The Inflation Reduction Act Does Little to Reduce Climate Change

Unlike most other nations on the planet, the U.S. has substantially reduced its carbon emissions over the past 15 years. This is largely owing to the fracking revolution that replaced a lot of America’s coal with natural gas, which is cheaper and cleaner. Even without the new law, the U.S. was on track to cut emissions substantially by 2030, according to research by the Rhodium Group. Averaging their high and low emission predictions, the U.S. would drop emissions by almost 30% absent the new law. With the new law, emissions will decline instead by a little over 37%. The “most significant legislation in history” will actually cut emissions by less than eight percentage points.

While the administration talks up its emission reductions, it never seems to tout the law’s impact on temperature and sea level—for good reason. If you plug the predicted emissions decline into the climate model used for all major United Nations climate reports, it turns out the global temperature will be cut by only 0.0009 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. This is assuming the law’s emission reductions end when its funding does after 2030. But even if you charitably assume they’ll somehow be sustained through 2100 without any interruption, the impact on global temperature will still be almost unnoticeable, at 0.028 degree Fahrenheit.

The law will similarly have little effect on the sea level. A model that calculates changes in ocean levels predicts waters will be somewhere between 0.006 and 0.08 inch lower in 2100 than they would have been without the Inflation Reduction Act.

To reach even this minuscule climate impact, the law would have to be kept intact over the rest of the decade, across four more Congresses and two presidential terms. Given the $369 billion price tag on the act’s climate policies, it’s hard to imagine the Inflation Reduction Act surviving a Republican majority. It might not even survive sustained Democratic rule.

It’s been proven around the globe that politicians can be quick to backtrack on expensive climate policies when faced with economic trouble and an angry electorate. Consider French President

Emmanuel Macron’s

flip-flop on his signature fuel-tax hikes or the German Green Party’s U-turn on fossil fuels amid sky-high energy prices.

With the Inflation Reduction Act’s massive costs, it could be more of a warning to the world than the leading example the Biden administration hopes it will be. Three-fourths of all emissions in the rest of this century will come from what are today developing countries, especially China, India and nations in Africa. These countries couldn’t afford to follow the U.S. lead and drop hundreds of billions of dollars on climate subsidies even if they wanted to. And they have far more important challenges—such as poverty, illiteracy and starvation—that they can tackle far more cost-effectively and with a far greater impact. Even if the U.S. is now proclaimed a global climate leader, it’ll have few followers.

The cost of the act also belies the oft-repeated claim that green technologies are already cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives. If they were, they wouldn’t need enormous subsidies. If green energy is going to work, it needs to be as reliable and cheap as fossil fuels. Otherwise developing nations in particular aren’t going to switch to cleaner energy, preferring instead to focus on development and prosperity.

Climate change can be meaningfully addressed only by investing in the research and development of all sorts of green energy—from solar, wind and batteries to fourth-generation nuclear and carbon capture. Many of these technologies will ultimately fail, but we only need a few to become so cheap that everyone—including China, India and Africa—can access plentiful and reliable green energy while reducing emissions.

Unfortunately, the new climate law delivers next to nothing to direct innovation. Instead, it retreads tired policies, dishing out subsidies to roll out more inefficient technology. And it does so at a much greater cost than the tens of billions of dollars it would take to improve R&D.

The U.S. could have set an example for the world through innovation. Instead the government chose to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve no noticeable climate benefit.

Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”