http://www.environmentamerica.org/home/reports/report-archives/new-energy-future/new-energy-future/the-high-cost-of-fossil-fuels

Big Oil, Dirty Coal Could Cost U.S. $30 Trillion By 2030

America is at an energy crossroad. As a nation, we are dependent on fossil fuels at a time of growing demand and dwindling supply. Meanwhile, fossil fuel use continues to impose massive environmental and economic costs. Now our country must choose between paying to continue the status quo and investing in a new energy future.

The costs of continuing on our current energy path are steep. American consumers and businesses already spend roughly $700 billion to $1 trillion each year on coal, oil and natural gas, and suffer the incalculable costs of pollution from fossil fuels through damage to our health and environment. If America continues along a business-as-usual energy path, U.S. fossil fuel spending is likely to grow, totaling an estimated $23 trillion between 2010 and 2030.

Policymakers in Washington, D.C., and many states have recently taken the first small steps toward a clean energy future, adopting policies to encourage energy efficiency, ramp up the use of solar and wind power, and curb global warming pollution. Now, with even bolder steps – such as a national cap on global warming pollution and more ambitious targets for renewable energy and energy efficiency – on the public agenda, powerful interests with a stake in preserving the status quo have criticized strong clean energy policies as being too expensive for the American public.

In fact, the reverse is true. The United States cannot afford to wait to break our dependence on fossil fuels. The cost of fossil fuels to our economy and our environment will continue to mount in the years to come unless the nation takes bold steps now to embrace the benefits of a clean energy future.

America is overly reliant on fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and oil. This dependence is costly to everyday citizens, and sends valuable dollars overseas and out of the domestic economy.

• The United States depends on fossil fuels for 85 percent of our energy supply.

• In 2006, American consumers and businesses spent $921 billion – or close to 7 percent of America’s gross domestic product – on fossil fuels, more than the nation spent on education or the military. In 2008, national expenditures on fossil fuels likely topped $1 trillion for the first time ever. Each year, more than 70 percent of this money is spent on oil.

• In 2007, America spent more than $360 billion importing fossil fuels, with the vast majority of that money spent on crude oil. That money is a direct transfer of wealth from American consumers to oil companies and foreign governments.

• For every dollar that an American household spends each year, about 10 cents is likely to go toward the purchase of energy, with most of that money spent on fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel production and use damage our environment and our health – inflicting even greater damage on the American economy and our quality of life.

• Fossil fuel combustion is the leading contributor to global warming, which, in addition to being a looming environmental and human catastrophe, could inflict massive economic damage as well:

• Sea level rise and an increase in the severity of storms could put key cities such as New York, Miami and New Orleans at greater risk of costly storm damage. A 2008 Natural Resources Defense Council study estimated that high-intensity hurricanes could cause as much as $422 billion in damages in Atlantic and Gulf Coast states between 2025 and 2100.

• A 2007 study by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University found that global production of three of the six largest global crops experienced significant losses due to global warming between 1981 and 2002. The study concluded that global wheat growers, for example, lost $2.6 billion and global corn growers lost $1.2 billion in 2002. 

• Global warming is forecast to inflict a variety of other costs, including declining rainfalls and rising temperatures that will combine to cause large and extended drought conditions in regions like the Southwest, and impacts on public health due to heat-related illnesses, greater formation of ozone smog, and increases in vector-borne disease.

An assessment by former World Bank Chief Economist Sir Nicholas Stern indicates that global warming has the potential to reduce global per-capita consumption by as much as 20 percent.
....
....
http://www.environmentamerica.org/home/reports/report-archives/new-energy-future/new-energy-future/the-high-cost-of-fossil-fuels