MIT to Republicans: Lay off the Scaremongering on Climate Costs

Republican opposition to any sort of climate-change bill has sparked another battle—but this time, it isn’t in Congress. House Republican leader John Boehner started the fray by arguing that proposed legislation to curb greenhouse-gas emissions will raise utility bills by $3,100 per household. “Anyone who has the audacity to flip on a light switch will be forced to pay higher energy bills thanks to this new tax increase,” he said in a statement released Tuesday, citing a 2007 study by MIT that tried to calculate the economic impact of a cap-and-trade bill. Not so fast, says John Reilly, an MIT professor and one of the authors of the study. He told Republican leadership they had the numbers wrong even before they published their statement. After it was released, he sent a letter to Rep. Boehner yesterday saying the MIT study had been “misrepresented.” For starters, the figure cited by Republican House leadership is almost ten times higher than the cost estimate provided in the study, Professor Reilly said—and that number wasn’t limited to electricity bills...House Republicans are sticking to their guns. In a release today, Republican leadership explains how they got the $3,100 figure–dividing MIT’s estimate of 2015 cap-and-trade revenues of $366 billion by 117 million households. “Nothing in the Democrats’ budget would provide rebates or any relief to consumers,” the statement added.WSJ