The cost estimate of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act coupled with EPA mandates, just jumped by $466 billion. 
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the latest Congressional Budget Office outlook conclude IRA Energy Provisions Cost Could Double With New Emissions Rule
Last April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule for stricter vehicle emissions standards starting in model year (MY) 2027. If finalized, this rule would increase federal deficits both by increasing the number of electric vehicle tax credits awarded and reducing the collection of gas tax revenue.
At the time of passage, CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated the IRA’s energy and climate spending and tax breaks would cost about $400 billion through Fiscal Year (FY) 2031 and would be more than fully offset by other parts of the law.
Since then, the combination of higher inflation, greater demand for credits, and looser-than-expected regulations significantly boosted the cost of those credits. Last June, we estimated the cost of the IRA energy provisions had grown by two-thirds, to $660 billion through 2031. Assuming the new vehicle emissions rule proposed by the EPA is finalized, we now estimate the cost of the provisions will more than double to $870 billion through 2031, or $1.1 trillion through 2033.
CBO’s latest baseline also revised the original costs for “clean vehicle tax credits and gasoline excise taxes” upward by about $159 billion through 2031, from only $14 billion in the original score to $173 billion in their latest baseline. This revision is over $100 billion higher than in prior estimates, suggesting the remaining increase is due mainly to the new emissions rule. Because CBO applies a 50-percent weight to the effects of the proposed rule, we believe the rule itself would cost about $200 billion through 2031 once in effect.
Importantly, these estimates do not provide enough information to “re-score” the Inflation Reduction Act itself, which also includes various policies to raise revenue and reduce prescription drug costs. Nonetheless, the IRA tax credits themselves are expected to cost substantially more than originally believed, suggesting ample room to pare them back.
CBO Budget Outlook
- The new emission rule will cost about $280 billion through 2033, including $200 billion through 2031, if finalized in its current form.
- With the emission rule in place, energy-related provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will cost almost $870 billion through 2031, more than double the original $400 billion estimate.
- Of the total increase, about two-fifths would be the result of the emission rule and the rest is due to a mixture of laxer-than-expected regulations on new credits, higher-than-expected demand for green technologies, and other economic and technical changes.
Annual Costs of IRA Energy Provisions
Anyone surprised by this wasn’t thinking and likely still isn’t.
The Shocking Truth About Biden’s Proposed Energy Fuel Standards
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA did an impact assessment of 4 fuel standard proposals and compared them to the cost of doing nothing. Guess what.
Following roughly 150 pages of fearmongering discussion of things like gasoline spills, 27 references to cancer, and the hypothetical benefits of proposed actions, we arrive at this amusing table.
Doing Nothing vs Four Alternatives Year 2035
For discussion and more tables, please see my August 26, 2023 report on The Shocking Truth About Biden’s Proposed Energy Fuel Standards
Here is the NHTSA’s bottom line: “Net benefits for passenger cars remain negative across alternatives” vs doing nothing at all.
Costs are always much greater than expected, and in this case we are already starting from a negative benefit.
Ans so, here we are.
The Inflation Reduction Act that Biden told us would pay for itself, not only delivers negative benefits “across all time frames” in reducing emissions, it is now expected to cost $466 Billion more over 10 years.
Government estimates use the distorted BLS measure of inflation to project future expenses. Biden’s policies will cost a lot more.
>The Inflation Reduction Act that Biden told us would pay for itself, not only delivers negative benefits “across all time frames” in reducing emissions, it is now expected to cost $466 Billion more over 10 years.
The best way of reducing vehicle emissions is driving less. After all that working from home during the pandemic, why go back to usual? Keep as many people as possible working from home.
How could they be so far off unless it was done purposefully? Our crime syndicate government is useless.
“Following roughly 150 pages of fearmongering…”
Fear sells. The government spent 6 trillion after creating a fear campaign. Look where we are now.
Global warming costs 16 million dollars per hour in today’s costs now on a world wide basis. These costs will only go up and we pollute co2 and other GHGs into the atmosphere. .
link to weforum.org
The owners of these factories that polluted the environment should pay. They made the decisions and pocketed the profits. Leave the lower orders alone.
are you a fckn troll or what ? ! Go fck yourself with your fckn green BS !
EMISSIONS ! Fckn disastrous ! Yeah ! I just read that NASA (a very reliable source) predicts a lunar oscillation soon, causing mayor destruction in coastal regions …WHAT we gonna do about that one greenies ?!
