Climate change's cost to U.S. transit

This post is by Sheryl Canter, an online writer and editorial manager at Environmental Defense Fund.

A new fact sheet on costs to U.S. transportation and infrastructure surveys the many ways that global warming will cause disruption and damage if we don’t act to stop it.

Published by the Democratic Policy Committee, the fact sheet gives examples of known costs in different areas to give a sense of what the total might be -- and it’s big. Here are just a few examples from the transportation sector:

Flooding, droughts, and shipping on rivers.
In 1998, severe droughts stranded more than 4,000 barges, each capable of carrying 52,000 bushels of grain. Climate change increases the risk of similar droughts. At today’s prices, the cost to the agriculture sector would be more than $1.2 billion.

Rail transportation.
Climate change increases the intensity of hurricanes, so we can expect more storms like Hurricane Katrina or worse. Reconstruction costs for the damage caused to rail transportation by Hurricane Katrina totaled about $300 million.

Muddy dirt roads and logging.
The frozen dirt roads that logging companies use will be muddy and difficult to traverse for more of the time. In Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, almost 100,000 people are employed in forest-based manufacturing jobs that generate annual payrolls of $3 billion.

These are just a few examples from the transportation section. The infrastructure section examines potential damage to pipelines and costs of highway deterioration. All the numbers are documented with reference links.