Scrapping Climate Protections Would Erase $300 Billion in Benefits, Study Finds

A new analysis of key Obama-era climate rules targeted by the Trump administration finds the benefits of those protections are 4x greater than the costs.

The Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the nation's climate change regulations, often claiming a high cost of compliance as justification. But a new study says keeping those rules would actually save nearly $300 billion a year by 2030.

"That just gives you a sense of the scale of the impact of the climate deregulation that's underway right now," said Jessica Wentz, a staff attorney at Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and one of the study's authors.

To get the figure, Wentz and a colleague took the cost-benefit analyses published by the federal government with each major greenhouse gas emissions rule issued under Barack Obama—regulations that touched on the power sector, the oil and gas industry, and automobiles—and essentially added them up.

They found that the total costs associated with those rules—the costs for companies to comply, higher prices for consumers and other indirect costs—were projected to be about $84 billion per year in 2030.  But in that same year, the benefits—including the direct savings from lower carbon emissions, improved public health from lower emissions of pollutants, and new jobs created by the rules—were expected to be worth nearly $370 billion.  They also found that the rules would prevent the emission of the equivalent of nearly 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2030.

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