Frank Pallone: “I would like to just read some sections from the letter. The letter is from Public Citizen and a number of other…”

“I would like to just read some sections from the letter. The letter is from Public Citizen and a number of other consumers groups. They say in the letter that ``the Clean Power Plan will benefit consumers. Climate change poses a severe threat to American consumers and in particular to vulnerable populations . . . The Clean Power Plan should lower consumer electricity bills. The Clean Power Plan is likely to lower consumer costs, not raise them, because it will spur improvements in energy efficiency. Although electricity prices may rise modestly under the Plan, consumers will use less electricity. This should result in lower bills overall. The EPA projects that the rule will lower consumer bills by 7.0 to 7.7 percent by 2030. A Public Citizen analysis of the proposed rule found that the EPA's projection of bill reductions was conservative because it overestimated the cost of efficiency programs and underestimated how much progress the states can make on efficiency. These points remain valid with respect to the final rule, for which the EPA's analysis is similar. Consumers costs are likely to decline by more than the agency projects.'' Again, we keep hearing from the other side of the aisle, oh, electricity bills are going to go up. They are not. They are going to go down. We keep hearing we are going to lose jobs. Well, a lot of those jobs are going to be lost anyway because of the change in the types of generation of electricity.…”