable future; 2) The costs of climate change are catching up with the positive economic impacts associated with fossil fuels. From 2020 to 2024, oil and gas extraction has contributed roughly $225 billion per year to the US economy while the U.S. incurred costs of roughly $140 billion per year associated with weather-related disasters over the same period. In other words, for every dollar the oil and gas industry contributed to the US economy, more than sixty cents has been lost through large-scale climate disasters.
We need to keep the lights on and address the economic consequences of climate change. Knowing we’re not in a position to get rid of fossil energy any time soon, the focus should be on: (1) using the lowest-carbon intensity, lowest-cost energy sources available, and (2) limiting, or otherwise removing, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with them.
It’s evident that we need to develop carbon-efficient sources of energy supply, and both renewables and natural gas clearly have a role to play. We also need to reduce or otherwise remove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. One obvious way to do so is to capture CO2 associated with the combustion of fossil fuels before it is emitted to the atmosphere. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an industrial process to separate CO2 from other flue gases, compress it, and inject it into geologic reservoirs. CCS is technically challenging but feasible and may play a material role in lowering greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel sources.
But reducing CO2 emissions associated with fossil fuels is not going to be enough. We also need to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere, especially if we continue to rely primarily on fossil fuels for energy. Various technologies exist to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, ranging from planting trees to industrial processes, generally referred to as direct air capture, to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. Graphyte, the company I lead, has developed a low-cost, low-energy form of carbon dioxide removal called “Carbon Casting.” We do so by taking the biomass byproducts from the agricultural and timber industries– which have naturally captured CO2 from the atmosphere through the photosynthesis– and employ engineering techniques to ensure that the captured carbon does not re-enter the atmosphere.
These carbon dioxide removal technologies can enable us to continue to keep the lights on while minimizing the economic damage associated with climate change. They also create jobs, particularly in rural environments, due to their ties to the natural resource economy.
Reducing the economic costs of climate change is not a political issue; it’s a techno-economic one. We have the solutions we need to keep our planet habitable; we just need to deploy them at scale. Tossing a political football from one party to the next is unlikely to provide the investment environment we need to do so. Instead, we have the opportunity to create jobs in new economic sectors while simultaneously reducing the economic costs of climate change. We’re going to have to pay for it one way or another, and “an ounce of prevention is [almost always] worth a pound of cure.”
Barclay Rogers is the CEO of Graphyte, a company that is delivering the lowest-cost form of durable carbon dioxide removal. Barclay has decades of experience in the low-carbon economy, and is making permanent carbon removal at scale an economic reality.
Read more: Opinion: A Rare Opportunity For Climate Progress Under Trump
