Fuel on a planet on fire
What Biden's climate bill does and doesn't do a year after it passed
This is an updated version of a story I wrote after the Inflation Reduction Act, often referred to as the climate bill, passed August 16, 2022. If you scour the funding provisions, either they little do to temper climate change or they are oil industry schemes to continue drilling and burning.
Media like the New York Times gushed over the bill, and they still do. As the anniversary comes up, it exulted, “The Clean Energy Future is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” Amid the techno-optimism of windmills soaring, solar panels unfurling, and e-vehicles cruising, the Times admits, “the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere is at record levels.”
We must end the use of fossil fuels if we have any hope of halting global warming. Instead, Biden’s climate bill incentivizes more oil and gas drilling, more production, more exports. The new norm is raging wildfires, punishing droughts, extreme heat, and ferocious storms and floods.
It’s never too late to address climate change even if catastrophe is already baked in. We owe it to future generations to ban all fossil fuels and transition to a clean, green, and sustainable economy for everyone in the world. Either we bail each other out or we drown alone.
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With environmentalists calling President Biden’s 2022 climate act everything from a suicide pact to historic, you can be excused for being confused. The 725-page bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, is filled with arcane language and acronyms for new programs, tax credits and subsidies across a range of goods and industries.
Climate reporter Kate Aronoff said $370 billion in new spending for clean energy is “genuinely exciting.” Bill McKibben called it a triumph.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Critics called the bill a fossil-fuel giveaway, and they are right. The fact that BP America, ExxonMobil, and other oil companies praised the bill is all one needs to know that the bill is a sham.
To begin, advocates of the IRA use Enron-style accounting in claiming it will reduce emissions 40 percent by 2030. In reality, U.S. carbon emissions have been steadily declining for years. Models find the bill moves the needle only slightly on emission cuts, with estimates ranging from 7 to 17 percent.
But even the small cuts are suspect. Food and Water Watch found that one widely cited study from Princeton University used to estimate cuts assumes “an astonishing turnaround” for carbon capture and “a massive increase in the deployment of clean energy.” The study also unrealistically assumes all cars sold by 2030 will be electric and solar and wind farms will proliferate because they will be cheaper than fossil fuels.
The bill’s problems go deeper. It is inherently flawed as it funds only the private profit and private consumption of renewable energy while it eliminated funds for public goods for a green economy such as mass transit, affordable housing, community utilities, urban agriculture, and public schools. Subsidizing solar panels and Teslas for the well-off to restrain global warming will be about as effective as tax incentives for sand bags and cement blocks to fight rising seas.
It gets worse. The IRA is a gusher of fossil fuel inventives. That’s to be expected since coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) wrote the act. He designed it as an all-of-the-above energy bill to incentivize more oil, gas, and coal production. Manchin also stripped it of bans, penalties, and prohibitions on fossil fuels that are crucial to reducing the mining and burning of dirty energy.
There are no borders to planetary warming, so only public goods and global solutions will work. Privatized green energy makes climate change worse as individual electric cars, solar panels on McMansions, and home battery arrays are so resource-intensive they cancel out any benefits.
Some of the most dire predictions about the future aren’t from tree huggers but from leading energy institutions that warn fossil fuel production is set to increase for decades. The U.N. Environmental Program says major fossil fuel producers like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil, Canada, and Australia plan to expand extraction over the next 20 years. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects global oil and gas production and consumption will be higher in 2050 than it is today.
The Internal Energy Administration says if we have any hope of staving off complete disaster, industrialized countries need to reach zero carbon by 2050. But the U.S. government itself says we will be burning 15 percent more oil and producing 24 percent more natural gas by 2050. Much of that will be exported. The U.S. is simply displacing burning oil and gas to other countries. Any carbon reductions here will be offset by increases in energy-hungry developing countries.
The IRA is like spitting into force 5 hurricane winds. It is the endgame of U.S. politicians sabotaging climate negotiations, which they have doing since world leaders gathered for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to dial back global warming.
Instead, they turned up the heat. In the last 30 years carbon dioxide emissions have grown 38 percent, and industrialized countries have pumped as much CO2 to the atmosphere as in the previous 250 years of the Industrial Revolution.
The media’s complicity in capitalist extractivism and the desperation of environmentalists to praise crumbs as a feast blinds them to the glaring contradiction. More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon to wage energy wars from Iraq to Russia, while IRA spending amounts to less than a penny out of every federal dollar over its 10-year lifetime.
Then there is the bill itself. It seems almost no reporter examined the spending provisions. I looked at every single item. Much of it is an oil-and-gas industry perversion of green energy. The act allocates $13.2 billion for clean hydrogen that is dirtier than natural gas and $3.2 billion for carbon capture and storage, including $60 for each ton of carbon dioxide used in oil recovery.
CCS is diabolical. Drillers release tons of carbon dioxide in the earth when producing natural gas. Sometimes they capture CO2 and pump it down old fields to force up more crude. The IRA funds the capture of CO2 that is then “stored” by pumping it down fields. Subsidies will make tapped-out fields profitable that would have been abandoned before.
