It’s clear that taking action to prevent such disasters doesn’t hurt the economy as a whole, said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, but it does hurt some industries — namely, oil companies. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has been promoting the story that taking action on climate change is too costly.

“There is this prevailing narrative out there, and I guess what I would say is that this is not by accident,” Wagner said. In the early 1990s, the American Petroleum Institute began commissioning economists to produce research that made any effort to rein in greenhouse gases appear prohibitively expensive. One industry-funded study in 1991 calculated that imposing a carbon tax of $200 a ton would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.7 percent by 2020. It ignored the cost of failing to act on climate change.

The tradition continues today through the Trump administration’s cost-benefit calculations for repealing environmental regulations. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency accounted for the health benefits of cutting air pollution — such as avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths — when it created cost-benefit analysis for approving clean air rules.

That changed in recent months, when the Trump administration’s EPA revamped the practice so that it now effectively treats the value of saving human lives at $0. It has also thrown out the “social cost of carbon,” a metric that estimates the economic damage from floods, droughts, and other effects of global warming, which the Biden administration had set at $190 a ton.

Last June, an investigation by The Associated Press found that Trump’s EPA consistently emphasized the costs of pollution rules while omitting their benefits — even though for 17 of the 20 rules AP examined, the benefits outweighed the costs, sometimes by a lot.