By Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee During the 1980s, I worked primarily as an economist specializing in risk management. By the early 1990s, however, it had become clear that the greatest systemic risk facing civilization was not financial—it was climate change. Working with physicist Sidd Mukherjee, we began developing what we called the Nonlinear Acceleration […]
Category Archives: Finance
The Evolution of Climate Change: From Linear Warming to Nonlinear Earth-System Acceleration
The Full Economic Burden of Climate Change in the United States
Beyond Point Estimates: An Ensemble-Based Probabilistic Framework for Estimating the Full Economic Burden of Climate Change in the United States Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee Abstract Traditional estimates of climate damages generally report single-value estimates or narrow ranges that fail to capture the cascading uncertainty inherent in coupled human-natural systems. Climate change is not a […]
Addendum: Distinguishing the Benefits of Energy from the Costs of Fossil Fuel Combustion
A common criticism of climate damage accounting is that it focuses on the costs of fossil fuels without acknowledging the benefits they have provided to modern civilization. This criticism conflates two distinct concepts: the benefits of energy and the benefits of burning fossil fuels. This paper does not argue that reliable energy, transportation, heating, cooling, […]
Quantifying the Climate Tax: The Full Ledger of Harm
Macro-Welfare Frameworks vs. Economic Justice Valuation in the United States Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee I. Introduction A. Research Problem Climate change imposes large and growing costs on the United States, yet there is still no centralized national ledger that captures the full burden in a unified way. Conventional economic indicators—especially GDP, insured losses, and […]
The Acceleration of U.S. Climate-Linked Economic Burden (1890–2040 Projection)
by Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee This paper estimates the long-run evolution of U.S. climate-related economic burdens and finds strong evidence of nonlinear acceleration. Using a reconstructed baseline in the late 19th century and an integrated 2025 estimate of approximately $1.5 trillion annually in climate-attributable economic losses, we estimate that the effective doubling time of […]
The 2025 Cost of Climate Change in the United States
Estimating the Per-Person Economic Burden of Extreme Weather, Insurance Destabilization, Climate Inflation, and Health Impacts A reasonable all-in estimate for the 2025 economic burden of climate change on the United States is about $1.5 trillion, or roughly $4,400 per person. For a family of four, the implied annual burden is roughly $17,600. That burden extends […]
America’s Greatest Climate Risks
Extreme Heat, Coastal Flooding, and the Cascading Threat to Economic Stability and Human Health By Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee Abstract The greatest overall climate risk to the United States is not a single hazard in isolation, but the cascading interaction of extreme heat, coastal flooding, infrastructure fragility, rising property losses, and financial destabilization. In […]
A Coupled Framework for Compression of Climate Impact Doubling Times
Climate Jerk in Socio-Ecological Systems By Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee Abstract Conventional climate-risk analysis often treats impacts as the downstream consequence of physical hazard intensification alone. In this framing, rising losses, displacement, mortality, infrastructure disruption, and systemic instability are interpreted primarily as a function of increasing temperature, precipitation extremes, sea-level rise, or other physical […]
Climate Displacement and Nonlinear Acceleration: When Extreme Weather Becomes a Systemic Driver of Human Mobility
By Daniel Brouse and Sidd Mukherjee Abstract Climate displacement is often framed as a humanitarian consequence of storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, and sea-level rise. That framing is correct but incomplete. The deeper problem is that climate displacement is increasingly emerging from a nonlinear Earth system in which multiple climate hazards are intensifying simultaneously and interacting […]
Wholesale Inflation Surges to Highest Level Since 2022: Consumer Prices May Be Next
The latest inflation data delivered an unwelcome surprise. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Producer Price Index (PPI) for final demand rose 1.1% in May on a seasonally adjusted basis, pushing wholesale inflation to 6.5% over the past 12 months—the highest annual rate since November 2022. The increase exceeded expectations and represents […]