White House Pushes Financial Case for Carbon Rule
The report is part of the White House’s effort to increase public support for President Obama’s climate-change agenda, chiefly an Environmental Protection Agency proposal targeting coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of planet-warming pollution. The E.P.A. will hold public hearings on the proposal, which are expected to be heated, this week in Atlanta, Denver, Pittsburgh and Washington.
The rule could lead to the shutdown of hundreds of power plants, a decline in domestic coal production, an increase in electricity rates and a fundamental transformation of the nation’s power supply. The White House has repeatedly sought to make the case that the long-term cost of not cutting carbon emissions — including longer droughts, worse floods and bigger wildfires that will damage homes, businesses and the nation’s infrastructure — will be higher than the short-term expense of carrying out the regulation.
A Sierra Club volunteer, Alex Burke, outside an E.P.A. hearing in Denver. Credit Brennan Linsley/Associated Press
A Sierra Club volunteer, Alex Burke, outside an E.P.A. hearing in Denver. Credit Brennan Linsley/Associated Press
Jason Furman, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the report was intended to explain “why the administration is doing so many things on so many levels to deal with climate change.” He added, “Each decade we delay action results in added cost.”
The report concludes that climate-change costs will increase 40 percent for each decade that nations do not curb carbon emissions.
Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party group backed by Koch Industries, the Kansas conglomerate run by Charles G. and David H. Koch, is planning demonstrations outside the hearings to protest the regulation aimed at coal-fired power plants.
“President Obama’s E.P.A. is waging a war on traditional affordable energy through burdensome regulations and unrealistic mandates,” the group’s president, Tim Phillips, said in a statement. “It’s time for the American people to stand up to this federal overreach, and send a message that they cannot afford to pay for Obama’s environmental ideology.”
The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, a state that is heavily dependent on coal, is expected to speak at the public hearing in Washington about losses of coal-mining jobs under the proposal. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which lobbies for the coal industry, said it would show videos criticizing the plan outside each hearing site.
The Environmental Defense Fund, which is in favor of the rule, is planning rallies that are intended to focus on the dangers of climate change.
The White House report adds to a growing stack of research linking climate change to economic costs. A report titled “Risky Business,” issued last month by a bipartisan coalition backed by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, and Tom Steyer, the billionaire and environmental activist, among others, also concluded that the long-term costs of carbon pollution would be greater than the expense of cutting emissions.
Congressional Democrats are working on their own messages. The Senate Budget Committee, led by Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, conducted a hearing on Tuesday to show the effect of climate change on the federal budget. Over the past decade, federal spending during droughts, floods and wildfires has reached record levels.
“It’s becoming clearer and clearer that if you care about the deficit, you need to care about climate change,” Ms. Murray said in a statement. “We’ve got a responsibility to leave a stronger country for our children and grandchildren, and that means addressing climate change to help the environment, help the economy and help the federal budget.”
Democrats hope that argument will win over some fiscally conservative Republicans. Most Republicans have said that the E.P.A. climate-change rules exemplify what they call the Obama administration’s overreach.
At a hearing last week, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, told the E.P.A. administrator, Gina McCarthy: “You don’t run the country. American people run the country.”
