Orginally published on Climate Realism today.
On August 8th , just a day after the passage of the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” containing a suite of climate-related spending and tax credits, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial board published a scathing editorial titled “Tilting at Climate Windmills – Schumer-Manchin will have little effect on the world’s temperature,” showing how the provisions of the bill will have virtually no effect on climate at all.
WSJ uses analysis with the help of the IPCC climate models and Dr. Bjorn Lomborg to come up with a number, and the number is vanishingly small. They write:
Nearly all of Washington—Democrats, the press, lobbyists—is taking a victory lap with Senate passage of the Schumer-Manchin tax, climate and drug price control bill. The climate lobby is especially thrilled, claiming a historic victory that will reduce temperatures, hold back the rising sea, and save the planet.
Or, maybe not. Our contributor Bjorn Lomborg looked at the Rhodium Group estimate for CO2 emissions reductions from Schumer-Manchin policies. He then plugged them into the United Nations climate model to measure the impact on global temperature by 2100. He finds the bill will reduce the estimated global temperature rise at the end of this century by all of 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit in the optimistic case. In the pessimistic case, the temperature difference will be 0.0009 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, as seen in the figure below provided by Lomborg, we get somewhere between 0.028 and 0.0009°F reduction in temperature by 2100 for about 400 billion dollars in climate spending contained in the bill.
At that rate, simple math (see Excel sheet below) suggests the amount of money required to achieve the much desired 1.5°C (2.7°F) reduction in temperature using the best case reduction of 0.028°F would be $38,571,428,571,428 or approximately 39 Trillion dollars. The worst-case temperature reduction of 0.0009°F would cost a staggering 1,200,000,000,000,000 dollars or ONE QUADRILLION TWO HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS.
To put that number in perspective, according to the World Bank, the 2020 world economy in U.S. dollars was approximately $84.7 trillion. Assuming it would actually work, to have a meaningful effect on climate, the world would have to spend about half the global annual economy for the best-case scenario. If you think inflation is bad now, just wait for those sorts of numbers.
The worst-case scenario is out of reach of world wealth.
President Biden had this to say:
Now, let me be clear: This bill would be the most significant legislation in history to tackle the climate crisis and improve our energy security right away. And it’ll give us a tool to meet the climate goals that are set — that we’ve agreed to — by cutting emissions and accelerating clean energy.
There are just no words to describe this sort of disconnect between believing you’re a climate superhero and climate reality, especially when you’re a Nobel winning economist. Kudos to WSJ and Lomborg for pointing out the climate folly of the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
(Thanks to Charles Rotter for checking the math in the Excel file -Anthony)
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but, but, Joe Biden admitted during his visit to Georgia, that he can’t control the global climate… just yet….😏
Francis Menton- ” The bill is still not final, since it differs substantially from a version previously passed by the House.
… it appears that the very most destructive provision of the proposed bill got scrapped at the last minute, just prior to Senate passage. That was a provision that would have attempted to substantially undo the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in West Virginia v. EPA.
… Under the Senate’s arcane rules, to avoid the possibility of a filibuster and a requirement for 60 votes to proceed, the proposed bill had to meet the tests for “reconciliation.” That meant that the bill could only include provisions for taxing and spending.
… Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) warned that buried in the 725-page Schumer-Manchin bill are provisions designed to “overturn” the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. Cruz did not name the provision or provisions he was referring to.”
While the Inflation Reduction Act is a useless pork package, a much more
potentially dangerous part that’s still unsettled- provisions to “substantially undo the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in West Virginia v. EPA”- could end up in the final bill, that would be much worse than the pork!
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-8-9-we-may-have-dodged-a-bullet-in-the-misnamed-inflation-reduction-act
It’s actually an inflation ignitor if you factor in the extra activity with scarce materials and labor to build favored projects at a faster rate to mine much more tax credits over a 10-year period. Just the extra fuel use to transport more EV parts and renewable project components will be substantial. Other parts of the economy will be stressed more to support the enlarged tax credit-based economy that’s about to explode. All of this extra activity and inflation may drive some added need for interest rate hikes on the non-tax credit economy to fight the “inflation reduction” ignitors.
Are there ever Congressional bills that do not do the opposite of whatever their title suggests?
The “simple maths” presented here appears to be wrong for two reasons. Firstly there is a difference between limiting the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees and “much desired 1.5 C reduction in temperature”. Secondly and more importantly the author is confusing the total amount needed with the annual spend. The figure of 38 Trillion needed to reduce global temperatures is the total amount just as the 400 billion in the inflation reduction act is the total cost not the annual cost. Dividing the 38 Trillion by 80 years (i.e. roughly the number of years left before the end of the century) and comparing that to the global GDP you find that a 1.5 degree reduction in temperature would cost 1% of global GDP not the 50% claimed here which is just fear mongering.
