Chamber: Costs of EPA climate rule could top $50 billion a year

The country’s largest business lobby warned Wednesday that the Obama administration’s proposal to impose new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants could eclipse $50 billion in annual costs through 2030. The new study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce comes ahead of the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned rollout of draft regulations at the center of President Obama's climate change initiative. Obama announced the push last year, declaring that he would not wait for the bitterly divided Congress to pass legislation to counter the effects of global warming. "Congress is being bypassed and this is the path that we’re on, which its why we sought to analyze this,” said Karen Harbert, president of the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.The intitute's report concludes that the forthcoming regulations could diminish the nation’s coal-fired energy capabilities by a third, as plants unable to meet the new standards shutter. Coal currently represents roughly 40 percent of the country’s energy production, and is a major part of the employment picture in many states, including West Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming and Pennsylvania. The Chamber’s study says as many as 224,000 jobs would be eliminated annually through 2030 under the proposal...more