Someone will propose giant mu-metal shields over US coastal cities at a cost of 100’s of billions. It’s for the children.
Learn to swim if you are forward looking and plugged in to the latest trends. /s
Going green is the future of the planet. We can invest in ourselves or we can be laggards dragging our feet, reluctant to change. Our choice with strong future consequences for our economy.
The Biden Administration Plans a Major Carbon-Free Electricity Buy: The General Service Administration and Department of Defense are looking for options for obtaining 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030 at federal properties in 13 Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states. Such a procurement would be one of the federal government’s largest, as Andrew Freedman reports for Axios. The states cover the footprint of PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest grid region, which runs from New Jersey to Illinois and includes the government’s substantial holdings in the Washington, D.C., area.
Heat Pumps Outsold Gas Furnaces Again Last Year—and the Gap Is Growing: Heat pumps, which use electricity to heat homes and businesses, outsold gas furnaces last in 2023 for the second year in a row, as Alison F. Takemura reports for Canary Media. Americans bought 21 percent more heat pumps last year than the next most popular appliance, which was gas furnaces, according to a trade group. This is good for the climate and human health because it contributes to a reduction in the burning of natural gas.
Since you never tell us how many were bought before your 21% increase in what ever bulls hit you’re trying to sell here your 21% increase is MEANINGLESS!!! AS IS THIS COMMENT!
Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces by 21%.
Actually its very straight forward. Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces last year. No need for going back further in history of sales. My wife and I installed a heat pump on our cottage replacing our electric baseboard heat. It takes up very little space, costs less to operate, and heats our cottage much more comfortably than the base board heat.
Its really straight forward. In the year 2023, heatpumps outsold natural gas furnaces by 21%.
There are people saying we shouldn’t invest in ourselves. We attract investment from around the world, we get a big slice of the pie in the world ecomomy. Had we not invested here, we would just be ordinary. Instead we become extraordinary.
Seven Automakers Join to Create Ionna, a Massive New U.S. EV Charging Network: A group of seven automakers (BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, and Stellantis) said they are joining forces to support Ionna, an EV charging network based on one that has been successful in Europe. The companies, which indicated last summer that they were working on something like this, said Ionna will have 30,000 locations by the end of the decade and some of them would have amenities that resemble airline lounges, as John Voelcker reports for Car and Driver. The CEO of the new venture is Seth Cutler, who has experience at two charging networks, EVgo and Electrify America. As I wrote last week, a lack of charging infrastructure is a major impediment to the growth of EV ownership, so the existence of Ionna is a good sign if the company can come anywhere close to meeting its goals.
All of this should have been done and ready to go before you stupid people started making electric cars!!!!
EVs are just way cleaner with renewable energy than gas could ever hope to be. That is a reality most on here don’t want to accept.
EVs are the corner stone of electrification for making our society work cleanly. I started with a simple EV that only had a 64 mile range and two charge ports rather than one like Tesla has today. With some planning, I could make it work. Just took quite a bit more time on the longer trips. Today I have an EV that gets over 300 miles with plenty of fast chargers in my area of the country. Where my mother lives the fast chargers are 50 miles or more farther away. I had my brother set up a charger at her place. A little planning and everything works great.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg. Tesla did it the capitalist way and is the winner of the charging format in the United States.
From inside climate news. Sounds like a conservative value to me. The gov doesn’t pick the winners, the market does. Wow!
One of the recurring themes within the U.S. is that it’s not widely understood by the public how the Inflation Reduction Act has helped to attract jobs and has helped to attract investment. From your vantage point, as a company that could locate anywhere, how big a difference does the IRA make?
Massive. Most programs, up until the IRA, they’ve tried to do something with the cost of capital or with development funding, or perhaps cheap land or things like that. They sort of give you committed benefits that happen principally at the beginning of a project or even before you put shovels in the ground. That’s sort of the path that Europe is still on when it comes to these kinds of these kinds of policy initiatives. The brilliance of the IRA is that it doesn’t have to pick winners the way the traditional approaches have to. With the IRA, you wait until you’re producing and you get support exactly to the tune that you produce volume. That’s very clever because if you show you’re already producing gigawatt hours of batteries, you’ve shown you’re a winner. The government doesn’t have to pick winners, but the market picks their own winners.
