Just 1 in 4 Americans believe that President Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act will actually reduce inflation, while 71 percent say the law will either have no impact or make things worse. The majority is right to be skeptical. The nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model found that the bill’s effect on inflation will be “statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
This is not surprising. The real purpose of the bill is not to reduce inflation but to reduce climate change. Fully 85 percent of the law’s spending goes toward climate and clean energy. So, what will the bill’s effect be on the climate?
Answer: Statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of the book “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet,” did a little digging to see how much Biden’s law will affect global temperatures. He took the energy and climate analytics firm Rhodium Group’s estimate of how much the law will reduce average greenhouse-gas emissions, compared it with the reduction in emissions under current U.S. policy — and found that the act will reduce emissions by an additional 1.7 billion tons by 2030. Sound like a lot? Not really. According to the United Nation’s climate model, Lomborg says, that will reduce the rise in global temperature by a grand total of … 0.0009 degrees. That’s next to nothing.
Of course, this is the most pessimistic estimate. It assumes that the law produces no more emissions reductions after 2030, when its funding expires. But what if we take the most optimistic view and assume that the emissions reductions from the law continue every year for the next 70-plus years, until the end of the century? Then, Lomborg says, the total reduction in emissions would be 37.5 billion tons, which would reduce the growth in global temperatures by 2100 by a whopping … 0.028 degrees.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/23/inflation-reduction-act-climate-change-effect/