Costs of Carbon Reduction by 2020: $40-$340 a year per household

It's going to cost us to de-carbonize the economy, but apparently not near as much as ideological opponents of climate action would have the public believe.

The Congressional Budget Office's newly-released analysis of the Waxman-Markey clean energy and climate bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), states that in 2020, the bill's carbon cap-and-trade provisions will cost around $22 billion a year, or $175 on average per household

This is far below the thousands per household some opponents of the bill have claimed.

As ACES is currently written, in 2020 the cap-and-trade market will have been operation for about eight years, with 17 percent of all carbon allowances, or credits, being sold by the government, and the remaining 83 percent given away.

The give-aways will help to cut the costs being passed back to consumers, and money raised by selling emissions credits will be distributed to the public as tax breaks.   CBO estimates that in 2020, the poorest Americans will actually be getting a little money back:

• The bottom fifth of households by income would see a net benefit of $40 a year
• The richest fifth would pay a net cost of $245 annually
• Of the remaining American households, those in the second lowest fifth would pay around $40 a year; those in the middle, around $235; and households in the second highest fifth, about $340.

$340 a year.  That's less than $1 a day per family to create a safer future.

I pay more than $300 a month right now just to keep myself health-insured.  So a couple hundred more a year to restore the health of the entire planet's climate sounds positively cheap. [[This assumes there will still be an American middle class 11 years from now, and that I'll still be a gainfully employed part of it...here's hoping.]]

Even these relatively minimal costs may end up being lower, because the CBO "does not include the economic benefits and other benefits of the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and the associated slowing of climate change."

So many things in our lives have been made so inexpensive, for so long, by use of fossil energy.  Slashing our carbon pollution will be expensive in ways we're not yet used to accounting for.  But the costs of global warming -- in mitigation, insurance, medical care, damaged infrastructure, food prices, humanitarian relief, lost biodiversity, and more -- would really break the bank.

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Image:  "The effects of global warming are already being felt worldwide. The Larsen-B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula collapsed over 35 days in early 2002, prompted by 3°C of warming since the 1940s."  Source: NASA Earth Observatory