by David Kotok and Elizabeth Sweet
First, the Climate Adaptation Center Annual Conference
In Florida we have a wonderful nonprofit organization working the challenges of climate adaptation in our state, and I have been a supporter since its inception. The Climate Adaptation Center focuses on raising awareness and leading adaptation as the state confronts “sea level rise, hazards to human health, red tide, changing hurricanes, and threats to the natural environment.” Though the CAC’s focus is Florida, much information it provides is relevant to other places, and it offers a model for initiatives everywhere.
The CAC will host its 5th Annual Florida Climate Forecast Conference on Thursday, November 13, 2025, from 8 AM to 4:45 PM at the Selby Auditorium on the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee Campus. This year’s conference will examine how climate warming is impacting Florida’s ecosystems and their biodiversity. CAC CEO and Chairman Bob Bunting elaborates: “The CAC Climate Conference: Climate & Biodiversity brings 10 speakers from around Florida and the world together to tell the epic story of climate and biodiversity from ancient Earth to the future.” Bob notes that the outlook depends on whether we adapt and mitigate.
For more information and to buy tickets, visit https://theclimateadaptationcenter.networkforgood.com/events/85027-5th-annual-florida-climate-forecast-conference-climate-and-biodiversity.
Kotok note: If you are new to the Kotok Report and have the time, take three minutes to hear from me regarding climate change and its inextricable link to economics, along with the vital work of the CAC. (Please note that this video was recorded when I was still CIO at Cumberland Advisors, the investment firm I co-founded. I’m now an independent strategic advisor.)
What follows this Sunday morning is an inevitably partial roundup of climate change-related issues and where we stand here in the US.
Stifling Renewable Energy in the US
On August 22, Trump administration issued a stop work order for a windfarm project off the coasts of Connecticut and Rhode Island, pausing the project to review national security issues. Halted when it was 80% complete, this commercial collaboration between the Danish company Revolution Wind and Skyborn Renewables, headquartered in Germany, is designed to power 350,000 homes in the two states. Not surprisingly, with $5 billion already invested in the project, the two companies has sued the Trump administration to get the order issued by the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) reversed, claiming in the court filing that the order “was issued without statutory authority, lacked any evidentiary basis, and is unlawful.” A week later, the Transportation Department pulled federal funding totaling $679 million for 11 offshore wind energy projects. The Interior Secretary is tightening permitting for solar and wind projects on federal lands, and the Big Beautiful Bill terminates tax credits for solar and wind energy installations.
Renewable energy projects have been one means to help address energy demand and costs, which are rising sharply with the buildout of AI data centers. However, their future looks increasingly bleak in the US.
An ICE raid on a South Korean EV battery plant in Georgia this past week was a twist on this theme, damaging relations with a country that had, only 11 days earlier, agreed to invest $150 billion in the US on top of $350 billion pledged in July. Some workers helping to set up operations were in the US for a temporary (90-day maximum) stay on the Visa Waiver Program. Hyundai had in 2022 agreed to manufacture electric vehicles and their batteries in Georgia at a plant projected to employ as many as 8500 people. The battery plant is a collaboration between Hyundai and LG. Hyundai has partnered with Savannah Tech to train American workers for these jobs.
At a news conference following the raid, HSI Agent Steven Schrank announced, “This operation underscores our commitment to protecting jobs for Georgians and Americans.” One pertinent question is just how chilling such raids might be on foreign manufacturing investments in the US. For its part, Hyundai has released a statement articulating its plans to “review its processes” to comply with US law.
Jobs at Stake
The renewable energy sector employed 3.5 million Americans as of 2023. As the number of Americans looking for work now exceeds the dwindling number of open jobs, many of those workers will find themselves unemployed as the sector’s growth is undermined by changing federal policy. Future American jobs in renewable energy are being swept off the table. Along with them go the economic contributions to GDP that the sector might have made even as renewable energy helped to mitigate the economic costs posed by worst-case climate change scenarios.
Elsewhere
Elsewhere on this warming planet, though, solar installations are up 65% for the first half of 2025. China is leading the way, doubling its solar installations this year over last and moving beyond supplementing coal as an energy source to beginning to replace it. The trend seems clear: The world will move forward without the US.
Climate Change Information Imperiled
In July the US Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (CWG) released a report titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” The report argued that economic damage caused by climate change “might be less damaging economically than commonly believed” and that action designed to mitigate it might be “more detrimental than beneficial.” In response, 85 scientists submitted to Energy Secretary Chris Wright a “compendium of public comments” on the CWG’s report. The compendium runs 459 pages and concludes that the CWG report “currently fails to adequately represent the scientific understanding of climate change” and “will require very substantial revision before it can be relied upon by any federal agency or other entity.” The debate goes on, and the quality of government climate reports matters because jurisdictions at every level from municipal to state to federal need an accurate understanding of climate change and its economic implications in order to manage their responsibilities on behalf of their constituents.
Trump’s animosity toward facts he does not want to reckon with has been amply evident in his removal of climate change data from federal databases and in the dismissal of climate scientists. His order that NASA destroy a satellite critical to gathering climate change data is an extraordinary instance. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory has obtained critical data successfully for a decade now and could do so for three more. Blowing a satellite up cannot change the trajectory of climate realities and their costs. And no president can issue an executive order dictating how nature works and expect nature to comply. “Make it so” goes only so far.
