Kent Lassman of the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute recently partnered with former Koch lackey Daniel Turner of Power the Future on what the Washington Times’ Valerie Richardson generously describes as a “study” claiming that the Green New Deal will cost American households some $70,000 in its first year.
While most people would consider a study to be research based on real facts and peer reviewed to verify claims and published in an academic journal, these claims meet none of those qualifications.
Instead, this can at best be described as an analysis, but more honestly, it’s two Koch goons doing some back-of-the-envelope math, copying the work of fellow Koch goon Benjamin Zycher and the former Nixon CREEP at American Action Forum who popularized a $93 trillion price tag for the GND that Politico aptly described as “bogus.”
Essentially what Lassman and Turner do is average the costs cooked up by Zycher and AAF with those from the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie, who estimated a $4.7 trillion cost for moving off of fossil fuels. They then divided those costs by the number of households in five key states, and came up with some big scary numbers.
Since the Green New Deal is more of an aspiration than an actual set of policies at this point, they admit that they’ve had to make “a considerable number of assumptions.” And no one intelligent would give people whose job it is to promote fossil fuels and attack renewables the benefit of the doubt that those assumptions were legitimate. And you don’t even have to look hard for them.
For example, the authors confess that they don’t even bother trying to calculate the cost savings of energy efficiency upgrades, which would dramatically reduce household energy bills and almost certainly pay for themselves over the long term. Instead, they average a few different estimates for making a home energy efficient and peg the number at $27,413. They THEN assume that cost is all paid at once in the first year of the GND, making their headline first-year figures nearly $30,000 bigger than each year afterwards.
It’s the same for electric vehicles. They don’t take into account that EVs have significantly lower operating costs than gas-powered cars, which lowers lifetime costs. They also ignore the fact that people are regularly buying new cars anyway, so instead of comparing the cost of buying a new car when you need it with a new EV instead, they simply pretend the GND will make everyone go out and buy a new EV immediately.
Despite these obvious failings, and the reliance on a “bogus” report, there’s little doubt the dramatic “GND will cost households $70,000 a year!” framework will get picked up by fossil-fueled deniers. And when that happens, it would certainly be helpful to have some rigorous debunking of the numbers beyond the surface-level fallacies we’ve pointed out here.
But the entire report is based on a fundamental misrepresentation: that individual households should be responsible for picking up the cost of climate action. Why in the world would that be the case?
After all, it’s a pretty universal human value that when you make a mess, you clean it up yourself, you don’t make someone else do it for you. Or in policy parlance, it’s the “polluter pays” principle, which dates back to at least the industrialization of the 1800s.
The fossil fuel industry has known for decades that its product causes climate change. It has profited off of making this mess. Why shouldn’t it be responsible for paying for the clean up?
After all, they certainly have the money- a 2018 study pegged the stock value of 1,500 oil and gas firms at $4.65 trillion. For those keeping score, that’s just shy of the $4.7 trillion Wood Mackenzie guessed it would take to kick our fossil fuel addiction.
But if you must charge households, maybe start with those of the fossil fuel executives still profiting off of the problem?
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