Today, I sent the following letter to my congressman Cory Gardner:
I am writing to urge you to vote against the TRAIN Act, which will delay implementation of key environmental protections that could save thousands of lives. While proponents of the TRAIN Act claim that they are interested in ensuring that the benefits of regulation exceed the economic costs, their actual actions clearly show that this is not what they are concerned about. First of all, the EPA already does cost-benefit analyses of its regulations. If TRAIN Act proponents believe these analyses are flawed, why wouldn't they just fix them, rather than wasting time starting all over? Second, the latest version of the TRAIN Act explicitly blocks the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule and Mercury and Air Toxics standards. If proponents were really interested in making an honest inquiry as to the costs and benefits, why would they write into the bill what conclusions they want before even doing the analysis? Finally, the pro-pollution lobby's own words prove their dishonesty. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a key pro-polluter lobbying group, on the front page of its website (www.americaspower.org) states that proposed EPA regulations would "eliminate more than a million American jobs". However, if you click through to their own analysis you will find that is not true - they actually claim it will eliminate 1.4 million "job-years", totaled over an 8-year period, which is not the same thing. If the pro-polluter lobby can't even get basic facts straight, why should we believe anything they say?
I'm not too hopeful as to what Gardner will think about this issue, given that he is a staunch conservative and as far as I can tell from his votes, has hasn't voted on the pro-environment side on any recent bills. I don't see anything on his web site where he supports "protecting the environment." However, one of the proposals he supports, the Business Cycle Balanced Budget Amendment, says it will "force government to budget itself in a countercyclical manner", which actually makes economic sense. However, the actual proposal says that the budget limit for each year is an (inflation-adjusted) average of revenues for the past three years, and I don't think that's what "countercyclical" means.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Saving Green by Going Green ... Or Is It?
Today, I received an email from the Environmental Defense Fund urging me to protect clean air by calling my congressman and urging him to vote against the TRAIN Act, a law that will create an independent committee do do cost-benefit analyses of new EPA regulations before implementation. Opponents of the bill argue that it is unnecessary because the EPA already does cost-benefit analyses of its regulations and the new law would just duplicate that effort and delay implementation of the regulations. On the other hand, proponents say that the EPA analyses may be biased (after all, they're not exactly a disinterested party) and that an independent analysis is necessary to make it unbiased. (Actually, the latest version of the act does a lot more than just call for cost-benefit analyses; it also explicitly blocks certain regulations, see here.)
What I was interested in is just what, in particular, proponents believed the flaws of the EPA studies were. The American Association for Clean Coal Electricity, (ACCCE), a power-company lobbying group, has a web page that discusses the issue from their point of view. They identify two perceived flaws: first, that the EPA considers only one proposed rule at a time and does not lump multiple proposed rules together in its analysis; and second, that the EPA does not consider other negative economic effects such as lost jobs. (Note that on the association's front page, they claim that the regulations the TRAIN Act will block will cost 1.4 million jobs. However, on the actual page that discusses the TRAIN Act, they say it will cost 1.4 million job-years, totalled over an 8-year period. These are very different.)
Anyway, the first criticism does not, at first, seem to make any sense. If regulation A has costs which exceed benefits, and regulation B has costs which exceed benefits, then added together, regulations A and B will collectively have costs which exceed benefits. The only way this will not be true is if either:
(a) The benefits of implementing both regulations A and B are less than the benefits of implementing A alone plus the benefits of implementing B alone.
(b) The costs of implementing both regulations A and B are greater than the costs of implementing A alone plus the costs of implementing B alone.
This, of course, raises the question of in what circumstances these can be true. For case (a), I can think of a simple example: suppose that both regulations will reduce exposure to the same pollutant, and the pollutant has a hormetic dose-response relationship. But for some reason I don't think that's the case that the ACCCE is thinking about. For case (b), I can think of a different case, that seems to be the case that the ACCCE is discussing. Suppose that both regulations reduce the production of electricity, and electricity (like most goods) has diminishing marginal value. Then just looking at each regulation individually, and estimating the cost by multiplying the current price by the amount of reduction (let's say), will understate the total costs. In the diagram below, the true cost is C+D but the "looking at each regulation individually) approach will give you something closer to C.
