Big Fat Lies About Climate Economics

Even though nothing should surprise me any more, I'm still pretty amazed at some of the Republican attacks on the new Waxman-Markey climate change bill (for details, see a report here from Stacy Morford of "Solve Climate"). First of all, the bill doesn't take effect until 2012, so to cast it as a dire attack on our sputtering economy makes no sense. Everybody expects the economy to have improved by 2012. Moreover, there appears to be a habit of just making up numbers about how damaging the bill would be. Republicans are saying, in some cases, that it would cost the average family over $ 3000 per year in energy costs--in short, roughly the equivalent of buying a new car. Of course that's not correct--not even remotely. The EPA estimates that average energy costs would go up between $ 98 and $ 140 per year, and that's before any rebate gets paid back to citizens, either through a tax cut or by the direct writing of rebate checks. At this point, pretty much everybody expects the final climate legislation to pay the public back with a significant part of the revenues the government earns through the sale of emissions permits; indeed, this will be one key factor in making the bill popular. In sum, there's no economic hardship here--and there is vast benefit. But expect the misinformation to continue, in direct relation to how close this bill gets to passage....