Who needs 100,000 jobs?
Environment & Energy Daily reports:
Republicans will continue beating back Obama administration oversight of mining and public lands, targeting proposals this week by the Interior Department and U.S. EPA.
In what promises to be a contentious hearing of the House Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, Office of Surface Mining Director Joe Pizarchik will likely face questions on the agency’s budget and its soon-to-be-released stream protection rule. Just last week, the full Natural Resources Committee approved legislation aiming to block the proposal (E&E Daily, March 1).
“This important legislation would block President Obama’s proposed rewrite of the Stream Buffer Zone rule that would cost over 100,000 direct and indirect coal jobs and cause energy prices to skyrocket,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), said in a statement.
Johnson was referring to a new study by Environ International Corp., which says the proposal could cost hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs. But the administration and its defenders say the rule is still pending and discussion of jobs is premature.
“It’s not a job-killing rulemaking,” Pizarchik said at a hearing last year, adding that leaked documents showing the rule having a significant economic impact have “no basis in fact”…
Where will the capital to build non-carbon fueled replacement generation capacity? How much will it cost? How many net jobs will be permanently destroyed by decarbonizing our energy production? What will eliminating coal contribute to mitigation of climate change caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions?
Honest answers inevitably lead to the conclusion that we should continue to exploit our huge coal reserves to provide electricity that is cheap, efficient and reliable for the foreseeable future.
It is characteristic of reform-minded politicians that they are not capable of properly considering the way that other people and circumstances will inevitably react to the consequences of the decisions made by the politicians.
It is not really their fault.
They are victims of the Utopian Rule of Budget Forecasts: “In any project, the possible adverse consequences will always be underestimated and the proposed benefits will always be overestimated. Only after the execution of the project will these discrepancies will become obvious. As a result boths costs and timelines will grow far beyond initial budget estimates.”