While congressional Democrats cheered the narrow passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) in a close 219-212 vote last Friday, the National Republican Congressional Committee was already at work sending out a press release citing ACES as part of “Democrats’ ongoing crusade against economic recovery.”

“This is the biggest job killing bill that’s ever been on the floor of the House of Representatives,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) before launching into an hour-long mini-filibuster, during which he read from a 300-page manager’s amendment to wild laughter from House Republicans.

ACES – otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey bill after its cosponsors, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) – is perhaps the largest and most ambitious climate change bill passed to date: it requires a 17-percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and an 83-percent cut by 2050, and also mandates that 20 percent of electricity must come from renewable sources and increased efficiency by 2020.

But the most important stipulation of the bill, and also the most contentious, is the cap-and-trade program, which sets limits on the amount of pollution companies can emit, and allows these companies to buy and sell “pollution allowances.” The cap gets tightened as years pass, setting stricter and stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions until they’re at the final, lowest level.

Republicans have been referring to ACES as an “energy tax” because of this cap-and-trade program because it will ultimately lead to higher energy costs; Boehner has said in the past that the bill could cost families $3,100 a year based on a study conducted by MIT, although MIT has already refuted this argument because that number did not appear in their study.

Different studies, however, have come up with many different conclusions, making pinpointing the exact cost of this bill exceedingly difficult.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for one, released an analysis of the bill concluding that the cost per family would be much lower than Republicans’ predictions, at only $150 a year. This much lower estimate is based on the Obama administration’s plan to rebate roughly 80% of the expected $646 billion in revenues from the cap-and-trade program via tax breaks; this rebate plan is already a part of Obama’s budget.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has also released a price analysis, one that is slightly higher than the EPA’s prediction: the CBO has released a report saying that ACES will raise energy bills by $175 per year by 2020. But Republicans believe this estimate is way off for several reasons.

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal states that the biggest flaw in the CBO report, which the CBO itself acknowledges in a footnote, is that “the resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap.”

“The hit to GDP is the real threat in this bill,” says the Journal. “The whole point of cap and trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas so that Americans will use less. These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station but in every manufactured good, from food to cars. Consumers will cut back on spending, which in turn will cut back on production, which results in fewer jobs created or higher unemployment.”

According to the editorial, House Republicans had offered three amendments, all of which were defeated by House Democrats, which would have safeguarded against economic catastrophe in case the cap-and-trade program backfired: one would have suspended the program if gas hit $5 a gallon, one would have suspended the program if electricity prices rose 10% over 2009, and one would have suspended the program if unemployment rates hit 15%.

The Journal also cites a study by Britain’s Taxpayer Alliance, which estimates that families there are paying an average of $1,300 a year in “green taxes” for carbon-cutting programs.

Importantly, the European Union’s alternative energy plan is stricter than ACES, requiring countries to be getting 20% of its energy from alternative energy sources by 2020, as opposed to our 15%.

The conservative Heritage Foundation also did a study to analyze the potential effect of ACES on the national economy, and their estimate was higher than the EPA, the CBO, and the fictional MIT conclusions combined; the Foundation found that the bill could cost families $4,609 a year by 2035 when the higher price of goods is added in, although energy bills themselves would only rise by about $1,200.

“Unemployment will increase by nearly 2 million in 2012, the first year of the program, and reach nearly 2.5 million in 2035, the last year of the analysis,” says the Foundation. “Total GDP loss by 2035 would be $9.4 trillion. The national debt would balloon as the economy slowed, saddling a family of four with 114,915 of additional national debt.”

The Foundation acknowledged the EPA and CBO’s analyses, saying that “those estimates are grossly inaccurate, as both the CBO memo and the EPA’s analysis contain flaws too serious for use as measures of the economic impact of the Waxman-Markey bill.”

“It’s a huge tax and there’s no sense calling it anything else,” investor Warren Buffett told CNBC’s financial news television network, “and it’s a fairly regressive tax.”

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