Congressional Legislation: Number of Pages

From Carpe Diem:

Baucus: No Senator Understands This Health Care Bill

HT: Michael F. Cannon

How much will climate legislation cost you?

According to the most recent analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a cap-and-trade bill will shrink the GDP’s growth 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent by 2020:

Here is how the pay breaks down at a household level per state:

So what accounts for the differences? Jonathan Rothwell and Mark Muro explain:

The household costs of cap-and-trade compliance vary quite a lot, and depend quite a bit on what metro you live in. Ranging above and below the average $160 cost to a household nationally in 2020, the average metro figures range from a high of $277 per household in Lexington, KY to a low of just $96 in Los Angeles. Low costs are registered all across the West’s metros and in Northeastern metros like New York, Boston, and Rochester. Much higher costs will be borne by households in metros all across the upper South and Ohio Valley—places like Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, and Nashville. So once again, as we keep saying: Place matters.

In terms of what’s driving these variations and what we’re to make of these differentials, the bottom line is this: Differences in the compliance costs across metros result mostly from variation in carbon emissions. Residents of high emission metros emit roughly 2.4 times as much carbon per capita as residents in low emission metros and this translates into about $178 extra in costs per household. In that sense, the cap-and-trade system really will penalize high-energy-consumption households. But beyond that, it will also penalize sprawling, low-density metros that contend with extremes in temperatures and lack transit options. That’s because, as the earlier report confirmed, the per capita “carbon footprints” of metro areas are influenced by their development patterns, the existence of rail transit, the carbon content of electricity sources, as well as the weather.