Biden’s new climate change rules would smack government contractors with a $604 billion bill, forcing them to cut the price of air conditioning by 20 percent by 2030, according to analyses by Citizens for Climate Change (C2C), the Sierra Club and others.
Citizens for Climate Change calculated that if the Obama administration had passed its legislation, the cost of energy for the next 25 years would be reduced by over $160 billion in direct subsidies from fossil fuel companies. However, the administration’s proposed rule — titled “Achieving Target greenhouse gas reduction and clean energy standards” (TARTS) — would impose a $604 billion bill onto companies and consumers over the next two decades, according to a summary of the rule prepared by the Energy Department. The rule would effectively require companies to pay $1.9 trillion of costs for complying with environmental standards, which would require them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 40 percent by the year 2030 and increase electricity rates by $3.50 per month, the summary said.
The administration estimated that implementing the rule will cost $1.6 billion to $4.1 billion annually, while it expects to recoup more than $2.25 billion of the total costs, according to the summary of TARTS.
As well, the administration estimates that the costs of the regulation would be less than that of the Clean Power Plan, a rule the Obama administration had proposed in June last year.
The Energy Department said in the summary that “the implementation of this rule is not likely to cause significant adverse economic or policy impacts for the electricity sector,” but the Sierra Club said the costs of the rule would cause the electricity sector to pay an estimated $4.2 billion in additional costs, which would reduce power purchases by the industry by 22 percent and result in 16,000 electricity jobs being eliminated by 2030.
“It’s a total tax on Americans,” said John Coequyt, senior vice president for state policy at the Sierra Club. “A billion dollar tax on the power sector is not very much of a tax on Americans, but it’s a trillion dollar tax on Americans.”
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said that the cost of the rule would be between $2.5
