According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau (2005 PACE; 2005 ASM), for more than 82% of U.S. industrial sectors surveyed the total cost of environmental laws is less than 1% of their total value of product shipments. With the appropriate policy instruments, it is clear that in most cases those costs could be more than offset by savings achieved through energy efficiency upgrades using technologies available today.

[Please note this chart only considers manufacturing sectors for which 2005 data are available from both the ASM and the PACE datasets.]

This chart is a reproduction of a chart from Edison Electric Institute (EEI) that has been used to suggest that EPA’s regulatory timeline is unworkable - see http://www.eei.org/meetings/Meeting%20Documents/EPA-CAAUtilityRegTimelin.... WRI has identified four categories of EPA activities on the EEI timeline that are potentially misleading:

(Blue X's) Rules that have been remanded or vacated by court decisions that do not impose compliance obligations.

In addition to legislation, other completed actions have climate consequences, notably stimulus packages that made green spending a key feature, passed in response to the global economic crisis.

The countries that lead in wind energy jobs are those that offer a stable and predictable framework for investment in wind power generation. In contrast, in the United States, federal support for the wind industry has been through the production tax credit (PTC), subject to periodic renewal. In years where the PTC expired, new wind investments collapsed. Large wind markets with stable long-term financial support in the forms of a feed-in tariff, such as Germany and Spain, have seen more constant market expansions and job creation.