The ‘Greatest President for Climate’ Decreased Carbon Emissions by 0.2 Percent in 2024 – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

“Joe Biden’s legacy as the greatest president for climate and environmental action is etched in stone,” said the Sierra Club.

“President Biden has accomplished more on climate than any president in history,” said the executive director of the organization Climate Power.

“Joe Biden has taken on the climate crisis more than any other president in U.S. history,” said the president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

This line has been parroted again, and again, and again.

But does Biden have anything to show for it? No.

In fact, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States fell by just 0.2 percent in 2024. That’s according to the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization.

In other words, Biden’s climate policies amounted to a dismal failure. Despite the billions in taxpayer dollars that Biden pumped into environmentalist groups, any improvement is negligible.

Biden’s failure is particularly embarrassing given the high targets for reducing emissions that he trumpeted throughout his presidency. In April 2021, he announced that the U.S. would seek to reduce emissions 50-52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Then, in December 2024, he said the U.S. would try to reduce carbon emissions by 61-66 percent by 2035.

In order to reach these goals, the U.S. would need to decrease carbon emissions by 7.6 percent every year from 2025 to 2030, according to the Rhodium Group. Spoiler alert: we are not going to experience a 38-fold decrease in carbon emissions within a single year — and then continue at that clip for five years. These goals are simply fantasies that exist for the sake of a press release.

Yet in the name of these fantasies, Biden pumped out money like there was no tomorrow.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which President Donald Trump aptly calls the “Green New Scam,” dedicated $783 billion to addressing climate change and decreasing greenhouse gases. (RELATED: Democrats Still Don’t Get Why They Lost)

The Biden administration’s climate spending included apportioning $53 billion for the Commerce Department to expand offshore wind permitting, $4.4 billion for the Department of Homeland Security to “build a climate resilient Nation,” $11 billion for “international climate finance,” $2.9 billion for “climate related programs to address the climate crisis” at the Environmental Protection Agency, and $8 billion for AmeriCorps’ American Climate Corps.

In a notable example, Biden allocated $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging only to have created just seven charging stations three years later.

Biden also threw $20 billion at the last minute at Democratic Party-aligned climate nonprofits after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election. This included $6.9 billion to the Climate United fund and $5 billion to the Coalition for Green Capital. A group for which former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams serves as special counsel received a $490 million part of the pie. (RELATED: The Green Grift: How Power Forward Communities’ $2 Billion Boondoggle Misses the Mark)

Luckily, we don’t need to criticize Joe Biden’s climate spending on a theoretical basis. A 0.2 percent decrease in carbon emissions in the last year of his presidency shows us that, on the merits, this whole project is rotten.

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