SHOCK: Biden Administration environmental rules estimated to cost Americans almost $1 Trillion | Eastern North Carolina Now

Ward Clark writing in Red State, reports:

Mandates, mandates, mandates; subsidy after subsidy. All of these cost money, and we're occasionally reminded of just how much. The Biden administration seems determined to shatter all the norms when it comes to unilaterally deciding that they know best what's good for us Americans and are willing to spend our money to those ends. Now we see the cost; the environmental rules alone implemented by this administration (without input from Congress) are projected to cost Americans more than $845 billion.

As if the fiat-currency dump fueling inflation wasn't enough already.

The projected costs to implement only a handful of President Biden’s most sweeping environmental regulations have an eye-popping price tag: more than $845 billion.

That’s according to an analysis of new Environmental Protection Agency policies, such as electric vehicle mandates, from Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The analysis concluded that the EPA rules to enforce Mr. Biden’s climate change agenda present “devastating” financial costs for U.S. consumers and businesses that outweigh the benefits.

Here's the thing: Most of the people supporting these policies, this agenda, are the ones who will be least affected by them. The politicians who mysteriously grow monstrously rich while earning rather modest salaries, the coastal urban liberal elites, are sheltered from most, if not all, of the worst effects of these policies. They can afford the extra cost.

You and I aren't so lucky.

Here's a list of some of those expenditures and subsidies:

$590 billion from 2027-2055 for an EV mandate on passenger cars that requires two-thirds of new vehicles sold by 2032 to be all-electric or hybrid.

$210 billion from 2026-2040 for a waiver sought by California to phase out 100% of new gas-powered cars by 2035. The waiver is still under consideration. Last year, the EPA granted California a waiver to begin phasing out diesel-powered trucks in favor of electric alternatives.

$24 billion from 2027-2055 for roughly 25% of semi-trucks and other heavy-duty diesel vehicles to be electric by 2032.

$14 billion from 2024-2042 to slash nearly all emissions from fossil fuel power plants to achieve a zero-emission electrical grid by 2035. Plants, primarily coal and natural gas-fired, would have to implement costly carbon capture technology, switch to renewables or shut down. The rule has not been finalized.

$7 billion from 2032-2051 to limit soot pollution levels, which critics say jeopardizes domestic energy and manufacturing.

$390 million from 2024-2035 for a proposed emissions rule that fines oil and natural gas companies for leaked methane. Critics say it will raise consumers’ energy costs and divert money from clean energy.

The Environmental Protection Agency, it should be noted, did not reply to a request for comment. What a surprise.

It's hard to take this as merely "environmental" activism by the government. If one were to deliberately set out to damage the nation's economy, to cost individual Americans more money in almost everything they do, it's hard to see how one could do any better than the Biden administration is doing by burying the American economy in mandates, subsidies, rules and regulations, and taxes. None of these actions are listed, of course, under the enumerated powers of the executive branch in the Constitution, not that this seems to matter any longer. The Consitution is now just something politicians seem to care about when it's convenient; when it serves their agenda. Politics, not principles, are what apply.

In my lifetime alone, the federal government has exploded. The Biden administration is just the latest in a long chain of malefactors who keep cranking that ratchet up, and up, and up. And make no mistake; a ratchet it is. There's no simply dialing the thing back down.

Nobody's more concerned about the environment than I. I'm one of the people, unlike the aforementioned politicians, bureaucrats, and urban elites, who actually live out in the environment. Like everyone else, I enjoy having clean air and water, and blue skies. But we've largely achieved that. Those of us who remember times as recently as the early '70s know how bad pollution used to be, but we've largely won a battle that the Biden administration seems determined to keep fighting, and that battle is costing the American taxpayer billions.

This quote would seem to apply:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

November can't come soon enough.