From the Daily Caller
Nick Pope
Contributor
According to a study published in early August in the respected scientific publication Science, only a small proportion of the climate policies enacted globally have actually achieved significant emissions reductions.
The new study, titled “Climate policies to achieve deep emissions reductions: two decades of global evidence,” used artificial intelligence to evaluate 1,500 different climate policies pursued by 41 countries between 1998 and 2022, aiming to determine which types policies have resulted in significant emissions reductions. The study's analysis found that only 63 of these policies constituted “successful policy interventions,” meaning that only 4% of the measures evaluated in the study sample were effective in reducing emissions. (Related: Supreme Court deals huge blow to Biden’s climate agenda)
“Across 4 sectors, 41 countries and 2 decades, we found 63 successful policy interventions that had a large impact, reducing total emissions by 0.6 to 1.8 [billion metric tons] of [carbon dioxide],” the study noted. Furthermore, most of the reductions observed in the study are the result of a combination of two or more policies.
“We have a lot of policies that don't lead to big emissions reductions, and more policies don't necessarily equal better results,” said Nicolas Koch, head of the Policy Evaluation Laboratory at Germany's Mercator Institute and one of the study's members. “We have observed that the most commonly used policy tools (subsidies and regulations) alone are not enough. Only in combination with price-based tools such as carbon prices and energy taxes can significant emission reductions be achieved.”
In other words, subsidies and regulations generally do not force economies to reduce emissions without complementary policies that directly tax energy use or outright bans on certain practices, such as coal-fired power generation, Koch said.
Richard Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex in the UK who has expertise in the economics of climate policy, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the study's findings show fundamental problems with green subsidies .
“If you estimated the impact of 1,500 policies, you would think that the fact that 75 of them were statistically significant was just a statistical fluke. They only found 63,” Tolle told DCNF. “Regardless, subsidies may be effective in the short term, but are less effective in the long term because they make offending activities more profitable. For example, subsidies for energy conservation (such as home insulation) make energy cheaper, thereby making people Use more energy. Furthermore, many 'green' subsidies are designed to reward political allies rather than reduce emissions.
Other critics of Western climate policy point out that the continued use of fossil fuels, especially coal, by populous countries such as China and India will hinder global emissions reductions while Western countries bear the high costs of the energy transition.
China is by far the world's largest emitter, with emissions more than twice that of the United States, while India is the world's third-largest emitter, emitting more than all 27 countries in the European Union combined, according to the World Resources Institute.
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