The Trump administration has long rejected prescriptions like a carbon tax. But policy debates aside, many of the central economic questions of the decades ahead are, at their core, going to be climate questions. These are some of the big ones.

How permanent will the costs be?

When we think about the economic damage from a hotter planet, it’s important to remember that not all costs are equivalent, even when the dollar values are similar. There is a big difference between costs that are high but manageable versus those that might come with catastrophic events like food shortages and mass refugee crises.

Consider three possible ways that climate change could exact an economic cost:

A once-fertile agricultural area experiences hotter weather and drought, causing its crop yields to decrease.

A road destroyed by flooding because of rising seas and more frequent hurricanes must be rebuilt.

An electrical utility spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build a more efficient power grid because the old one could not withstand extreme weather.

The farmland’s yield decline is a permanent loss of the economy’s productive capacity — society is that much poorer, for the indefinite future. It’s worse than what happens in a typical economic downturn. Usually when factories sit idle during a recession, there is a reasonable expectation that they will start cranking again once the economy returns to health.

The road rebuilding might be expensive, but at least that money is going to pay people and businesses to do their work. The cost for society over all is that the resources that go to rebuilding the road are not available for something else that might be more valuable. That’s a setback, but it’s not a permanent reduction in economic potential like the less fertile farmland. And in a recession, it might even be a net positive, under the same logic that fiscal stimulus can be beneficial in a downturn.

By contrast, new investment in the power grid could yield long-term benefits in energy efficiency and greater reliability.