Yet another study finds that reducing carbon emissions saves Americans money
by David Roberts
Conservatives insist that Obama's Clean Power Plan — indeed, any effort to reduce carbon emissions — will cost American consumers money and jobs.
It is impossible to know the future, so there's no way to say that this is definitively false, but at this point there's enough research and modeling to indicate that it's very, very unlikely. (This will not stop conservatives from saying it, and it won't stop the media from uncritically passing along these dire warnings.)
In fact, many studies show that an aggressive shift to clean energy and efficiency would save consumers money. For a general account of why that's true, see this new report from NextGen Climate. For a more focused bit of number crunching, however, we turn to this new brief from Synapse Energy Economics. It models a clean-energy pathway for the US and produces specific numbers showing both the carbon and financial savings.
Here's what Synapse calls the "Clean Energy Future" scenario:
Synapse’s Clean Energy Future scenario shows 70 percent of the nation’s electric needs being generated by renewables in 25 years. Renewables added by 2040 include 308 GW of utility‐scale solar panels, 253 GW of on‐shore wind, 197 GW of distributed solar panels, 18 GW of concentrated solar, 14 GW of geothermal, and 4 GW of off‐shore wind. Electricity sales are 25 percent lower than in a Reference—or business‐as‐usual—scenario in 2040, as a result of savings from energy efficiency measures and standards, as well as "demand response" programs that pay participating consumers to curtail their energy use at times of peak demand.
more
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9053283/clean-energy-efficiency-money
