© 2024 Blaze Media LLC. All rights reserved.
Whoopsie: Gov't subsidies for 'green' energy actually increase carbon emissions

Whoopsie: Gov't subsidies for 'green' energy actually increase carbon emissions

The Wall Street Journal dubs it the "perverse effects" of green subsidies (emphasis mine):

Anticarbon central planning was bound to distort markets, but it turns out that the planners often increase emissions as they try to engineer President Obama's "new energy economy." So concludes the National Academies, whose major report on energy subsidies deserves more attention than it has received since its June release.

By some miracle, Congress in 2008 created a National Research Council special committee to comb the tax code to figure out how specific provisions increase or decrease greenhouse gases. As chairman William Nordhaus of Yale and his colleagues note, there is very little empirical literature on these programs. What they did learn is that "several existing provisions have perverse effects, while others yield little reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per dollar of revenue loss."

Take ethanol and other biofuel subsidies, which the committee calls a "most striking" example. The 45-cents-a-gallon ethanol tax credit expired in 2012, but before it died it was increasing carbon emissions by five million tons every year, at a cost of $5.26 billion. As they say, it's not easy being green.

Somehow I doubt this info, no matter how relevant, will dissuade the left from pursuing its green agenda.

Want to leave a tip?

We answer to you. Help keep our content free of advertisers and big tech censorship by leaving a tip today.
Want to join the conversation?
Already a subscriber?