Costs of Climate Change
The economic costs of climate change are daunting. One 2024 study puts the figure at $38 trillion globally by 2049. The global median income hit is significant, with variations by region even if mitigation happens, but that hit spirals upward if emissions do.
If the world could curb carbon pollution and get down to a trend that limits warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, which is the upper limit of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, then the financial hit will stay around 20% in global income, [the study’s lead author, climate scientist Max] Kotz said. But if emissions increase in a worst case scenario, the financial wallop will be closer to 60%, he said.
(“New study calculates climate change’s economic bite will hit about $38 trillion a year by 2049” | AP News, https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-damage-economy-income-costly-3e21addee3fe328f38b771645e237ff9)
The Trump administration’s approach to climate disaster-related costs involves avoiding adding them up whenever possible. NOAA has been ordered to stop maintaining a list of weather disasters with price tags in the billions. As of 2023, the annual cost of extreme weather events was estimated at $150 billion; but Helene — just one storm — dealt damage to the tune of $113 billion in 2024, while the 2025 LA wildfires caused $250 billion in damage. There are rising healthcare costs beyond the extreme weather events, with increasing cases of insect-borne diseases over a widening swath of the US as the climate changes. Monster storms, wildfires, and insect-borne diseases are not new, of course, but our changing climate has intensified the risks and costs they pose.
Whither FEMA?
The longer the road to recovery after a disaster, the greater the economic hit over time. FEMA’s capacity to provide adequate help at the request of the disaster-struck states has been sorely tested by large-scale disasters such as Helene. Dissatisfied, back in the spring, President Trump flirted with the idea of doing away with FEMA and asking states to step up, noting that “FEMA is a very expensive, in my opinion, mostly failed situation.”
Rather than shoring up FEMA and adjusting its funding, procedures, and staffing to meet a growing need, the administration has laid off 30% of its staff and reassigned a hundred or so FEMA staff to help process new ICE hires. Concerned FEMA employees, more than 180 of them, signed the “Katrina Declaration and Petition to Congress,” sounding an alarm over cuts to risk-reduction programs, a loss of leadership with expertise, the termination of the “Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities” program and other preparedness programs, and the reduction in FEMA’s disaster workforce. The petition asked for Congress to establish FEMA as a cabinet-level agency independent of DHS, to defend the agency from interference (for example Kristi Noem’s impoundment of funds, subject to her approval), and to protect FEMA employees from “politically motivated firings.” Thirty-six hours later, many of those who signed the document publicly were placed on leave, a move legal experts say is illegal. The key question is this: Are Trump administration policies making US disaster response more effective or less effective? The people who do the work say that their ability to carry out their missions has been negatively impacted.
FEMA is at this point still FEMA. (Pushing disaster recovery costs back to states would, in fact, be a disaster for some states that lack adequate funding and incur greater disaster-related costs.) The agency provides monthly reports on expenditures from its Disaster Relief Fund. The Carnegie Endowment captures “the major sources of grant-based funding to individuals and communities through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)” in its Disaster Dollar Database, updated each June and December. Just last week, FEMA approved almost $100 million in additional Helene relief for the State of Georgia.
Time to Prepare?
That’s response. Ahead of a disaster, timely warning saves lives, while warnings that don’t make it the last mile in time cost lives. After DOGE cut personnel for NOAA and the National Weather Service, impacting the fine-grained accuracy of forecasting, the Trump administration is filling 450 new positions at NWS, presumably after confronting the fact that some cuts were a mistake. Pushback matters.
Forests and Climate
Last on the climate front for today, open for public comment until September 19 is a Trump administration proposal to rescind the federal government’s roadless rule enacted in 2001. That rule has kept roads from being built and maintained in remote public lands, and it currently stands in the way of the Trump administration’s plans to open 280 million acres of public lands to fast-tracked logging. Anyone who explores the country’s national forests on foot will find that many places are, in fact, crisscrossed by narrow old roads that loggers created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — that Gilded Age Donald Trump admires — to log out many acres of forest. Today, old-growth trees still stand only in remote groves too difficult to reach or on slopes that were too steep for hauling trees away. In the mountainous Southeast, small-diameter trees grow on those old roads now, along with thickets of rhododendron and mountain laurel.
While selective cutting and controlled burns keep a forest healthy, clear-cutting destroys a forest ecosystem that can require more than a century to restore, denudes lands used by the public for recreation (thus undermining recreational economic activity), unleashes erosion, significantly worsens floods, contributes to climate warming, and reduces local and regional rainfall (actually making fires more likely and more severe, especially if rejected timber lies scattered on what was once the forest floor).
Kotok Final Note
In closing, let me repeat a point I made in the CAC video linked at the beginning:
Climate impacts all elements of economics and finance…. Other than maybe war—and I say maybe—[climate change] is probably the largest single strategic / economic / financial shock in the history of all the people that are walking around on the planet now…. Mitigation requires innovation, and the innovation can be remarkably successful as a business venture if it’s a winner.
Failing to adapt or mitigate, on the other hand, entails costs far higher we want to pay.
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