Real Climate Change Ideas Gored By IRA?

Biden’s IRA was going to “save the planet.” My a**. So suggests Holman Jenkins who notes in reality such over-generous “green subsidies aren’t working when CO2 is growing faster than energy consumption” globally.

Wrote the WSJ columnist: “Hooray, the climate problem is solved. At least if the new spending estimates under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are matched by similar expected declines in emissions … I’m joking, of course, but so were the original estimates by three private groups touted last year by the White House. All three ignored the price effect: When certain consumers are subsidized to use less fossil energy, others in the US & world will take advantage of lower prices to consume more.” Result? “Global CO2 emissions actually grew 12% faster in 2022 than energy consumption did. With deployments goosed by Obama-like handouts around the world, wind & solar still accounted for less than 2.4% of humanity’s total energy consumption. Their annual increase was still a small fraction of the annual increase in fossil-fuel consumption.”

So, does the iron laws of economics mean it is really going to be as hard for green activists to save the planet as it is to change the weather? Apparently. Perhaps instead of going bankrupt by tilting at wind mills, concluded Jenkins, we need to disentrall ourselves of the progressive genius for throwing good money after bad. It starts with honesty. For instance, Jenkins noted, “At least one honest climate advocate works in the administration – whoever was responsible for its recent endorsement of research into geoengineering, or injecting particles into the atmosphere to slow warming even as our green subsidies uselessly accumulate in the pockets of green-energy lobbyists like Al Gore.”

Davd Soul