Reporting On New Study About Policies Are Effective In Addressing Climate Change

Here’s a link to the primary source discussed in the following articles:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl6547

I find these articles are unsatisfactory. First, there is no discussion of cost and benefit of the policies that were found to be effective. Second, except for Mr. Jenkins inflammatory opinion piece, there’s no discussion as to what the findings mean to how the US should proceed. Mr. Jenkins is being disingenuous about the carbon tax. He knows there is no way in hell in our current political environment that such a tax could be implemented. Especially not when many of the WSJ readers deny that we have anything to do with climate change, if there is such a thing.

Climate change has been overwhelmed by Dunning Kruger biases. Many of us think we are experts, even though we don’t know poop. I had a conversation with a gentleman the other day who dismissed EVs because they weigh more and therefore their tires need to be replaced more often. I pointed out that a heavier car might be considered safer and that while true about the tires, the cost of maintaining an EV are lower (electric motor vs combustion engine). He looked at me like I was bothering him. I’m not saying I know all.

I do believe government has a role in incentivizing decarbonization. I’d love the think the free market could do it on its own, but company CEOs are focused on near term results. Most of today’s CEOs will be retired to Palm Beach by 2030. It will be someone else’s problem. They didn’t get to be CEO by solving long-term problems (see fall of Kodak).

I’m not smart enough or strategic enough to tell you what we should do.

From the WSJ:

Most Climate Policies Don’t Work. Here’s What Science Says Does Reduce Emissions.

Relying on green subsidies alone has failed, but combining various economic tools has helped limit climate-warming emissions

Aug. 22, 2024 at 2:00 pm ET

Climate experts said a new study is a good road map for which policies work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

An evaluation of more than 1,500 climate policies in 41 countries found that only 63 actually worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Subsidies and regulations—policy types often favored by governments—rarely worked to reduce emissions, the study found, unless they were combined with price-based strategies aimed at changing consumer and corporate behavior. 

“The commonality in those successful cases is where we see subsidies and regulations being combined with price-based policy instruments,” said Nicolas Koch, senior researcher at the Berlin-based Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change and an author of the study. “This means carbon pricing, and it could be energy taxes, it could be vehicle taxes.”

The study, published today in the journal Science, used an AI algorithm to sift through a database of environmental prescriptions compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based economic agency, between 1998 and 2020. These policies ranged from energy-efficient standards for household appliances to a carbon tax on fossil fuels like oil and gas.

The fraction of policies that worked combined financial incentives, regulations and taxes, according to the study.

The authors evaluated policies adopted by each nation’s electricity, transportation, building and industrial sectors. They programmed the algorithm to cross-reference each policy with subsequent changes in greenhouse gas emissions from each country. 

Climate experts said the study is a good road map for which policies work and can be updated to include data from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is doling out an estimated $428 billion in subsidies, incentives and tax credits for climate-related projects.

“This study gives me confidence that we know what to do and how to do it,” said Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, a New York-based carbon management firm, who wasn’t involved in the study. 

In 2015, more than 190 nations signed the Paris agreement, pledging to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels to avoid the worst effects of climate change. As part of the treaty, nations are required to document how they will achieve emissions reductions. 

By searching through the OECD database, which identifies 46 types of policy interventions, the study’s authors found government policymakers prefer subsidies and regulations, according to Koch.

“We see a lot of policy packages built around these two policy types, and we find that it’s very rare that they really work in reducing emissions,” Koch said. 

The study found the nations’ overall climate emissions will exceed the Paris target by 23 billion metric tons of CO2 by 2030.

The 63 successful policy interventions in total reduced emissions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tons of CO2. The most successful of the policies included a mixture of policy tools to change consumer and corporate behavior. 

In the U.S., emissions from vehicles dropped 8% from 2008 to 2010 after new mileage rules were put into effect in 2007 along with a tax break for motorists who bought cleaner cars in 2006, Koch said. 

In the U.K., a combination of an announced phaseout of coal plants, a minimum price for electricity and stricter air pollution standards led to a 44% cut in emissions in the electricity sector between 2013 and 2020. 

In China, emissions fell 20% in 2016 from the industrial sector in seven provinces that started an emissions trading program in 2013 that ratcheted down the use of fossil fuels, combined with the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies. 

In isolation, policies such as labeling appliances or cars as energy efficient, imposing speed limits or imposing new vehicle taxes, weren’t sufficient to bend the emissions curve, the study found. 

