It’s every American energy analyst’s favourite parlour game: how much is the climate bill currently moving through the US Senate going to cost the national economy?
“We can move to a clean energy future at a cost of less than a postage stamp per family per day,” said energy secretary Steven Chu on the latest estimates from the Energy Information Administration (which provides statistics and analysis for the Department of Energy).
The EIA said the measures – due to higher energy costs – would reduce household consumption between $26 and $362 annually (7-99 cents a day) by 2020; and between $157 and $850 annually by 2030.
Chu also pulled out the trusty postage-stamp line after earlier reports by the Congressional Budget Office and the Environmental Protection Agency. The CBO reckons that implementing the legislation would cost US families an average $175 a year (48 cents a day); the EPA goes for between $80 and $111 a year on average.
Meanwhile, studies by the Heritage Foundation have projected that the average family’s energy bill would rise $1,241 a year by 2035 – there are also plenty more numbers in that range from groups such as the American Petroleum Institute and consultants CRA International.
The analyses don’t pick up all the savings enabled by the bill such as through energy-efficiency regulations. (The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has tagged these per household at $750 annually by 2020 and $3,900 annually by 2030.)
Most of the low estimates assume that US factories will be able to meet their bill-imposed carbon emission limits by paying foreign governments – cheaply – to offset their emissions. The higher estimates generally predict that won’t happen. A 26 June article in the New York Times sums up the “quagmire” of “dartboard projections”: “There are too many critical unknowns in the equation, from the amount of forest land in developing nations that the United States can ransom from clear-cutting to the costs and timing of massive investments to capture and store coal-fired power plant carbon emissions.”