Climate Change Suffers Rude Collision With Reality

Democrats’ climate change agenda has taken a backseat to politics.

Although this is clear in general, nowhere is it more so than on Democrats’ focus on higher fuel prices. What once were sought and lauded as means to their climate change goal, are now lamented and wielded as a political cudgel.

While climate change is still used in conjunction with reporting on every adverse weather event, the unwinding of Democratic Party policies that were ostensibly justified as addressing it has gone comparatively unnoticed. Example One is the misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” about which President Biden confessed: “It has nothing to do with inflation. It has to do with the $368 billion, the single-largest investment in climate change anywhere in the world, anywhere.” 

But the IRA’s “green” tax credits were ticking fiscal time bombs. Generous and with no cap on how many of these credits could be granted, estimated costs exploded: Initially estimated to cost $270 billion, the estimate doubled to $536 billion, then more than doubled again to $1.2 trillion over ten years. Others, such as an overemphasis on renewable power rather than an emphasis on reliable power, were predestined to fail.