Two Years and $300 Billion into Biden’s Climate Plan, Emissions Are Higher than Ever
Pollution from a factory. (photo: Science Focus)
Green energy and fossil fuels are rising hand in hand. The growth-based climate framework is fundamentally broken.
August 16 marked the two-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), legislation that has funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into green energy and electric vehicles. While the Act made unprecedented investments in renewable energy, it also faced criticism for being too little, too late and for compromising on fossil fuel extraction. In response, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan acknowledged the bill’s shortcomings but explained the administration’s approach: “We’re using every tool in our toolbox to drive down climate pollution as much as possible, as quickly as possible.”
But let’s take this anniversary to entertain a horrifying doubt: What if the toolbox itself is inadequate? What if, on the contrary, all the tools only make a dire crisis even worse? Because that’s exactly what’s happening: Two years and close to $300 billion later, what we’re seeing is that increased renewable energy investment goes hand in hand with increased fossil fuel production.
What’s even more horrifying? Social movements around the world have been predicting this outcome for years or even decades, but they have been shut out of the mainstream conversation. In fact, nobody with any sizable platform is pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, that the entire international framework around climate change is designed to fail.
And while the circus of false solutions keeps getting louder, we have probably already passed the point of no return, meaning carbon saturation and the beginning of a domino effect that will lead to 2.5-5C of global warming, mass extinction, and hundreds of millions or billions of human deaths. (For an overview of the data, check out this supplementary article).
Growth
To understand why more green energy investment is causing an increase in fossil fuel production, let’s look at some numbers.
For starters, let’s examine the U.S. government’s claim of an emissions reduction of 3% in the first full year of the IRA (too little, too late, anyone?).
This miserable reduction wasn’t even the result of robust government intervention: 85% of it can be attributed to power companies burning more gas and less coal as gas prices fall. In fact, what was supposed to be a banner year for green energy actually saw a slight decrease in electricity generation from renewable sources in the U.S. — a failure that belies the supposed magic wand of government intervention.
What’s worse, the 3% reduction isn’t even real. Countries like the U.S. can claim a victory only thanks to the “carbon accounting” practices approved by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and central to the Paris Agreement framework. This carbon accounting is done country by country (as if ecological catastrophe respected borders) and a country’s footprint is measured by the greenhouse gas emissions of what they consume, not what they produce.
So what does that mean? It means the United States can increase natural gas production and break all global records in crude oil production in 2023 and, in the same year, claim an emissions reduction. It also means that, globally in 2023, fossil fuel emissions went up.
And it’s not only the United States. Let’s look at some countries held up as poster children of “green growth” by global economic institutions and environmental organizations: Sweden, Norway and Chile. Because none of these rank in the world’s top 20 biggest economies as measured by GDP (the closest is Sweden, at #23), let’s also throw in the United Kingdom, since it is the sixth largest economy in the world, it generally ranks in the top ten or top fifteen in the world for sustainability and the transition to renewable energy, and it gets trotted out by the media as an example of green growth.
What kind of facts jump out at us? All these countries have economies that are deeply ecocidal, while the changes they have introduced are largely either cosmetic or for the benefit of their own citizens at the expense of the rest of the world. Sweden, for example, is often celebrated for its green economy, but 33% of that economy is constituted by an export-focused industrial sector based in mining, logging, automobiles, machinery, telecommunications and military armaments. Because its manufactured goods are exported, the energy necessary for their production is not counted in the country’s emissions balance. Norway, meanwhile, is lauded for transitioning to a domestic energy supply that is mostly nuclear or renewable. And yet, this Scandinavian country is the largest oil and gas producer in all of Europe, with fossil fuel production and export making up 20% of its economy. But Norwegians can rest easy: Nearly all of that gas is sold to be burnt elsewhere.
As for the U.K., it’s frequently held up as an example of a large economy that has successfully decoupled economic growth from carbon emissions, but it’s also in the top fifth of oil and gas producers in the world. It’s a major exporter and manufacturer, with automotive, pharmaceuticals and aerospace production being especially important. This includes the high-pollution airplanes essential to tourism, global travel and global militaries, as well as rockets and satellites with military, surveillance and communications applications.
Then there’s the financial services sector, which contributes close to 10% of the U.K. economy’s gross value. When it comes to finance on this scale, we never have to look far to find connections to the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex and other institutions of exploitation, misery, and environmental destruction. Take, for example, HSBC, the U.K.’s largest bank. It has been implicated in money laundering for organized crime and drug trafficking, is a major investor in the arms trade and in authoritarian and ecocidal regimes, and was partially responsible for the 2007 mortgage crisis that threw millions of people out of their homes. It’s been linked to toxic disasters, land theft and paramilitary violence against Indigenous communities across the world. And it’s a major financier of coal, oil and gas operations. Its recent plans to divest and become carbon neutral by 2050, aside from being woefully too late, have been found unconvincing and vague by shareholders.