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.
However, the reality is that by the end of May this year, the Biden administration had built only eight charging stations nationwide. This slow progress has left American consumers who bought EVs feeling a sense of disappointment and frustration. They are grappling with a range of issues, including the scarcity of charging stations, the increasing cost of electricity, and the quicker depreciation of the values of used EVs.
The weak consumer demand for EVs has significantly impacted the EV market, resulting in massive losses for American automakers. Ford Motor Company reported that its EV division lost $1.3 billion during the first quarter of 2024, about twice what it lost during the same period in 2023. To put these numbers in perspective, Ford lost nearly $130,000 per electric vehicle. To stop the financial bleeding of its EV division, the company announced it would kill a planned three-row electric SUV and postpone the production of a new electric version of its best-selling pickup, the F-150. Ford’s domestic competitor, General Motors, lowered its EV production goal for 2024, and forecasted the US EV sales in 2024 to be around 8 percent of the industry, a long distance away from the Biden-Harris administration’s goal of having 50 percent of all new vehicle sales be EVs by 2030.
While private companies will make painful adjustments based on market conditions, don’t expect Harris to “follow the science” and pause wasteful climate spending if she is elected President of the United States.
Harris’s past rhetoric and record suggest her climate policy would be even more radical than Biden’s. As a U.S. senator, Harris was an early co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass. As a presidential candidate between 2019 and early 2020, Harris said she would ban fracking on day one and promised to spend $10 trillion to transform the U.S. economy into a zero-emission economy by 2045. She also called for establishing an independent office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability, modeled after the environmental justice unit she created as San Francisco’s district attorney.
Harris has not renounced her past radical left-wing policy proposals, despite her campaign attempts to portray her as becoming more moderate. More importantly, Harris has not put forward any detailed centrist policies.
At the recent Democratic National Convention, Harris, in her acceptance speech as the party’s presidential nominee, filled the air with plenty of platitudes and little substance. She did, however, hint at her climate policy by equating climate change as a form of fundamental freedom, exhorting “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” It’s worth noting that Harris is part of an administration that has attempted to restrict American consumers’ freedom to drive gas-powered vehicles or cook on gas stoves, a stark contradiction to her speech.
The Harris-Walz campaign, as pointed out by The Wall Street Journal editorial board, has shamefully used the word “freedom” to “disguise that Democratic policies seek to restrict liberty across American society.” Voters who want to be free from the government’s wasteful spending and infringement on individual rights should not fall for the Democrat’s and Harris’ deception in the upcoming election.
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