The most important climate bill in world history does how much for climate change mitigation?
Real Clear Energy (8/15/22) op-ed: "Always good for a laugh, the New York Times opinion page has few peers as a dependable repository of supreme silliness. Day after day, year after year: It delivers ignorance of basic facts, bad analysis, endless non sequiturs, dishonesty by omission. All of that and more (or less) for a very reasonable price; it truly is the gift that keeps on giving. And the editors have succeeded in their never-ending quest to reach new depths: Bill Gates informed us recently that The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) 'may be the single most important piece of climate legislation in American history.' That, of course, is damnation with faint praise, as Congress for decades steadfastly has refused to enact 'climate legislation'— measures yielding an actual reduction in greenhouse gas emissions — for the obvious reason that any such laws would increase energy costs dramatically, an impact that would not prove salutary for the political prospects of politicians voting for it. Instead, efforts to force massive dislocations in U.S. energy markets for the most part have taken the form of regulatory maneuvers and litigation both deeply dubious and dishonest, that is, paths that decidedly shunt aside the consent of the governed...Moreover, while applauding the asserted reductions in GHG emissions to be engendered by the IRA, Gates fails to mention the benefits of increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG, as reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and in the peer-reviewed literature. Examples are planetary greening, increased agricultural productivity, increased water use efficiency by plants, and reduced net mortality from cold and heat. Do the potential adverse effects of anthropogenic warming outweigh the benefits? That is hotly (!) debated. And, Gates, supposedly a smart businessman, also neglected to tell us what effect the IRA — 'the single most important piece of climate legislation in American history' — would have on future climate phenomena. So let us do that for him, using the Environmental Protection Agency climate model. The U.S. GHG emissions reduction claimed by the proponents of the IRA is 40 percent (below 2005 levels) by 2030, a deeply problematic assertion for reasons that I ignore here. The temperature effect by 2100: 0.044°C. Because the standard deviation of the surface temperature record is 0.11°C, that effect that would not be detectable. "
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