Our guest blogger is Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The main argument conservatives and big oil and coal companies use against the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is that it would cripple American households with a crushing energy tax. To make that claim, they have distorted cost estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and conducted their own biased studies. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency obliterated these phony numbers with the release of its economic analysis of H.R. 2454. The EPA estimated the bill would actually lower household electricity bills:

As a result of energy efficiency measures, consumer spending on utility bills would be roughly 7% lower in 2020 as a result of the legislation.

That’s right — lower bills. In 2007, this would have saved the average residential user $84, or 23 cents per day. EPA’s analysis also found:

The overall impact on the average household, including the benefit of many of the energy efficiency provisions in the legislation, would be 22 to 30 cents per day ($80 to $111 per year).

We don’t have to just wish we were there — we can have a clean energy economy for the cost of a postcard stamp a day. And the EPA’s analysis does not “take into account the benefits of reducing global warming.”

EPA’s findings are consistent with the independent Congressional Budget Office analysis released on June 19th. CBO determined “that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household.” CBO did not evaluate the impact of the energy efficiency measures on consumer spending on utilities.

The bottom line is that independent analyses found that ACES would cut spending on utilities, as well as have minimal overall costs to the average household – somewhere between 22 to 48 cents a day. Hopefully, representatives will pay heed to these government studies and ignore conservatives’ counterfeit estimates when they vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act this Friday.

There are an array of reports today outlining the steps that the banking and financial services industries are taking to gum up various aspects of the plan to beef up Wall Street regulation.

There’s a new industry group — the Financial Instruments Reporting and Convergence Alliance (FIRCA) — fighting an accounting rule change meant “to end a practice that contributed to the risky lending that set off the financial crisis.” Hedge funds, organized into the Managed Funds Association, are mobilizing “money and power to fend off tougher oversight, higher taxes and much greater transparency.”

And of course, banks are continuing to raise a stink about the Obama administration’s plan to create a new consumer protection agency. All of which makes this report from the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (via The Stash) extremely timely.

The paper shows that the financial firms that did the most lobbying from 1998 to 2006 also had lower lending standards, a greater tendency to securitize, a larger presence in areas that are suffering the most from loan delinquencies, and ultimately lost the most money during the financial implosion. The researchers concluded that financial sector lobbying of this sort poses a threat to economic stability and increases systemic risk:

[The results] tend to support a theory of “moral hazard” whereby financial intermediaries lobby to obtain private benefits, making loans under less stringent terms not because they have better capacity to evaluate risks associated with the loans, but because they expect short term gains from these loans during the boom phase, and to be bailed out when losses amount during a financial crisis. These results…provide indirect evidence that lobbying might have the potential to threaten financial stability and contribute to systemic risk.

In those same years, financial firms increased their lobbying by 25 percent, while the average increase in other industries was 10 percent. Meanwhile, in the last two years, hedge funds have quadrupled the amount that they spend on lobbying (see graph at right).

So the moral of the story is that financial firms lobby to make the rules fit the tactics that they want to use, and lawmakers respond accordingly, instead of creating a system that forces firms to use more due diligence and employ more caution. This is worth knowing, since the Obama administration’s financial regulation plan likely won’t start moving until the fall, giving the financial industry lots of time to work its magic.