We can now estimate about how big this difference is. For the sake of argument, I will use the assumptions that are most favorable to the ACCCE's position. They mention that there will be a total reduction in coal power production of 30 to 100 gigawatts (GW) due to "these and other rules". 100 GW is equivalent to 876,000,000 MWh over the course of a year, or about 25 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption 3,741,485,000 MWh per year. Of course this is not a good estimate of total electricity consumption lost because some of the capacity lost in coal gets replaced by other energy sources. If I am interpreting the chart labeled "2016 CATR+MACT impacts" of their own report correctly (it's on page 6 of the PDF, or page 5 going by the page numbers on the page), it looks like about 60 percent of capacity lost in coal gets made up in increased natural gas. So you end up with a total of about 10 percent reduced consumption. According to the review here, the short-run price elasticity of demand for electricity is about 0.2. So 10 percent reduced consumption corresponds to about a 50 percent increase in price. That means that the triangular area D is about 25 percent of the area C.
However, my understanding (at least based on what it says here) is that for most of these regulations the benefits exceed the costs by at least several times. So just a 25 percent error won't make a significant difference.
----
The comment about jobs, however, is more interesting conceptually, and I think they have it backwards. Here's how I am thinking about it. Let's say that electricity and labor are perfect complements, so a business can produce a "widget" by using one worker and one unit of electricity. Suppose that currently the business is producing X widgets, and so it is using X units of electricity, and the new regulation will increase the price by Y. Suppose you ignore the issue of jobs. Presumably that means you assume that the business will just produce the same number of widgets as before. Then the total cost is X times Y. But suppose you take jobs into account, and you take into account the fact that now the business will produce fewer widgets because the cost of producing them went up. But if they made this change, then that means the change was beneficial (compared to just absorbing the extra cost). In other words, the "reduction in jobs" is partially a benefit because it means that you are now using less of the more expensive electricity.
-------------------------------
Of course, conservatives aren't the only ones who often use faulty economic reasoning when talking about environmental issues. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama claimed that oil companies had 68 million acres of land they were "not using" and that we needed to make them "use it or lose it." Most importantly, this claim was false: most of the 67 million acres of "non-producing land" was actively being explored and prepared, it's just that no oil was coming out of it yet. But even if it was true that oil companies were deliberately ignoring large portions of their land, why is that necessarily a problem? There are only two reasons I can think of as to why they would do that. One reason is because they think that oil will become more expensive in the future and they would rather wait and sell the oil when it's more expensive rather than extract and sell the oil now. But if that's the case, then the oil companies' actions would raise the price now (when it's cheaper) and lower the price when they get around to extracting it (when it's more expensive), thus reducing the volatility of oil prices over time. Isn't that a good thing; to save it for when it's scarcer? Another possible reason is if they are colluding to reduce supply in order to raise the price now. But that theory doesn't seem to hold water because oil is traded on a world market, and the vast majority of world oil and gas reserves are controlled by companies outside the United States, so it doesn't seem like U.S. oil companies could reduce the world supply that much just by drilling a bit less. And in any case, if the problem is that we are using too much oil, isn't it good if the oil price goes up because that means that people will have an incentive to switch to renewable sources?
What I was interested in is just what, in particular, proponents believed the flaws of the EPA studies were. The American Association for Clean Coal Electricity, (ACCCE), a power-company lobbying group, has a web page that discusses the issue from their point of view. They identify two perceived flaws: first, that the EPA considers only one proposed rule at a time and does not lump multiple proposed rules together in its analysis; and second, that the EPA does not consider other negative economic effects such as lost jobs. (Note that on the association's front page, they claim that the regulations the TRAIN Act will block will cost 1.4 million jobs. However, on the actual page that discusses the TRAIN Act, they say it will cost 1.4 million job-years, totalled over an 8-year period. These are very different.)
Anyway, the first criticism does not, at first, seem to make any sense. If regulation A has costs which exceed benefits, and regulation B has costs which exceed benefits, then added together, regulations A and B will collectively have costs which exceed benefits. The only way this will not be true is if either:
(a) The benefits of implementing both regulations A and B are less than the benefits of implementing A alone plus the benefits of implementing B alone.
