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GOP's Latest Anti-Regulatory Effort is a (S)TRAIN; CPR's Steinzor to Testify on New Billby Matt FreemanThis afternoon at 1:00 p.m., the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power will check one more box in the House GOP's ongoing effort to demonstrate its appreciation to the corporate interests that helped elect them, by holding a hearing on a proposal disingenuously called the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation Act of 2011, or as they acronym-ize it, the TRAIN Act. As the name does not at all suggest, it’s a bill about undercutting environmental regulations that inconvenience the energy industry. The idea is to create a sort of non-environmentally minded Star Chamber to review the full slate of Clean Air Act and coal ash regulations, for the purpose of concluding that they cost too much. That’s not quite how they phrase it, of course, but that is the purpose. Here’s an excerpt from the committee majority staff’s description of the bill:
Of course, every rule that emerges from EPA undergoes a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, totting up every penny of cost to industry (calculated by industry, for the most part, so you can imagine they don’t under-project), and comparing it with the dollar value of the benefits that would result. For a number of reasons, that process is deeply flawed and slanted against protective regulations. It ignores, for example, the value of benefits that can’t be readily monetized, with the net effect that benefits are commonly understated, while the costs to industry are often exaggerated. Nevertheless, these cost-benefit analyses are required by the White House. Yet if you listen to the GOP’s rhetoric on regulations these days, you’ll almost never hear any reference to the benefits of regulation, even though such calculations are readily available. They talk about the costs to industry, but never the benefits to the public. Note, for example, that the committee staff’s description does not acknowledge the benefits, and indeed, the word does not appear in their memo. As it happens, the monetized benefits almost always exceed the costs. In the case of the Clean Air Act, for example, a recent report from EPA calculated the costs and benefits of the last 20 years of regulation. In testimony that CPR President Rena Steinzor will present to the committee this afternoon, she summarizes the findings:
Reiterating the dollar comparison: Clean Air Act regulations result in $2 trillion in annual benefits, against $65 billion in costs, which means that benefits exceed costs by 30 to 1. She goes on to say:
She also pokes a little fun at the proposed name of the bill:
Later, noting that the name of the bill was obviously chosen with an acronym in mind, she suggests that perhaps it would be more accurate to call the bill the “So-called Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts on the Nation Act,” making both the title and the acronym – STRAIN – more accurate. This latest attack on the authority of the executive branch to write the regulations to enforce the law is extremely unlikely to make it to the President’s desk for veto. The GOP can run practically anything it wants through the House, but the Senate isn’t likely to concur. But the GOP obviously likes the atmospherics. They get to argue, completely without evidence, that overly aggressive environmental regulation is what’s bogging down the economy, not the lax approach to financial regulation that so defined the previous Administration. It’s a bright shiny distraction for voters. But more than that, it’s a chance to give some airtime to the policy wish lists of their corporate supporters. One would think that with the government on the verge of shutdown, they might have something better to do. But then again, clearly not.
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