Federal Report: Environmental Safeguards Provide Billions in Economic Benefits

Very quietly over the holidays, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a long-overdue draft report on the economic impacts of environmental regulations and safeguards for the fiscal year 2015, which covers October 2014 to September 2015.

The OMB looked at the cost of environmental regulations and compared to them to the economic benefits, both those seen during the 12 month period and the estimated long-term benefits.  Their results showed very clearly that these safeguards are providing an exponentially greater economic benefit than they are costing.

According to The Hill, the OMB report looked at a total of 21 regulations, mainly from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including the Clean Power Plan.  For those 21 regulations, the costs were estimated to be between $5.5 billion and $6.9 billion.  While those are hefty price tags, it only represents half of the equation.

The economic benefits from these same 21 regulations are estimated by the OMB to fall anywhere between $25.5 billion and $47.8 billion.  To put that another way, for every dollar spent on environmental safeguards, the economy will experience a benefit of no less than $5, which means that these investments will yield returns of over 500 percent.

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