One limitation of the study is that it only examined policies that had an impact within approximately two years of implementation. However, some policy changes take longer to make a difference, according to Christoph Bertram, associate research professor at the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, who wasn’t part of the study. Within the framework of the study, those kinds of policies wouldn’t appear to have reduced emissions. 

Bertram pointed out the slow transition from coal to natural gas in U.S. power plants that began in 2007 and resulted in a 25% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2022. This transition didn’t result in a sharp reduction in emissions, and therefore wasn’t picked up as a success in the study, he said.

As reported in the NYT:

Many Climate Policies Struggle to Cut Emissions, Study Finds

The most effective ones tend to combine several emissions-cutting strategies, not a stand-alone approach, according to an examination of 1,500 policies globally.

Aug. 22, 2024

First, the good news: 1,500 climate policies aimed at reducing emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases have been implemented across dozens of countries over the past two decades.

The more troubling news: Only around 4 percent may have substantially reduced emissions, according to a new study.

“We’re finding good and bad news together,” said Nicolas Koch, a climate economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of the study published Thursday in Science. “It’s highlighting opportunities, like that larger reductions are possible, but also challenging the political will for policy design.”

While 63 policies highlighted in the study successfully reduced as much as 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon, the United Nations estimates that emissions must fall by 23 billion metric tons by 2030 to reach targets laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Those targets aimed to limit the increase in the global average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, in order to preserve a livable planet.

With less than a decade left before that benchmark, the research could provide models for the best paths forward. “There is no silver bullet policy solution for climate mitigation,” said Jonas Meckling, an associate professor at University of California Berkeley and a climate fellow at Harvard Business School.

Most of those emissions reductions were tied to price instruments like changes in carbon prices, energy taxes and fossil-fuel-subsidy reforms. And most emissions reductions gained strength in numbers: They happened from the combination of multiple national policies, instead of just one stand-alone policy.

It’s often a combination of carrots and sticks, Dr. Meckling said, where the carrots are public spending like subsidies or tax credits, and the sticks are approaches like regulations on power plant emissions.

“Countries can learn from each other,” Dr. Koch said. If every country implemented one of the best practices that led to an emissions gap, up to 41 percent of the gap could be closed by 2030, he said. “It shows that we can implement powerful climate policies that lead to large emissions reductions.”

The study used statistical models to identify 63 drops in national emissions across 41 countries.

Those drops of at least 5 to 10 percent in emissions are called breaks. In charts, they show up like steps down a staircase, sometimes gradual and sometimes steep.

Once these breaks were identified, a machine-learning model combed through a data set released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that identified 1,500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022. Those policies cover four sectors: electricity, industry, transportation and buildings. Researchers then tried to match which policies could be attributed to which breaks in emissions.

“It’s the broadest empirical evidence to date for the insight that policy mixes or combinations of policies are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Dr. Meckling said.

The United Kingdom, for example, reduced emissions up to 50 percent by 2015 from implementing a minimum price for carbon in the power sector, along with subsidies for renewable energy and an announcement of a coal phaseout plan.

But the study has drawbacks. Agriculture and land use change, a major emissions sector, was not included. Good data showing reductions in carbon emissions for that sector doesn’t yet exist, Dr. Koch said.

In addition, hundreds of countries are missing from the O.E.C.D. data, particularly developing economies in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. While some transitioning nations like Russia, Brazil, India and China are included, only one African country, South Africa, is part of the data set.

In addition, the study covered only the near-term effects, and effects within the country where the policy was adopted, said Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But in climate change mitigation, we care about the effects on a global scale and bringing emissions down to zero regardless of where emissions reductions start,” she said. “So the fact that 63 cases were detected to have a significant impact over the near term where the policies were adopted, it doesn’t mean other policies weren’t effective.”

There are two main ways a climate policy can be effective. The first is to reduce emissions at a certain place and time. The second pathway is to develop technology that will allow for emissions cuts in the future, perhaps across multiple locations, like lower-cost solar panels resulting from technological advances. Emissions cuts plus development of new technology can create a positive feedback loop that the study might not be able to capture, Dr. Trancik said.

“Many of the technological tools that are needed to address climate change are now available,” Dr. Trancik said, “and ready to be adopted at scale because of a host of different types of policies that came before.”

