Despite the Obama administration’s recent decision to delay new rules regarding smog and emissions from industrial boilers, EPA is preparing to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants and industrial users that consume oil, natural gas and coal beginning in January. The potential cost: cutting back on carbon emissions will force many smaller, coal-fired power-generating plants to shut down, almost certainly raise electricity rates around the country, undermine the international competitiveness of U.S. businesses and send more American jobs overseas.
It is proposing a reduction in the national ambient-air-quality standard for ground-level ozone, a precursor of smog, which would require industries and many small businesses to adopt new, costly emission controls. (Public opposition has prompted the EPA to delay the rule’s issue until July.) The potential fallout: according the Manufacturers Alliance, an organization that for 75 years has conducted economic research, estimates 7.3 million jobs lost beginning in 2020.
It just raised the amount of corn-based ethanol that must be blended with gasoline from 10 percent to 15 percent for 2007 and newer vehicles. Projected cost: around $5 billion a year in federal subsidies.
It is reviewing federal legislation proposing to regulate so-called hydraulic fracturing in natural-gas production, a drilling technique that state agencies already oversee and which has been used in more than one million wells in the United States since 1950. The potential cost: in Appalachia’s Marcellus Shale zone alone, EPA regulation would destroy 280,000 potential jobs and reduce tax revenues by $6 billion over the next decade, according to a study by Natural Resource Economics.
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