Think about that for a second. Biden’s energy bill subsidizes drillers to extract oil and gas as that releases CO2 already locked away — some of which they are paid to capture but much of which escapes into the atmosphere. Captured CO2 is then used for more oil and gas extraction that is burned while releasing more CO2 locked in the field, all of which increases carbon emissions. It’s a perpetual CO2-belching machine beneath a fake green smokescreen to cut emissions.
CCS is a boondoggle as well. Last year’s infrastructure bill threw $12 billion at CCS after Uncle Sam previously spent $7 billion for a technology that has been a total failure other than for oil recovery.
Ethanol producers are excited that they can feed at the CCS trough because manufacturing the corn-based biofuel “emits a pure stream of carbon dioxide.” Except ethanol is even dirtier than gasoline, emitting 24 percent more pollution once land use changes and processing of corn is included, according to one study. The IRA also provides $9 billion in tax credits for biodiesel and alternative fuels that includes ethanol.
Most funding, more than $200 billion, is for clean energy. But it is in the form of subsidies for corporations and private consumption. This includes at least $170 billion for manufacturers of electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, biogas, and power generation and storage and heavy industry.
There is $30 billion for nuclear power. While cleaner than natural gas, nuclear energy produces three times as much carbon as solar energy and 16 times that of offshore wind farms, along with radioactive waste that must be safely stored for tens of thousands of years, and carries risks of catastrophic meltdowns like Fukushima and Chernobyl.
A huge amount of spending is for private goods. At least $50 billion is for homeowners and property owners for clean and efficient energy systems and appliances. While some of the measures are aimed at lower-income households, homeowners are wealthier and whiter on average than the general populace, and most savings will go to those who can afford big ticket incomes like heat pumps and solar power, and have a high enough income to realize the tax savings.
A similar problem exists with the over $20 billion in EV tax credit, subsidies, loans, and grants. Typically only households earning more than $100,000 a year pay enough federal taxes to take advantage of the full $7,500 rebate. Because the credit extends to households making $300,000 a year, taxpayers could end up subsidizing crypto bros to buy Teslas at $80,000 a pop.
The IRA is the consequence of climate negotiations that care about the sustainability of capital and not a whit about the planet. In 2009, during climate talks in Copenhagen, then President Obama led wealthy countries in sabotaging action to restrain climate change. Naomi Klein said the Copenhagen Accord was “nothing more than a grubby pact between the world’s biggest emitters.”
The Global North has abandoned any pretense of repaying the South, which was pillaged to fund the Industrial Revolution and will suffer hideously as the climate continues to destabilize. Scholar Patrick Bond says, the Copenhagen Accord lacks any “legally binding components or compliance mechanisms.” (In 2009, McKibben concurred, saying Obama “blew up the United Nations.”)
With compliance off the table the 2015 Paris Agreement enshrined self-regulation, the foul heart of neoliberalism. The pact is a thicket of shall, may, and should. It avoids bans, penalties, and force like the plague. It is so toothless it begs countries to “ensure the avoidance of double counting.” That’s dodgy accounting where corporations and countries double count “carbon offsets” from reforestation, renewable energy, and other conservation projects. Double counting fraud was so rampant in past climate plans, the pro-corporate Environmental Defense Fund warns double counting could negate all national pledges under the Paris Agreement.
The IRA may allow for carbon offsets, one of the most notorious climate change scams. A Pro Publica investigation graded them a “solid F.” It found they double counted, didn’t “offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with.”
Carbon offsets and credits are a foundation of “Net Zero by 2050.” It is the idea we can’t reach zero emissions through carbon cuts and renewable energy alone. Voilà, net zero. Proponents claim to completely decarbonize the economy, carbon credits, offsets and technologies to capture and store carbon are needed. But Greenpeace counters that oil companies, power plants, and airlines regularly use net zero pledges to greenwash pollution.
The IRA is powerless against an energy industry whose business model is to destroy the planet. The climate bill is so weak it is said to be boosting fracking, one of the dirtiest forms of energy production. One expert told Marketwatch that the talk about a green transition combined with a lack of action is incentivizing investors to bet on fracking, which takes only a few years to return a profit, over traditional oil drilling, which takes decades to pay back investors.
Outside the U.S. oil drilling is barreling forward. Exxon is giddy over its oil megaproject off the coast of Guyana expected to uncork 1.2 million bpd of oil by 2027. Downstream from Guyana, Brazil recently upped predictions on its offshore fields to 3.2 million bpd by 2026. Offshore fields are giant climate bombs because the massive and expensive projects produce oil and gas for decades.
We are doubling down on dirty energy as we are headed toward doubling atmospheric CO2 levels from its pre-industrial concentration of 280 parts per million.
Not only is the IRA a technological failure, it is a political failure. It lulls people into thinking Washington is addressing the crisis when it is actually throwing gas on global warming. But that is by design. Democrats excel at one thing alone: convincing low-information liberals they are managing crises even as they make them worse and worse.
The cheers for the climate bill are being drowned out by the screams of those dying from flood and fire on an overcooked planet.