Whenever you see a regulatory agency like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or a utility company crow about how much an energy proposal or regulation will save or cost Americans, the first thing you should do is ask: “Oh yeah? Compared to what?”

It’s important to ask this question because these entities never report the true cost of a proposal compared to today’s costs, but instead, they compare the costs to some imaginary future baseline scenario that is often even more expensive.

This deceptive bait-and-switch tactic allows utilities and regulatory agencies to hide the true costs of their onerous regulations or integrated resource plans in a B.S. baseline. It also allows these entities to dishonestly claim their preferred policies will save energy consumers money—when in reality, they won’t

In this week’s episode of Energy Bad Boys, we pull back the curtain on how the EPA used a B.S. Baseline to hide the true (and massive) costs of its regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal and new natural gas power plants.

What’s the Bait & Switch (B.S.) Tactic?

Imagine you were at Best Buy browsing around, and you saw an advertisement for two TVs—the one on the left has a price tag of $800, and the other on the right has a price tag of $500. The sign reads: “Save $300 by choosing the one on the right!”

Sure, you can save $300 by buying the TV on the right, compared to buying the one on the left, but ultimately, you understand that you’re still spending an extra $500. You could save even more ($500) by not buying a new TV in the first place. These are the kinds of bait-and-switch shenanigans used by regulatory agencies and utilities to sell their energy proposals to the public.

To help understand how this relates to energy modeling, it helps to look at another example involving a government budget.

Let’s say the federal government currently spends $200 billion per year on government programs, but some lawmakers want to increase spending to $1 trillion to pay for more government programs. Ultimately, Congress agrees to spend a total of $700 billion per year instead of $1 trillion.

Most people would probably look at this budget and agree that it increases spending by $500 billion per year, but spending advocates would argue that this bill saves $300 billion per year. This is only true