Source: EDF Blog – California 2.0 | Link to article
By Jamie Fine, PhD and Ruiwen Lee
Jamie Fine is EDF’s Senior Energy economist, and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Energy Resources Group; Ruiwen Lee is an economics fellow and graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
California’s energy and climate change policies have saved the state over one hundred billion dollars and dramatically reduced levels of environmental pollution since the early 1970’s. Yet these policies have been in the crosshairs of industry for decades, despite their demonstrated success. It’s not surprising that the latest study sponsored by the state’s main manufacturing lobbying group, the California Manufacturers and Technology Association (“CMTA”), ignores the achievements of these landmark policies while attempting to downplay the benefits of new laws that protect human health and the environment.
EDF’s team of economists looked behind the curtain of CMTA’s most recent tirade against clean air laws and found cherry-picked assumptions, secret modeling calculations, and confusion over basic economic principles. Accordingly, while CMTA’s new report maintains that it modeled the impacts of California energy and climate policies on the state’s economy, the results more closely resemble CMTA members’ manufactured products than actual economic analysis.
