From Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach (@weschenbach on X, my own blog at Skating Under The Ice)

Folks ask why I describe climate alarmism as a “grift”, a lovely English word meaning a swindle. I describe it that way because it’s making people rich while accomplishing nothing.

Here’s one example among hundreds. California’s CO2 “Cap And Trade” program, recently renamed the “Cap-And-Invest” program, is now primarily a multi‑billion‑dollar revenue machine whose costs land squarely on consumers while delivering meaningless reductions in greenhouse gases. Politicians, not the planet, are the clear winners.

Let’s start with the sticker price that no one voted on. The program is pulling in about $5 billion a year in auction revenue, with roughly $33 billion raised since inception. That money does not appear out of thin air; it is baked into the price of everything covered entities sell, with gasoline being the most obvious example.

It’s estimated that about 30 cents per gallon in cap‑and‑trade costs is embedded in California gasoline pump prices, roughly consistent with the California Air Resources Board’s own estimate of about 27 cents per gallon for the cap‑and‑trade component. California consumes on the order of 13–14 billion gallons of gasoline per year, so that 30‑cent skim works out to something like $4 billion per year transferred from motorists’ pockets to Sacramento without a line item on the tax bill. That is before counting similar pass‑through costs in diesel, electricity, concrete, and industrial products.

So what does all that pain at the pump buy in terms of carbon dioxide? The governor’s office and CARB boast that the ~ $33 billion in cap‑and‑trade proceeds have funded projects claimed to cut emissions equivalent to taking 1.3 million gasoline cars off the road. Using a standard figure of about 4.6 metric tons of CO₂ per year per typical passenger vehicle, that “cars off the road” metric translates to on the order of 6 million metric tons of CO₂ avoided per year if those reductions are durable and additional.

However, California’s cap‑and‑trade program covers roughly three‑quarters of state greenhouse gas emissions, and total state emissions have fallen about 14 percent since the program began, largely due to other policies like the renewable portfolio standard and vehicle efficiency rules. A federal review estimates that projects funded by cap-and-trade auction proceeds account for roughly 110 million metric tonnes of CO₂‑equivalent reductions cumulatively.

WOW! Over a hundred million tonnes of CO2, that must be a lot, right? So, how much difference has that made in the real world?

For that, we need a few facts. First, current CO2 levels are about 420 ppmv (parts per million by volume).

Next, for each 17,355 million metric tonnes of CO2 emitted, the atmospheric CO2 goes up by 1 ppmv (part per million by volume). This means that for the $33 billion dollars taken out of my and other California taxpayers’ wallets, the atmospheric CO2 level is lower by 110/17,400 = 0.006 ppmv … six thousandths of one part per million of CO2.

Be still, my beating heart …

And IF the IPCC is correct (which is a very big if), that would have reduced the current temperature by log2(420.006 / 420) * 3 = 0.00006°C …

Seriously. Californians have spent $33 billion dollars to reduce the temperature by not a tenth of a degree, not by a hundredth or a thousandth of a degree, not even by a ten-thousandth of a degree, but by less than a ten-thousandth of a degree.

And before you claim that we are “leading by example” and that the world will follow, most countries are not that stupid. At that rate, to reduce the world’s temperature by 1°C (again, IF the IPCC is correct) would cost $533 TRILLION dollars, a number so large it defies comprehension. It’s more than a hundred years of all the annual US Federal Tax revenue.

For. One. Degree. Of. Cooling.

So clearly, this has NOTHING to do with the climate.

Meanwhile, the spending priorities tell you what the real game is. The renamed “cap‑and‑invest” scheme locks in a billion dollars a year for the “railroad to nowhere”, Governor Newsom’s doomed high‑speed rail project, regardless of how many years it stays an expensive hole in the Central Valley.

Even the High‑Speed Rail Authority’s own projections concede that, if the system were ever fully completed, it would shave automobile emissions by only about 1 percent, while construction itself adds emissions up front. In other words, no emissions gain at all.

This insane boondoggle was sold as a San Francisco to LA high-speed train costing $33 billion. Now it’s been cut back to a Modesto to Bakersfield line for $40 billion or so. Despite billions spent already, there hasn’t been a full mile of track laid.

And if you don’t know where Modesto is … neither do most Californians. However, like nearly all the cities in Democrat-destroyed California, Modesto and Bakersfield need lots of things.

Sadly … a high-speed rail link connecting the two is not one of them.

Add to that, $1.25 billion shifted to wildfire suppression to ease pressure on a deficit‑ridden general fund, plus another $1 billion put into a legislative “discretionary” pot—that is, money that our corrupt Democrat leadership can steer to whatever pet projects or political deals they fancy. Those three buckets alone consume most of the annual auction take while having no measurable effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office, not exactly a bomb‑throwing outfit, dryly notes that cap‑and‑trade (now cap‑and‑invest) revenues “can continue to be viewed as akin to tax revenues and be legally available to expend for any purpose.” Translate the bureaucratese and you get this:

Cap‑and‑trade has become a backdoor tax on energy, largely invisible to voters, that can be spent on any damn thing the governor and legislative leadership wish, no matter how useless or corrupt.

Politically, that is a dream scam—billions per year off‑budget in the colloquial sense, routed to high‑profile projects, deficit patches, and discretionary slush, all defended under the halo of “climate action.” From the standpoint of the average Californian buying gasoline, electricity, or manufactured goods, it is a classic heads‑they‑win, tails‑you‑pay arrangement: higher prices now, no meaningful change in emissions, and a guaranteed windfall of flexible cash for the political class in Sacramento.

And tragically, the people getting hit the hardest by this backdoor tax on energy are the poor. It’s a regressive tax that hits the poor the hardest of all.

The Cruelest Tax Of All

And that, dear friends, is just one of the multitude of ways that politicians and alarmist scientists are lining their pockets by scaring you about the climate, and all the while shafting the poor.

The good news? People are coming to their senses and noticing that of the trillions spent on “climate”, the overwhelming majority goes to politicians and their friends, NGOs, meaningless feel-good “green” initiatives, and alarmist scientists.

The bad news? The scammers are going to scam until they’ve pried the very last possible dollar out of your wallet.

I repeat my proposal that ANY climate-related expenses by the government should be forced to reveal to the public how much they will theoretically reduce the temperature. If you asked California taxpayers, “Should we spend $33 billion to reduce global temperatures by 0.00006°C?”, I can tell you what the answer would be …

My very best to all on a foggy December morning,

w.

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