• March 19, 2024

Continuing the Cost of Obama’s Climate Agenda is $1 Trillion

A new report describes that Obama’s administration regulations are on track to cost $1 trillion over the next 34 years.

Estimated at costing each household $3,350, the right leaning American Action Forum (AAF), found that federal agencies have already $450 billion worth of regulatory burdens.

To meet Barack Obama’s pledge to the United Nations additional regulations of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050 would cost $4.5 trillion, according to an AAF given to the Daily Caller. That would cost $13,000 per person.

“These cost could cumulatively reduce GDP by more than $7.2 trillion, burdens that every household would bear,” AAF analysts wrote their report on the cost of a regulation-only approach to tackling global warming.

AAF wrote, “There will be clean air and climate benefits to this approach, but these costs will have a profound impact on consumers, the energy sector, and overall economic growth.”

As Donald Trump has been laying out his cabinet picks and prepares to take office on January, AAF’s report makes its way in. Trump had made rolling back regulations, especially on energy, a major part of his 1016 campaign.

Trump has said he’d “cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale energy and clean coal” on his first day in office. With the help of Congress, regulatory experts have already identified 150 rules that Trump could eliminate.

A carbon tax, according to AAF, would be a more efficient way of reducing emissions, but even then it depends entirely on how the tax is implemented and AAF found that the Obama administration’s path of using regulations to reduce U.S. emissions could cost trillions of dollars in the coming decades..

Trump also came out against carbon tax during his campaign and it is a highly publicized issue that has a small chance of being passed by Congress. If fact, a U.S. carbon tax alone, would do very little to address global warming.

AAF experts wrote, “By 2050, the average household will have $41,877 less economic value than it would have absent a regulatory approach to climate change,”

The Obama administration insists that regulations like the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), would yield billions of dollars in benefits from reducing harmful air pollutants while the CPP would supposedly yield $31 billion in so-called “co-benefits” from reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Having coal plants taken offline will have some benefit for air quality  from those actions but those benefits are harder to qualify and obscure the actual cost of reducing greenhouse gas.

AAF experts wrote, “The U.S. will certainly receive some benefits from regulations focused on GHG abatement, but the current methods for calculating those benefits may be overstating the gains, and leading to burdens that create, rather than correct, market failure.”

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