Charts of the Week: Rising federal climate costs; carbon emissions in Africa; COVID-19 in Trump vs. Biden counties

This week’s edition of Charts of the Week offers data on expected rising federal expenditures due to climate change; rising carbon emissions among African nations; and COVID-19’s prevalence in counties that favored Donald Trump versus those favoring Joe Biden.

In their paper for the Blueprints for American Renewal and Prosperity series, Joseph Kane, Jenny Schuetz, Shalini Vajjhala, and Adie Tomer propose a Climate Planning Unit in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to “to reduce the federal fiscal impacts of climate change by developing strategic intra-agency and cross-agency mitigation and adaptation projects and programs.” The chart above shows the estimated fiscal impacts in the federal response to climate change into the late 21st century.In their viewpoint from a chapter in the recent Foresight Africa report, expert authors describe policies, including carbon pricing, for a green transformation in the economies of Africa. “As African economies look to recover from the negative shocks of the pandemic and grow fast,” they argue, “a price on carbon is essential for that growth to not also lead to rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions, which are on the rise anyway.”
Over the past year, William Frey has tracked the spread and contraction of the coronavirus pandemic in regions, states, and counties throughout the United States. His latest analysis tracks cases from March 2020 through February 2021. In the figure above, Frey explains that “Biden counties registered higher monthly new case rates from March through July. This flipped modestly in August, when Trump counties exhibited higher new case rates. Yet, in September and especially in the months surrounding the election, Trump counties registered noticeably higher new COVID-19 rates than Biden counties.”