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
