By: Helen Raleigh
The Biden-Harris administration has spent more of taxpayers’ money on climate policies than any previous U.S. administration. But a new study found that most of the climate policies enacted in the last 25 years, including the ones the Biden-Harris administration imposed on American businesses and consumers, haven’t work.
The study, published in the Journal of Science, evaluated about 1,500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 by 41 OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). The study found only 63 policies (about 4 percent) that, combined, had successfully “reduced total emissions between 0.6 and 1.8 Gt CO2.” Due to the low success rate, researchers estimate the CO2 emissions from the 41 nations they studied will exceed the Paris Climate Agreement target by 23 billion metric tons by 2030.
More importantly, the study found that two popular tools most governments’ climate policies rely on — subsidies and regulations — rarely reduce emissions. Researchers found some form of carbon tax approach was more effective at reducing emissions. As the Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins summarized: “Taxing carbon reduces emissions. Subsidizing ‘green energy’ doesn’t.” This conclusion is nothing new. Jenkins recalled that a 2013 National Research Council study sponsored by the Obama administration (when Joe Biden was the vice president) also concluded subsidies were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”
Still, the Biden-Harris administration kept throwing more taxpayer money on these failed approaches. Following the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) that pledged over $110 billion in climate and energy funding, the administration introduced its Green New Deal with a grossly misleading label, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), in 2022, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the deciding vote in the Senate. The IRA purported to allocate $369 billion for climate change and energy over the next decade. However, the latest Congressional Budget Office’s projection of the IRA’s climate tax credit through year 2033 has already jumped to a staggering $428 billion, a rapid 16 percent increase than the IRA originally planned.
The primary vehicle of IIJA and IRA climate funding is through subsidies, which have been proven to be the least effective way to reduce CO2 emissions. With a price tag of more than $500 billion in climate spending between the two pieces of legislation, the Biden-Harris administration essentially sold taxpayers an expensive lie. The two acts also sparked the highest inflation rates in four decades. The inflation growth rate has been coming down since 2023, mainly due to a series of painful interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. However, the prices of food and housing remain elevated for ordinary Americans.
An excellent example of the Biden-Harris administration’s spendthrift climate spending is its effort to compel American consumers and businesses to switch from gas-powered vehicles to electric ones (EVs). To accelerate this transition, the IRA offers up to $7,500 for new passenger EV purchases, up to $4,000 for used EV purchases, and $40,000 for commercial EV purchases. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) also allocated $7.5 billion to the Biden administration to build 500,000 commercial charging stations nationwide to boost the transition to EVs.
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