Administration has tried to downplay dire findings of the National Climate Assessment, released the day after Thanksgiving

Donald Trump has told reporters he doesn’t believe his own government’s climate change findings that the US economy will suffer substantially with continued warming from greenhouse gas pollution.

“I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine,” he said outside the White House on Monday. “I don’t believe it.”

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The report, called the National Climate Assessment, was quietly released the day after Thanksgiving. Also last Friday, the government slipped out another environment internal report with bad news about emissions from oil and gas drilling on federal lands.

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The Trump administration has tried to downplay the dire findings of the consensus analysis, which concludes climate change could cost the US economy hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives each year in future. A White House spokeswoman said the assessment was “based on the most extreme scenario”, although the report explores the differences in the impacts of climate change based on pollution levels and other factors.

“With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century – more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many US states,” the report says.

Regional economies and industries that depend on natural resources and a favorable climate, including agriculture, tourism and fisheries, will suffer, the report finds. As other countries see even worse impacts than the US, Americans will feel the burden through import and export prices and in businesses that have overseas supply chains.

The report puts a dollar figure on the economic damages from unmitigated climate change. If greenhouse gas pollution from power plants and cars continues to rise through the 21st century, the US could then see $155bn a year in damages to labor and $118bn a year in damages to coastal property.

Lives lost to extreme heat and cold could cost another $141bn a year and the consequences from worsened air quality could equal $26bn a year.

Curbing globe-heating pollution would significantly reduce those costs, but the Trump administration has consistently reversed government efforts to slow climate change.

The Trump administration also published another report on climate change on Friday, laying out that oil and gas produced from drilling on public land accounted for almost a quarter of carbon dioxide pollution in the US between 2004 and 2015.



The information from the US Geological Survey, in the first such report, was requested in 2016 under Barack Obama’s administration.



Trump officials have since moved to make it easier for companies to drill on federal land and rescinded standards for the globe-warming methane released by oil and gas operations.

