There has been a lot of traffic today surrounding an erroneous and completely misleading CBS News report alleging that the administration "privately" concluded that pending Congressional clean energy and climate legislation would cost the average family more than $1,700 per year. I cannot underscore enough how completely incorrect this is. A few points to consider:
• What this Treasury document actually analyzes: Potential revenues from a hypothetical
climate plan that auctions 100 percent of the pollution permits and returns none of the proceeds to consumers or to another public purpose. As a colleague from the Environmental Defense Fund pointed out, the claims repeated by CBS News would only be true if all revenues from a climate plan were simply piled up on the White House lawn and set on fire. • What this Treasury document doesn't analyze: Anything even vaguely resembling the American Clean Energy & Security Act passed by the House or any live clean energy and climate proposals now under discussion in the Senate. Applying this so-called analysis to the climate plans now being debated in Congress would be like applying an analysis of a hypothetical single payer health care bill to the health reform plan now being devised by the Senate Finance Committee. • Consider the messenger--Big Oil: This story is being pushed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the organization at the center of global warming denial machine. CEI has received funding from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and foundations controlled by the Koch brothers. You may recognize Koch Industries and its founders as the money behind Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and much of the right-wing attack machine that continues to attack clean energy legislation, health care reform, and the rest of President Obama's agenda. Another group pushing this story, the American Energy Alliance, is also a front group for Big Oil. • John Boehner's Fuzzy Math Machine: Opponents of climate change legislation are now firing up the fuzzy math machine again, dividing a figure representing potential revenues from a hypothetical climate plan by the number of people in the country and concluding that climate legislation will mean high costs for households. Sound familiar? That's how House Minority Leader John Boehner arrived at his roundly dismissed $3,100 figure. That same $3,100 figure that Boehner and other Republicans continue to cite, despite being repeatedly told it is incorrect and asked to stop using by the very MIT professor who authored the study they purport to cite. Fortunately, instead of relying on misleading analyses of non-existent proposals pushed by Big Oil and its allies in Congress, we can rely on independent, non-partisan analyses of actual climate proposals before the Congress. All of these actual analyses demonstrate that comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation is affordable. And even more wide-ranging examinations that also
consider the benefits of potential legislation show that the potential benefits of clean energy legislation far outweigh the modest costs. Here's a summary from Progressive Media USA outlining what these independent, non-partisan analyses have concluded:
New Study: Clean Energy Bill Saves Consumers Money Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that the benefits of Waxman-Markey greatly outweigh the costs. The Journal highlights a new cost-benefit analysis of the House bill by the New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity.
• The NYU study finds that finds that the benefits outweigh the costs by 9:1 . • Based on a middle-of-the road estimate, potential benefits add up to about $1.5 trillion over the
next 40 years. Conservative attacks on the high costs of a clean energy bill are off-base. Analyses of WaxmanMarkey consistently show modest costs.
• The Congressional Budget Office estimates that on average, consumers will face the cost of about
the same as a postage stamp per day.
• The Environmental Protection Agency estimates even lower average costs between $98 and $140
from 2010 through 2050.
• The Energy Information Administration predicts families could spend up to $114 annually by
2020, or less than $10 per month per household.
• Low-income consumers would receive $40 per year in 2020.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, the NYU study “doesn’t include extra benefits—cleaner air from a cleaned-up power sector.” Indeed, the analyses above also ignore benefits of climate change legislation, such as savings from reduced energy demand and the creation of clean energy jobs.
• The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy projects that Americans could
save $750 per household by 2020 and $3,900 by 2030.
• The Alliance to Save Energy estimates that energy efficiency measures alone can create
over 100,000 jobs over the next two years and reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 200 million metro tons.
• Investing $150 billion in clean energy would create around 1.7 million new jobs, which is why
the clean energy bill being debated has the support of labor unions .
• A University of Massachusetts study found that investing in clean energy projects creates three-
to-four times more jobs than the same expenditure on the oil industry. Please feel free to drop me or my Clean Energy Works campaign colleague Josh Dorner a line if you have any additional questions. He can be reached at 202.679.7570 or josh.dorner@sierraclub.org.
Best, David Di Martino, Clean Energy Works Communications Director dd@bluelinesc.com