(b) The costs of implementing both regulations A and B are greater than the costs of implementing A alone plus the costs of implementing B alone.
This, of course, raises the question of in what circumstances these can be true. For case (a), I can think of a simple example: suppose that both regulations will reduce exposure to the same pollutant, and the pollutant has a hormetic dose-response relationship. But for some reason I don't think that's the case that the ACCCE is thinking about. For case (b), I can think of a different case, that seems to be the case that the ACCCE is discussing. Suppose that both regulations reduce the production of electricity, and electricity (like most goods) has diminishing marginal value. Then just looking at each regulation individually, and estimating the cost by multiplying the current price by the amount of reduction (let's say), will understate the total costs. In the diagram below, the true cost is C+D but the "looking at each regulation individually) approach will give you something closer to C.
We can now estimate about how big this difference is. For the sake of argument, I will use the assumptions that are most favorable to the ACCCE's position. They mention that there will be a total reduction in coal power production of 30 to 100 gigawatts (GW) due to "these and other rules". 100 GW is equivalent to 876,000,000 MWh over the course of a year, or about 25 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption 3,741,485,000 MWh per year. Of course this is not a good estimate of total electricity consumption lost because some of the capacity lost in coal gets replaced by other energy sources. If I am interpreting the chart labeled "2016 CATR+MACT impacts" of their own report correctly (it's on page 6 of the PDF, or page 5 going by the page numbers on the page), it looks like about 60 percent of capacity lost in coal gets made up in increased natural gas. So you end up with a total of about 10 percent reduced consumption. According to the review here, the short-run price elasticity of demand for electricity is about 0.2. So 10 percent reduced consumption corresponds to about a 50 percent increase in price. That means that the triangular area D is about 25 percent of the area C.However, my understanding (at least based on what it says here) is that for most of these regulations the benefits exceed the costs by at least several times. So just a 25 percent error won't make a significant difference.
----
The comment about jobs, however, is more interesting conceptually, and I think they have it backwards. Here's how I am thinking about it. Let's say that electricity and labor are perfect complements, so a business can produce a "widget" by using one worker and one unit of electricity. Suppose that currently the business is producing X widgets, and so it is using X units of electricity, and the new regulation will increase the price by Y. Suppose you ignore the issue of jobs. Presumably that means you assume that the business will just produce the same number of widgets as before. Then the total cost is X times Y. But suppose you take jobs into account, and you take into account the fact that now the business will produce fewer widgets because the cost of producing them went up. But if they made this change, then that means the change was beneficial (compared to just absorbing the extra cost). In other words, the "reduction in jobs" is partially a benefit because it means that you are now using less of the more expensive electricity.
-------------------------------
Of course, conservatives aren't the only ones who often use faulty economic reasoning when talking about environmental issues. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama claimed that oil companies had 68 million acres of land they were "not using" and that we needed to make them "use it or lose it." Most importantly, this claim was false: most of the 67 million acres of "non-producing land" was actively being explored and prepared, it's just that no oil was coming out of it yet. But even if it was true that oil companies were deliberately ignoring large portions of their land, why is that necessarily a problem? There are only two reasons I can think of as to why they would do that. One reason is because they think that oil will become more expensive in the future and they would rather wait and sell the oil when it's more expensive rather than extract and sell the oil now. But if that's the case, then the oil companies' actions would raise the price now (when it's cheaper) and lower the price when they get around to extracting it (when it's more expensive), thus reducing the volatility of oil prices over time. Isn't that a good thing; to save it for when it's scarcer? Another possible reason is if they are colluding to reduce supply in order to raise the price now. But that theory doesn't seem to hold water because oil is traded on a world market, and the vast majority of world oil and gas reserves are controlled by companies outside the United States, so it doesn't seem like U.S. oil companies could reduce the world supply that much just by drilling a bit less. And in any case, if the problem is that we are using too much oil, isn't it good if the oil price goes up because that means that people will have an incentive to switch to renewable sources?
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Mini News Quiz
President Obama's proposed new "American Jobs Act" prohibits employers from discriminating against job applicants who are...
(a) politically active
(b) environmentally conscious
(c) recently divorced
(d) currently unemployed
(a) politically active
(b) environmentally conscious
(c) recently divorced
(d) currently unemployed
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