By Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

On Friday, the White House released a wide-ranging report mandated by Congress and compiled by numerous federal agencies that confirmed what previous prognoses have suggested: that the ramifications of climate change are coming hard, fast, and—barring immediate human intervention—irreversibly. The fourth National Climate Assessment, which numbers some 1,600 pages, also lays out the dire toll climate change is expected to take on the U.S. economy, as the planet becomes increasingly uninhabitable, and prone to extreme climate events, such as the wildfires so recently raging in California. “With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product (G.D.P.) of many U.S. states,” the authors warn. All told, upcoming economic losses could more than double those posted during the Great Recession, per The New York Times:

The report puts the most precise price tags to date on the cost to the United States economy of projected climate impacts: $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage by the end of the century, among others.

The potential economic consequences the report details are especially ironic given the stance of Donald Trump’s administration. Many of the president’s economic policies have been aimed at slashing regulations for oil and coal companies, in order to prolong the current boom. In August, his administration unveiled a plan to let coal plants regulate themselves—a plan it later admitted would lead to thousands of American deaths a year. The next month, the White House introduced a proposal to make it easier for companies to release methane gas into the atmosphere. California Governor Jerry Brown called the methane proposal “insane,” “border[ing] on criminality,” and “the most obvious and dangerous and irresponsible action by Mr. Trump,” which, he acknowledged “[is] saying quite a lot.”

Meanwhile, the president himself has taken concerted steps to disavow climate change, such as pulling out of the Paris climate accord, and brushing off research showing human activity has permanently altered the environment. “This is the coldest weather in the history of the Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC, and one of the coldest Thanksgivings on record!” he tweeted on Thursday—a thinly-veiled reference to the nonsense theory of “global warming.” “Is there climate change? Yeah,” he said during a recent interview with Axios. “Will it go back like this, I mean will it change back? Probably.”

As we all know given the number of times he tweets about the stock market, Trump is obsessed with economic performance—so much so that the National Climate Assessment might just spur him to action. But even if it doesn’t, it could make it much more difficult for the White House to continue down its current path of destruction. “This report will weaken the Trump administration’s legal case for undoing climate change regulations,” Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, told the Times. “And it strengthens the hands of those who go to court to fight them.”