Krugman (with the snark deleted and one [substitution]):
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just came out with its [study of] Obama administration regulations on power plants. ... the Chamber wanted to ... show ... the economic impact of the regulations .... And I was eager to see ... the numbers.
... The Chamber ... outsourced the analysis. And ... found ... that dramatic action on greenhouse gases would have surprisingly small economic costs.
The Chamber’s ... headline is that regulations would cost the US economy $50.2 billion per year in constant dollars between now and 2030. That’s for a plan to reduce GHG emissions 40 percent from their 2005 level, so it’s for real action.
So, is $50 billion a lot? Let’s look at the CBO’s long-term projections. These say that average annual US real GDP over the period 2014-2030 will be $21.5 trillion. So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP. That’s cheap!
...the chamber also says that the regulations would cost 224,000 jobs in an average year. ... US employment is determined by the interaction between macroeconomic policy and the underlying tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, and there’s no good reason to think that environmental protection would reduce the number of jobs (as opposed to real wages). ... at face value that’s ... a small number in a country with 140 million workers.
... what they’ve ... shown is that ... the economics of climate protection look quite easy.
Editing for snark reduced the length of the excerpt by about 70 words.
