17 Mar 2011 Millions of Jobs at Stake If Congress Fails to Block EPA Efforts to Regulate Carbon Dioxide, Says New National Center for Public Policy Research Paper

The U.S. economy will lose millions of jobs if Congress permits the Environmental Protection Agency to continue plans to greatly expand carbon dioxide emissions limits, says a new paper, “Upton-Inhofe Legislation Would Block the EPA’s Harmful Climate Rules: U.S. Economy, Jobs, and Energy Costs at Stake,” by Dana Joel Gattuso.

Gattuso’s paper says the regulations will have a more severe impact on energy costs, U.S. jobs, household income, and economic growth than cap-and-trade legislation would have had. Furthermore, it says, the EPA’s regulations could reverse the economy’s direction toward recovery and push the U.S. back into an economic slump.

Gattuso is the director of the Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

What’s more, the paper says, African-Americans will be particularly hard-hit:

“[The EPA’s proposed] rules will have an unjust and disproportionately large impact on minorities, increasing the number of African Americans in poverty by 20 percent,” the study says. “[Economist Dr. Roger] Bezdek estimates that by 2015, household income among African Americans will fall by $550. By 2020, African Americans stand to lose as many as 1.7 million jobs.”

Gattuso notes that U.S. Representative Fred Upton (R-MI), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, have introduced legislation, the Energy Tax Prevention Act, to stop the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide emissions.

In her paper, Gattuso reviews the extent of support for the legislation in both parties, and also critiques legislation introduced by Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to delay implementation of the EPA’s proposed rules for two years.

The paper is available online at https://nationalcenter.org/NPA622.html.

The National Center For Public Policy Research is a conservative, free-market non-profit think-tank established in 1982. It is supported by the voluntary gifts of over 100,000 individual recent supporters, and receives less than one percent of its revenue from corporate sources.

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