Twaddle
Net zero just in the USA will cost minimum $400 trillion
An impossible number no matter how you look at it
And for nothing
Really? Via the CO2 control knob?
I think that they think that they are so close to their target that they can ignore everything inconvenient and just make one final push. Their target – total control – has nothing whatsoever to do with CO2 or the global climate.
I think and hope that they are wrong, but it is still going to take a lot of effort from a lot of people to stop them. Maybe “Don’t Pay UK” has to start its ‘strike’ in the UK and spread to the USA and other countries.
These are interesting times that I could happily do without.
Exactly who are “they”? Pushing baseless conspiracy theories about unnamed people who
supposedly want to control the world without any evidence doesn’t help anyone.
Is there any evidence that you can provide either to identify who is part of this global conspiracy or that they are actively trying to obtain “total control”?
Izaak, I’m familiar with your line of argument, you are demanding a document with signatures detailing what our lying eyes are telling us.
Pure troll maneuver, reasonable can look at a balance of actions and see a pattern.
If we see a push for an already failed technology (wind and solar) and a push away from a tech that works (nuclear) for a supposed problem (cO2) we can readily determine something else is going on.
If you can think
Big if
Pat,
plenty of “reasonable” people can look at things and see patterns completely different to the ones that you see. Every scientific body in the world thinks that rising CO2 levels are a problem, almost every country has signed up to Paris climate agreement. Over 99% of climate scientists think that rising CO2 levels are a problem. So are they all part of this global conspiracy? In which case it must includes 10’s of thousands of politicians and scientists in every country in the world. And despite the huge number of people involved nobody has stepped forward to admit the hoax. That is just not believable which is why if you want to make such a claim then you need to provide some evidence for it.
Appeal to authority. However the actual world is still not agreeing with any of the models.
Guess you’ve never watched a WEF vid…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/11/claim-a-total-victory-for-socialism-could-save-us-from-climate-change/
From the article:
‘President Biden had this to say:
Now, let me be clear….And it’ll give us a tool to meet the climate goals that are set — that we’ve agreed to — by cutting emissions and accelerating clean energy.’
Can someone remind me what ‘climate goals are set’ and ‘we’ve agreed to’?
Probably the never ratified by the US Senate Paris Treaty. They just pretend it was.
McKinsey group puts the annual net-zero capital expenditure requirement based on current models at $3 to 5 trillion, each and every year.
Total capital costs in the order of 100 to 1000 trillion dollars in the foreseeable. This does not include consumer costs and opportunity costs.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/our-insights/the-net-zero-transition-what-it-would-cost-what-it-could-bring
If temperatures level off they’ll claim praise.
If they don’t, they’ll double down.
Either way, weather events of all kinds will continue.
The US bill goes about 0.5% of annual spending required. Each major economy will need to contribute about 20x more than what’s in the US bill, each and every year, for decades to come.
Even then, it will be extremely fuzzy what difference any of it made.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-1-14-calculating-the-full-costs-of-electrifying-everything-using-only-wind-solar-and-batteries
“For several years now, advocates of “decarbonizing” our energy system, along with promoters of wind and solar energy, have claimed that the cost of electricity from the wind and sun was dropping rapidly and either already was, or soon would be, less than the cost of generating the same electricity from fossil fuels. These claims are generally based on a metric called the “Levelized Cost of Energy,” which is designed to seem sophisticated to the uninitiated, but in the real world is completely misleading because it omits the largest costs of a system where most generation comes from intermittent sources. The large omitted costs are those for storage (batteries) and transmission. But as we now careen recklessly down the road to zero emissions, how much will these omitted costs really amount to?
A guy named Ken Gregory has recently (December 20, 2021, updated January 10, 2022) come out with a Report at a Canadian website called Friends of Science with the title “The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.” A somewhat abbreviated version of Gregory’s Report has also appeared at Watts Up With That here. Gregory provides a tentative number for the additional storage costs that could be necessary for full electrification of the United States system, with all current fossil fuel generation replaced by wind and solar. That number is $433 trillion. Since the current U.S. annual GDP is about $21 trillion, you will recognize that the $433 trillion represents more than 20 times full U.S. annual GDP. In the post I will give some reasons why Gregory may even be underestimating what the cost would ultimately prove to be.”
Didn’t Atlas Shrugged explain the notion that if a bill is called a particular thing, it will in fact do just the opposite?
Climate Scientology at its worst unless you are one of the parasites in the Climate Industrial Complex…