The ludicrously named “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” which President Biden has praised as among the most significant measures in the history of the country, is a tour de force of wishful thinking and faulty reasoning.
In a prior article we discussed using the En-ROADS climate model to evaluate possible climate-modulating interventions in the then-voguish Green New Deal. To recap briefly, En-ROADS is an interactive model that allows each user to vary a number of parameters to evaluate their potential effect on temperature change through the end of the century. The interface and base case results are shown below.
The $485 billion dollar “Inflation Reduction Act” is really more about climate and price controls on pharmaceuticals than inflation. It includes large monetary incentives for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars. It’s instructive, therefore, to see what the effect would be if we subsidized renewable energy globally to the maximum extent possible. If we move the slider for “Renewables” all the way to the right – which results in very high subsidies for all forms of renewables, greatly increased research and development, and large investments in energy storage -- by the end of the century the temperature drops only 0.2 degrees C.– in other words, negligibly.
How about electric cars? If we slide the “Transportation Electrification” bar all the way to the right, the drop is 0.1 degrees – again, negligible. How about punitive taxes on coal? Only 0.2 degrees C. – also negligible. Planting more trees – again negligible. Bioenergy adoption – no effect at all.
The important bottom line is, therefore: Much of what is in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 has little scientific justification and is an exercise in futility. It is mostly virtue-signaling and politics – at a huge cost to the American taxpayer.
A critical corollary is that climate change isn’t a problem that, in the best of circumstances, America can solve alone. Just check out the contributions of various nations to world carbon dioxide (CO2) output.
The US produces about 13.5% of world CO2 emissions. Even if we were to cut our emissions to zero, CO2 will continue to accumulate in the atmosphere and the world will continue to warm. So, in order to accomplish anything significant, we need the cooperation of the “Big 5” emitters: China, the US, the EU, India, and Russia. Will they do their part?
We assume that all nations have priorities similar to ours. But is this assumption valid? India, for example, would likely prefer lower temperatures, but they have bigger problems: a huge population, widespread poverty, class and religious strife, and a developing economy that needs lots of energy to thrive. Even if they wanted to, it is unlikely that Indian politicians could force the people of India to forego their liquid-fueled vehicles; cease using natural fuels such as wood, charcoal, and dung for heating and cooking; and shut down all their coal and oil-fueled power plants at a time when there is insufficient power to begin with.
China and Russia present additional problems. An often-ignored factor is that there are both losers and winners from a warming globe. There are vast areas in China and Russia that might well benefit from higher temperatures and accompanying effects. The next figure shows expected temperature (top) and precipitation changes (bottom) under very aggressive CO2 reductions (left side) and conditions if there is no CO2 action (right side).
Note in particular the effects in central Asia of the extreme cases on the right: a temperature increase of around 4 degrees C and a rainfall increase of 10% - 20%. What would these do to these regions?
Take, for example, a typical city in the middle of this area, Krasnoyarsk, Russia.
Krasnoyarsk has an average summer high temperature of 77 degrees Fahrenheit (F) and an average winter low of – 6 degrees F. Under the extreme global temperature rise scenario their average temperature would rise about 4 degrees C, which is about 7 degrees F. Would they be willing to trade a few 80-some degree summer days for staying above 0 in the winter? I know what my answer would be. More importantly, their rainfall would increase 10% - 20%. Krasnoyarsk is in a semi-arid region, so this extra rainfall would likely benefit their agriculture. Regions farther north would be advantaged by these changes to an even greater extent. Thus, Russia and northern China might well be net beneficiaries of increased global warming. In the absence of any compensatory benefits, can we seriously expect the leaders of these countries to work against the interests of their own people?
If we cannot count on China, India, and Russia to significantly cut their CO2 output, what can we do? Is the situation hopeless?
Possibly not. There are at least two possibilities: direct removal of CO2 from the air and from production sources, and techniques that fall under the rubric “climate engineering.”
Because CO2 does not break down or react with other atmospheric elements, once it is emitted it stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Therefore, cutting our emissions does not reduce the amount of CO2 already present. Direct removal of CO2 means taking in air from the atmosphere, chemically removing the CO2 from it, and storing the CO2 in some form that does not re-enter the atmosphere, such as in rock formations. This is one of the few ways of potentially reducing CO2 that is already in the atmosphere.
Direct removal of CO2 is already being implemented in Iceland. But this facility removes mere thousands of tons of CO2, whereas the world emits about 36 billion tons of new CO2 each year. Thus, it would take millions of these facilities to make a significant reduction in atmospheric CO2. Is there a way to scale up this process without breaking the bank? Possibly. Companies in the US are exploring the use of very large sandstone formations in and around the Gulf of Mexico as CO2 storage areas. And the Inflation Reduction Act does increase the incentives for direct air CO2 capture, which expands the number of projects that could be economically viable.
An impetus to R&D in this area is big tech investment. In 2019, Stripe Inc. announced plans to buy $1 million of emissions offsets from firms that permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That commitment is now significantly larger. Stripe, along with partners Alphabet, Meta, and Shopify, and McKinsey & Co., recently launched an initiative, known as Frontier, that will invest $925 million in carbon removal efforts between now and 2030.
The other approach is climate engineering, which entails injecting materials (or, perhaps, giant mirrors) into the upper atmosphere that reflect a portion of the sunlight that would otherwise heat the Earth. This approach is based on naturally occurring events such as volcanoes. When volcanoes erupt, sulfur dioxide particles are thrown high into the atmosphere. These particles reflect sunlight back into space and provide a degree of shade. Large volcanoes can profoundly effect the weather for the following year or two. The overall term describing this is Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF), which essentially means how much energy the sun is delivering to the earth relative to how much the earth radiates back into space. If ERF increases then the earth will get hotter; if it decreases then the earth will cool.
To sum up, we cannot count on the world's support to greatly reduce CO2 output. China, India, and Russia have other priorities. Even if they did cooperate, the world will get substantially hotter for the next few decades. Nothing in the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act can possibly change that.
However, there are two possible approaches that the US could implement unilaterally. First, direct removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, if implemented at enormous scale, could begin to reduce global temperatures as soon as it began removing more CO2 than it produced. The incentive provided for this in the Inflation Reduction Act is a subsidy (in the form of a tax credit) of $180 per ton of CO2 removed. Currently the world production of CO2 is about 36.3 billion tons, so the cost of removing that much CO2 under these conditions would be $6.5 trillion dollars per year – which is clearly not affordable using current technology.
The second possibility is climate engineering. Mimicking the effects of erupting volcanoes could have an immediate and dramatic effect on global temperature. However, we don’t yet know how to implement this without causing other undesired effects. But what is known is that spending billions on electric cars and windmills will not solve the problem during our lifetimes. A better use of the funds might be a “Manhattan Project” program of research and development to develop inexpensive and effective climate engineering and CO2-removal technologies.
