Shown here is water vapor leaving a tailpipe.Between 2009 and 2015, the Obama administration enacted energy and environmental regulations that will cost a total of $460.5 billion to implement, with the most expensive coming as a result of President Obama’s push for cleaner greenhouse gas emissions, according to data from the American Action Forum (AAF).
During those years, the administration finalized 275 energy and environmental regulations, each averaging about $1.75 billion. Twenty-nine regulations cost $1 billion or more each to implement, reported The Daily Caller.
To comply with the regulations, Americans will have to complete an additional 3.95 million hours of paperwork, according to AAF.
The most expensive, finalized in 2012, is the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2017 and Later Model Year Light-Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission regulation. It will cost a total of $156 billion to implement, or about $10.8 billion per year, and require an additional 5,667 paperwork hours.
It’s designed to fight global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving fuel economy for light-duty vehicles for model years 2017 and beyond, according to the Federal Register.
The first phase of that car-emissions rule was the second most expensive regulation finalized by the Obama administration, costing $51.8 billion, or $4.9 billion per year. It’s called the Light-Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards and was passed in 2010 to reduce greenhouse gases and improve fuel economy for vehicles made between 2012 and 2016.
According to the EPA, these two regulations will result in “an average industry fleetwide level of 163 grams/mile of carbon dioxide (CO2) in model year 2025, which is equivalent to 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) if achieved exclusively through fuel economy improvements.”
The program would “cut 6 billion metric tons of GHG over the lifetimes of the vehicles sold in model years 2012-2025,” “save families more than $1.7 trillion in fuel costs,” and “reduce America’s dependence on oil by more than 2 million barrels per day in 2025.”
A new study released this week by the Competitive Enterprise Institute found that federal regulations cost U.S. consumers and businesses an estimated $1.88 trillion in lost economic productivity in 2014.
Since 1993, some 90,836 new rules have been issued, and regulation enforcement alone cost the government $59.5 billion in 2014.
