Michael Bastasch of the Daily Caller highlights a new report that questions the purported benefits of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan.
The EPA claims its Clean Power Plan will end up saving lives from reducing air pollution, but a new report by a free market energy group warns the agency’s global warming rule will end up killing more than it saves.
“The EPA’s climate rule has no discernible impact on climate change and may cause thousands of premature deaths in the United States,” according to a recent report by the free market Institute for Energy Research (IER). “The EPA relies on faulty data to make exaggerated claims about the benefits of a rule that will cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars and plunge millions of families into poverty.”
“The loss of disposable income due to higher energy bills will leave families with less money to spend on health care, prescriptions, and other essentials. Therefore, EPA should withdraw its expensive and harmful carbon regulation,” according to IER’s report. …
… [T]he Clean Power Plan will also raise energy prices as coal-fired power plants are forced to shut down and more expensive, new sources of electricity come online. IER notes that “EPA ignores the link between health and wealth.”
Basically, higher energy prices will decrease poor people’s’ disposable income and, therefore, “may end up causing far more premature deaths than it prevents, even if we accept the EPA’s numbers at face value,” according to IER. By 2030, IER estimates 14,000 more people will die from reduced incomes than will be saved by the EPA’s rules. And this is taking the EPA’s own data and assumptions at face value.
