President Barack Obama’s plan to fight global warming will raise energy prices and drag many low-income Americans into “energy poverty,” according to a new study.
The so-called Clean Power Plan (CPP) would significantly increase the price of electricity in the U.S., and could cost the economy up to $479 billion by 2031, according to a study by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI). The average American’s electricity bill would rise by more than 10 percent as a result of climate regulations that would do nothing to address global warming.
Climate models created by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and utilized by the Cato Institute show that it would only prevent an additional 0.019° Celsius of warming by the year 2100, an amount so small it cannot be detected.
“Energy poverty is already burdening too many families in the US,” Dr. Wayne Winegarden, the PRI researcher who authored the study, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“The Clean Power Plan will significantly increase electricity costs for all families, but these costs will be more burdensome on lower income families,” he said. “In some neighborhoods average annual expenditures on electricity would be 10 percent, or more, of the average families income.”
The average American’s electric bills have already gone up 10 percent since January 2009, due in part to regulations imposed by Obama and government agencies.
The CPP would force states to develop plans to slash carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced from power plants with the goal of reducing emissions by 32 percent by 2030. The plan would probably eliminate most cheap coal power plants and replace them with much more expensive and unreliable sources like solar and wind if it survives current legal challenges. This would further increase the price of electricity, which causes the price of everything made using electricity to also spike, effectively raising the price of almost everything.
