Science-averse Republicans have once again blocked the establishment of a National Climate Service by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, moving from denial of man-made climate change to the denial of climate itself. “I’m very concerned that NOAA has taken steps to form what amounts to a shadow climate service operation,” House science committee chair Ralph Hall (R-TX) cried in September. At a hearing in June, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) blasted the budget-neutral plan to consolidate NOAA’s existing, widely dispersed, climate capabilities under a single management structure as “propaganda services.” In the committee report submitted by appropriations chair Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) for the 2012 budget, the National Climate Service is expressly forbidden:

The National Climate Service would have allowed NOAA to meet America’s rising demand for authoritative and timely climate information. Tea Party Republicans successfully included a rider preventing its establishment in the FY 2011 continuing resolution. The reorganization would have significantly boosted the agency’s efficiency, strengthen science across NOAA, and improve delivery of vital weather and climate forecasts – at no additional cost to the taxpayer.

Nothing less than the full mobilization of the nation’s resources will allow us to survive the changing threats of our polluted climate. However, the Republican Party now has a policy of science denial. The formation of this service threatens the know-nothings who deny that the fossil fuel industry is creating a dangerous world — so they are preventing the government from protecting the American people.

Our guest blogger is Frank Ackerman, director of the Climate Economics Group at the Stockholm Environment Institute-US and senior research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University.

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) has asked the Energy Information Administration to evaluate an unrealistically harsh and unsophisticated clean energy standard, designed to represent the Republicans’ worst nightmare: every electricity retailer in the country (some of them quite small) must meet a relatively high and rising standard for low-carbon energy, starting very soon, with no trading between companies, banking of excess credits, or other flexibility mechanisms that would soften the blow.

Even the Republican nightmare doesn’t look as bad as one might have suspected: according to the EIA analysis, it achieves a rapid reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, while causing electricity prices to rise by less than one percent per year, and lowering GDP per capita in 2035, the end of the study period, all the way from (watch closely or you’ll miss this) $65,848 to $65,658 – a reduction of less than 0.3 percent, in a national income nearly twice as high as today’s. Employment is slightly higher, as a result of this standard, from the mid-2020’s onward.

In the light of day, no one would allow this nightmare version of a clean energy standard to be adopted. Trading of clean energy credits between companies would almost certainly be included in any real standard. The goal, after all, is to reduce nationwide emissions as cheaply as possible, not to impose burdens on each and every company regardless of size or situation. The large reduction in costs that can result from trading is well established in economic theory, and confirmed by the experience of sulfur emissions trading under the Clean Air Act, among other cases. If some companies can reduce emissions more inexpensively than others, it makes perfect sense to let them sell credits to others; the same amount of emission reduction occurs, but at much lower cost than under the rigid plan that troubles Ralph Hall. This, by the way, is perfectly orthodox free market economics, of a sort that Republicans, once upon a time, used to swear by.

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the science-denying chairman of the House science committee, says a federal clean energy standard would be an “expensive new electricity tax on the American people,” based on a study he requested. An analysis by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of a clean energy standard he designed finds that “household electricity bills could jump an average of $115 per year by 2025.” President Obama has called for a clean energy standard of 80 percent clean electricity production by 2035, allowing for production from renewable sources, nuclear, natural gas, and coal with carbon capture and sequestration. This goal would mean that America’s aging, dirty coal plants would be mostly phased out over the next 25 years.

Defending the coal industry that funds him, Hall attacked the president’s plan based on the EIA report:

This report—prepared by independent government experts—makes clear that the CES amounts to an expensive new electricity tax on the American people. With an anemic economy and unemployment stuck above nine percent, it is very troubling that the President continues to pursue an energy policy that would add billions to Americans’ energy bills.

Hall fails to mention that the EIA analysis says the “impacts on electricity prices prior to 2015 are negligible.” In other words, this standard poses no threat to the “anemic economy” of today. In fact, the EIA projects that employment will increase over the reference case by 2030.

Furthermore, the EIA analyzed a clean energy standard proposed by Hall, not by the Obama administration. The EIA makes that clear throughout its report, saying their analysis is of the Hall Clean Energy Standard (HCES). Hall’s CES was purposely designed to compel rapid investment in new electricity production without flexibility, which EIA models as a high cost. The inflexibility Hall required includes these provisos:

There is no option to purchase compliance credits from the government.

HCES credits earned in one year cannot be “banked” for use in a subsequent year.

All electricity retailers are covered by the requirement, regardless of ownership type or size.

There is no provision for excluding any electricity sales from a seller’s baseline based on resources used to produce the electricity or type of customer purchasing the electricity.

This report’s findings are a result of Hall’s deliberate gaming of the economic tools of the EIA. Moreover, they reflect the assumptions that energy economists use to analyze policy instruments, even though those assumptions have been proven false by history. The health costs of coal pollution are not incorporated, even though top economists have found that coal-powered electricity is dragging down the US economy by ruining Americans’ health. The EIA projects that electricity prices would increase by 2.7 cents/kWh by 2035, which is almost exactly what economists found as the annual cost of health damages from coal pollution today (2.8 cents/kWh).

To repeat — the “costs” that the EIA projects in 25 years as a result of Hall’s rigid clean energy standard are already being paid today by Americans through suffering and death, especially our children and elderly. A clean energy standard would replace the economic costs of asthma and heart disease with investment in new jobs and technology.

The EIA also ignores the existence of global warming, with a reference case that has the United States continuing to increase its greenhouse pollution for decades, even though that would mean planetwide catastrophe. As the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook describes, in a “climate friendly” scenario “the power sector is largely decarbonized by 2035.”

Under Ralph Hall’s inflexible clean energy standard, the EIA finds that annual electricity sector carbon dioxide emissions would decrease by more than 60 percent from the reference case by 2035. Using an estimate of the social cost of carbon of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide, then the benefits of that decline would reach $100 billion a year in 2035, far outweighing the supposed “costs” of shutting down “cheap” electricity from high-polluting coal plants.