Emily Atkin had a piece at Think Progress this week, Industry Groups Are Freaking Out About Obama’s New Smog Pollution Rule.  The nickel summary:  The EPA has issued a draft rule intended to reduce urban smog.  The usual suspects object;  however, “both industry groups and Republicans have been overestimating the cost of regulations like this since the EPA first began issuing regulation of this kind.”   A longer excerpt including estimated vs actual costs of regulation:

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a new draft proposed rule on Tuesday to tighten already-existing restrictions on ground-level ozone pollution, the main ingredient of urban smog.

Under the draft proposal, states would be required to lower the level of ozone pollution allowed to be in the air. Right now, the current standard is 75 parts per billion, and the new rule would change that to somewhere between 65 to 70 parts per billion. The rule would require some states with bad pollution to expand their ozone pollution monitoring, and require improvements to systems that notify the public when their air quality is at an unhealthy level.

The EPA predicts this will do wonders for public health and, by extension, the economy….

As it happens, industry groups and a number of high-ranking Republicans do not agree with the EPA. Instead, they are already predicting doom — and if you can believe it, they’re a little more exasperated than usual.

On Thursday, Politico published an article brazenly titled “‘The Most Expensive Regulation Ever‘,” roughly quoting the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which says the rule would result in the loss of $3.4 trillion and 2.9 million jobs for the manufacturing industry by 2040. They’re not alone — the American Petroleum Institute has also deemed the proposal “the costliest regulations ever” proposed…

[B]oth industry groups and Republicans have been overestimating the cost of regulations like this since the EPA first began issuing regulation of this kind. In addition, the EPA has historically underestimated the benefits. Those statements are backed up by a survey done by The Economic Policy Institute, which in 1997 found that estimates made before EPA regulations went into effect — even the estimates made by the EPA itself — nearly always significantly overshot how much those regulations would actually cost American industry.

This same kind of industry gloom and doom prediction happened when the EPA strengthened its ozone regulation in the 90s, too. And according to an analysis of the effects of those regulations from the Center for American Progress, those predictions didn’t pan out — in fact, the areas most impacted by those regulations experienced very similar economic growth and employment rates to the nation as a whole. The failure of industry’s dire predictions at the time “suggests that their recent, similar attacks on the pending ozone standard also lack credibility,” the report reads.

Also note that regulations to rein in acid rain didn’t destroy us either.