Mitt Romney added a new twist Tuesday to false right-wing claims about the EPA’s regulation limiting mercury and other pollutants from coal power plants.
EPA estimated that the “utility MACT” will have annual monetized benefits of $37-90 billion and costs of $9.6 billion. A critique we’ve heard over and over again from the industry and its supporters goes something like this: “But only $6 million of those benefits come from reducing mercury pollution, the top target of the rule!” It’s sort of an odd critique, but it’s misleading anyway: the mercury numbers are so low because EPA simply didn’t monetize most of the mercury reduction benefits. Putting a dollar value on not poisoning kids with a neurotoxin is difficult or impossible, and the benefits of the rule far outweigh the costs already anyway.
Now here’s the twist. On Tuesday, the website sciencedebate.org, a consortium of concerned groups, published responses from Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to a questionnaire on science issues. Romney repeated the common right-wing Utility MACT argument (see question 11), and added a different argument:
Unfortunately, President Obama has repeatedly manipulated technical data to support a regulatory agenda guided by politics rather than science. For example, his “Utility MACT” rule is purportedly aimed at reducing mercury pollution, yet the EPA estimates that the rule will cost $10 billion to reduce mercury pollution by only $6 million (with an “m”). This has not stopped the President from trumpeting the rule as “cost-effective” and “common sense,” while claiming it will “prevent thousands of premature deaths.” The trick? Making the rule so expensive that it will bankrupt the coal industry, and then claiming that the elimination of that industry (and its hundreds of thousands of jobs) would have significant benefits.
The EPA estimated that the health benefits of the rule include averting 4,200 - 11,000 premature deaths, 130,000 asthma attacks, and 540,000 missed work sick days – each year. Romney is saying that those calculations of prevented deaths rely on a trick: they are achieved because the affected coal plants would simply shut down.
That is, it turns out, not how EPA’s calculations for the rule work. As the agency explains (p.17):
EPA projects 4.7 GW will retire out of the more than 1000 GW that make up the nation’s electric generating capacity. That’s less than one half of one percent.
The overwhelming majority of the rule’s health benefits – including those averted deaths that Romney is skeptical of – will come because dirty power plants will finally be required to install pollution control equipment. Many states have already successfully implemented such requirements.
The “bankrupt” line does make for a more sinister sounding story, though.
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Ben Somberg | September 6, 2012
Mitt Romney added a new twist Tuesday to false right-wing claims about the EPA’s regulation limiting mercury and other pollutants from coal power plants. EPA estimated that the “utility MACT” will have annual monetized benefits of $37-90 billion and costs of $9.6 billion. A critique we’ve heard over and over again from the industry and its supporters […]
Daniel Farber | September 5, 2012
Ben Somberg posted here recently about the Republican platform and the environment. He noted that the platform uses a discredited estimate of regulatory costs, calls for making environmental regulations into guidance documents for industry, and proposes a moratorium on new regulations for the indefinite future. Unfortunately, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. If you can […]
David Driesen | August 30, 2012
Reposted from RegBlog. Traditionally, the field of law and economics has treated government regulation as if it were a mere transaction. This microeconomic approach to law assumes that government regulators should aim to make their decisions efficient by seeking to equate costs and benefits at the margin. As I argue in a new book, The Economic […]
Robert Verchick | August 28, 2012
NEW DELHI — Here’s what monsoon season looks like in India. This summer, the northern states have been lashed with rain. In the northeastern state of Assam, July rains swamped thousands of homes, killing 65 residents. Floods and mudslides in northeast India sent nearly 6 million people heading for the hills in search of temporary […]
Ben Somberg | August 27, 2012
A draft of the Republican party platform, posted by Politico on Friday afternoon, reveals that the party has incorporated some of the more absurd claims and proposals on regulations pushed by House Republicans and some more radical trade organizations. The draft claims regulations cost $1.75 trillion each year – that’s from a discredited study sponsored […]
| August 24, 2012
Today CPR releases a new briefing paper explaining how states can spearhead improving energy efficiency standards for home appliances. The paper, States Can Lead the Way to Improved Appliance Energy Efficiency Standards, draws on ideas discussed in Alexandra B. Klass’s article State Standards for Nationwide Products Revisited: Federalism, Green Building Codes, and Appliance Efficiency Standards. […]
Frank Ackerman | August 23, 2012
Cross-posted from Triple Crisis. Can we protect the earth’s climate without talking about it – by pursuing more popular policy goals such as cheap, clean energy, which also happen to reduce carbon emissions? It doesn’t make sense for the long run, and won’t carry us through the necessary decades of technological change and redirected investment. […]
Joseph Tomain | August 23, 2012
Based on what the Romney-Ryan team has said so far on energy, I expected their energy plan today would be something like the National Energy Policy of 2001, delivered by Vice President Dick Cheney four months after George W. Bush’s inauguration. I thought that their energy plan would simply be a retread of old thinking, […]
Thomas McGarity | August 22, 2012
Yesterday afternoon, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a long-awaited decision on the validity of EPA’s “Cross-State” rule governing interstate transport of pollution. The EPA has been trying for more than two decades to come up with a solution to the vexing interstate transport problem, but every attempt has failed. The court has now […]