"Business Lobby Tries to Frighten America About Clean Energy, Fails Utterly"

Business Lobby Tries to Frighten America About Clean Energy, Fails Utterly
By Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/lobby-tries-fails-to-frighten-on-clean-energy.html

"SNIP.........................


Even so, while the study uses lots of impressive adjectives to describe the size of the cost it predicts, the numbers are pretty meager. It predicts the regulations will increase electricity costs by $17 billion a year. Scared? Keep in mind electricity costs about $350 billion a year, which would mean the Chamber is predicting a one-time hike in electricity bills on the order of 5 percent a year. For the average American, that’s about $100 a year in his electric bill.

Even the Chamber’s unrealistically dire number is still low enough that most people would barely notice it. (For perspective, a poll found that the average American would spend $162 a year for cleaner energy.) Adele Morris, a Brookings Institute climate economist, told me, “If they were going to make up numbers, I’d assume they’d have made up bigger ones.”

The study’s bad faith is made abundantly clear in its conclusion, which announces that regulating power plants will still eliminate “a mere 1.8% of global CO2 emissions.” The assumption, in other words, is that nothing the United States does to limit its carbon emissions will impact the amount that other countries emit: “Regardless of the national emissions reduction policies modeled in the [proposed regulations], and the adverse economic impacts resulting therefrom, global CO2 emissions – both in the power sector and overall – will continue to grow rapidly.”

But that is not an inflated assumption, it’s a completely absurd one. The Chamber is assuming Obama’s plan is to impose costly energy restrictions on itself, and continue to tighten those restrictions year after year, while every other country in the world does nothing at all to limit greenhouse gases. That would be an incredibly stupid plan. Nobody is willing to do that. The whole point of reducing U.S. emissions is to meet targets needed to forge an international agreement.




........................SNIP"