And Holman Jenkins in the WSJ:

Follow the Science: Biden Climate Policy Is a Fraud

A new study examines global climate efforts and says green pork barrel has no impact on emissions.

Aug. 23, 2024 at 5:36 pm ET

Even Democrats don’t want to hear about climate change. The words were barely mentioned at the convention, and every transcript I examined omitted the once obligatory Biden modifier “existential.”

The reason isn’t a mystery. Joe Biden’s policies are having not the slightest effect on climate change and yet somebody will still have to pay Ford’s $130,000 in losses per electric vehicle in the first quarter. This sum, a calculation shows, is equal to $64.80 per gallon of gasoline saved over four years of average driving. And yes, this amounts to a ludicrously costly subsidy to somebody else to use the gasoline that EV drivers are paid to forgo.

Voilà, the flaw in the Biden strategy from the get-go, which completely defeats the goal of reducing emissions.

Regular readers may feel vindicated by a new study this week in the prestigious journal Science. It examines 1,500 “climate” policies adopted around the world and finds only 63—or 4%—produced any emissions reductions. Even so, press accounts strained to muddy the study’s simple lesson so let’s spell it out: Taxing carbon reduces emissions. Subsidizing “green energy” doesn’t.

In fact, this should be old hat. One of the most cited papers in climate economics is 2012’s “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” by the University of Oregon’s Richard York. His answer: not “when net effects are considered.”

Mr. York and a colleague returned with a 2019 empirical paper showing that while “renewable energy sources compose a larger share of overall energy production, they are not replacing fossil fuels but are rather expanding the overall amount of energy that is produced.”

This result can’t really surprise the Obama-Biden Democrats, who sponsored a 2013 National Research Council study of their own, led by a future Nobel Prize winner no less. For similar reasons, the author didn’t mince words, concluding that green subsidies were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases and achieving climate-change objectives.”

Yet this poor strategy Mr. Biden would later quadruple down on with upward of $1 trillion in taxpayer and energy consumer money.

I won’t rehearse the official lying that went into selling this folly, especially in the form of Mr. Biden’s laughably named Inflation Reduction Act. But nothing in presidential memory resembles Mr. Biden’s record of exceptionally foolish choices in office.

You know the litany: the second Covid spendathon that caused 9% inflation, the border collapse, the Afghanistan withdrawal, his attempt to appease Vladimir Putin after lying about a Russian connection to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Mr. Biden’s green-energy strategy was wrongheaded by every bit of economic advice, with nothing to show now except billions added to the deficit and a budding disaster from forcing Detroit to build EVs the public doesn’t want.

So let us welcome the new Science magazine study. “Backfire” was a term already turning up in the economics literature for policies that claim to reduce emissions but actually increase them.

Green-energy subsidies, in the first instance, subsidize extra fossil-fuel consumption to produce battery minerals, wind turbines and solar panels. U.S. policies particularly incentivize oversize SUVs whose net emissions are greater than any gasoline-fueled miles they could possibly displace.

When Washington spends hundreds of billions to lure some drivers to use EVs, guess what? It ends up making gasoline cheaper and more available for other consumers around the world to use.

The 2023 data have arrived. Fossil-fuel use, emissions and green energy all have grown right alongside each other, as economics predicted. Global emissions finally broke the 40 gigaton threshold, having doubled since 1984.

A few years ago the United Nations climate panel dropped its once-standard emissions scenario RCP 8.5 as unduly pessimistic. It may have to be revived.

RCP 8.5 was a model of emissions under systematically bad global economic policies, such as Mr. Biden’s green-energy trade wars and industrial pork barrel, that inhibit the global economy’s quest for energy efficiency.

Obama handler David Axelrod ventured on CNN this week that the Democratic convention had turned out to be a “values-laden” affair, short on “policy specifics.”

This understates how thoroughly the convention left voters having to guess how Kamala Harris will act on a myriad of issues. Their only guide is apparently that she doesn’t kick puppies and Donald Trump does.

Every scintilla suggests Ms. Harris nevertheless would bring better natural judgment than Mr. Biden. But because she, like America, has been swathed in the New York Times’s unanalytical, uncritical cheerleading, she will still likely be dumbfounded to learn the truth about Biden climate policies.

Perhaps we should say “if” she chooses to hear the truth. Because there’s a good chance she will keep throwing your money and mine on the pyre to avoid admitting a mistake.