Recently, CEOs from several leading American corporations met with White House officials to show their support for passing clean energy and climate legislation.
 
These executives, including Jeffry Immelt from GE, David Cote of Honeywell International, and Jim Rogers of Duke Energy, recognize that a climate law will unleash innovation and sharpen America’s competitive edge in the global marketplace.
 
The economic data and the history of environmental laws are on their side. That’s why so many businesses, including the more then 2,500 in the American Businesses for Clean Energy, support the bill.
 
Yet there is always a contingent of industry representatives who resist making our air cleaner and safer. I have been fighting for stronger clean air safeguards for 40 years, and I have heard these folks cry wolf over and over again.
 
Each time a major new rule is proposed, they claim it will put them out of business and ruin the American economy. In reality, the cost of complying with new rules is almost always less than expected and economic growth has never been constrained by them. Indeed, the economy has grown 70 percent since the Clean Air Act was passed.
 
Naysayers’ claims about the clean energy and climate bill echo the falsehoods used in previous battles over environmental and public health protections.
 
They were wrong then and they are wrong now.
 
Falsehood Number 1: The Science Isn’t Strong Enough

Some industry leaders like to call the scientific evidence of climate change into question as a ploy for delaying action. This is not a new strategy. In the 1980s, NRDC pushed Congress hard to regulate the pollution that causes acid rain. Scientists had documented the devastating effect acid rain had on forests, lakes, fish, and human health but coal-fired power plants operators and others painted the science as unsettled and inconclusive.
 
The National Association of Manufacturers wrote in 1987, “The present state of knowledge on the causes and effects of acid rain is, at best, ambiguous… There is time for science to guide the public policy debate.” Another industry group wrote, “In light of the evolving science, uncertainties, and staggering costs, can we justify acid rain controls now? We think not.”
 
Sound familiar? But of course the scientists were right. No one doubts the reality of acid rain any longer, not even industry. It is now a scientific and regulatory fact that power plants are accustomed to dealing with – and have begun to deal with by substantially cutting their air pollution. Soon that will be the case with carbon pollution as well.
 
Falsehood Number 2: We Don’t Have the Technology to Do That

Many fossil fuel companies say that we should wait to limit carbon emissions until the technology for doing so has fully matured. But history shows that innovation follows new pollution rules.
 
Back in the late 1980s, Congress wanted to tighten vehicle pollution standards. The American auto industry protested strongly, saying as one representative did, “We just don’t have the technology to comply.” Yet once the new standards passed in 1990, the auto industry created several advances in super-performing catalysts for tailpipe emissions, and the industry started meeting the new standard by 1993.
 
Likewise, when the EPA proposed phasing out ozone-depleting CFCs, manufacturers claimed they did not have the technology to keep machines running. One refrigeration company representative forecast: “We will see shutdowns of refrigeration equipment in supermarkets… We will see shutdowns of chiller machines, which cool our large office buildings, our hotels, and hospitals.” In fact, the sky did not fall. Chemical companies quickly developed alternative to CFCs, and refrigeration manufacturers put them to work without incident.
 
Falsehood Number 3: The Pollution Controls Will Cost Too Much

Coal-fired power plants and other heavy carbon polluters claim it will be too expensive to employ emission controls at their facilities. They said the same about installing new scrubbers to reduce acid rain, but then as now, the expense was vastly overestimated. According to an MIT study, the true cost for implementing the acid rain program was about 80 percent lower than originally predicted, using a combination of control methods and market mechanisms.
 
Costs came down because the new rule triggered innovation. Industry started making more effective scrubbers that made the job of capturing pollution easier and more affordable. Use of cleaner fuels spread. Industry found lower cost solutions. The same process will unfold when we put a price on carbon emissions: industries will have an incentive to create new technologies, to become more efficient, and in turn these innovations will drive down the cost of reducing global warming pollution.
 
Falsehood Number 4: This Will Lead to Job Losses

Some opponents of climate change legislation say the bill will cost American jobs. We heard the same claim when NRDC was working on 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. Numerous industry-backed studies predicted dire jobs loss. The U.S. Business Roundtable, for instance, predicted:
 
“This study leaves little doubt that a minimum of 200,000 (plus) jobs will be quickly lost, with plants closing in dozens of states. This number could easily exceed 1 million jobs-and even 2 million jobs–at the more extreme assumptions about residual risk.”

In fact, studies show that gross reductions in jobs were limited to one to three thousand jobs per year. At the same time, environmental jobs increased by the tens of thousands per year, yielding far more job gains than losses.  

We now have three decades of experience with environmental regulation, and the data shows that investments in environmental protection, coupled with GDP growth, have led to an increase in jobs that were orders of magnitude larger than any job losses caused by these requirements.

After four decades in the Clean Air Act trenches, I have heard the same industry battle complaints time and again.

But I have also seen that hard science, tenacious advocacy, and public concern can rise above those voices. That’s how we got lead out of gasoline, phased out CFCs, cut acid rain, and slashed dangerous pollutants from diesel engines.

We can do the same with global warming pollution, as long as Americans see through industry falsehoods and make their own voices heard.