We get the jobs and the technology coming to the United States. This is how we win.
Why build a big plant in Georgia?
Our original plan was to build a big plant in Norway, because we have 100 percent green energy, hydropower and the prospect of local material supply with lithium and graphite and others. Very good location, close to a deepwater quay and good rail and road transport and great support from the community. And then we were also planning to build a facility in Georgia which was the result of a selection process. The reason we prioritized Georgia over other stateside locations was many of the same factors: very central, great airport close by, railroads, access to the port facilities, either by road or by rail, great partnership with local community, great welcome, a strong base of resources, local skills everywhere from sort of trade school level all the way up to the postdoc level.
Our plan was originally to build in Norway first and then Georgia second. And then August, year before last, the IRA was passed into law. That was a real shock to the system. We took some time to digest and to understand whether there would be a relevant policy response happening from either European or local, national authorities and Norway. When we concluded that there wouldn’t be, it was a very easy choice, frankly, because project level funding or entity level funding for this kind of project is a fairly globalized capital market. The ability to fund it is going to flow to where the best economics are.
It’s still going to cost the taxpayer almost a almost a Trillion dollars
Investments are worthwhile engines for our economy. The future is more EVs and renewable energy. Invest now and get some really great returns coming up.
You mean like the massively negative returns in solar and wind stocks over the last couple of years? No thanks. I’ll stick with my oil and gas investments.
This next year, 81% of new energy is solar and batteries. Last year the world invested 1.8 trillion dollars in renewable energy. This is the trend. At some point in the future fossil fuels is going to collapse.
In terms of pollution, oil and gas are the grand loosers for us. There is no getting around co2 pollution. Telling lies about co2 pollution is litterally like drinking mild poison and saying you are OK.
IF YOUR TIME IS SHORT
FEATURED FACT-CHECK
Jesse Watters stated on January 31, 2024 in a segment of “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Fox News
“We think the Earth’s warming” because “we’re literally cooking the books” with flawed temperature data.
Yes the Fox News angle strikes again based on no evidence but inuendo. In the mean time, there is no evidence suggesting co2 is not a GHG. Pollution is something that causes harm to our society. CO2 is the very molecule in our atmosphere causing the ice to melt on earth raising sea levels. That isn’t even its only harmful effect. There are many many more.
Eventually gas and oil is going to turn into stranded assets.
A YEAR! A TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR!!!!!
Better RE than FFs.
If you believe this won’t happen, think again. This is not a drill, this is the real thing. A lot of studies are conservative. This could easilty higher than 3 trillon a year by 2050.
link to weforum.org
Climate change is costing the world $16 million per hour: study
The global cost of climate change damage is estimated to be between $1.7 trillion and $3.1 trillion per year by 2050.This includes the cost of damage to infrastructure, property, agriculture, and human health.This cost is expected to increase over time as the impacts of climate change become more severe.The poorest countries in the world are at greatest risk from the economic impacts of climate change.
Damage from global warming is going to way more down the road..
Meanwhile, China and India get to pollute all they want. And they can pollute into the future because we keep cleaning up.
A lot of industry is going into red states to build green technology. When jobs depend on this, the voting changes. The IRA is going to bring in a lot of technology into the United States along with jobs.
link to insideclimatenews.org
A Battery Company CEO on the ‘Massive’ Effect of the Inflation Reduction ActFreyr Battery plans to invest billions in a factory near Atlanta.
The project would benefit from the 45X Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit in the IRA, which is paid out based on the capacity, in megawatt-hours, of batteries made at the plant. The credit is much better than anything Norway can offer to Freyr, which is a disappointment to leaders in Norway, as the New York Times reports this week, but a boon to the United States.
I spoke with Steen in a video call. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
To quote an old song “California here I come!” The whole country is becoming California, and I don’t mean that in a complementary way. I escaped there after 56 years and am watching my new home stumble towards the same depressing conditions. Oh well, millions more illegal immigrants should fix everything!
The most over spent, under performing President, in American History! Now that’s saying something.
Add on top of that, the most corrupt, incompetent, weakest, and most fragile President in America history. You can’t possibly achieve much of anything in that sorry state of mental capacity, and fleeting memory.
The only explanation for this ridiculous situation, is that it was planned from the get go. Whether it be Obama’s 3’rd term, or Hillary’s first one, doesn’t really matter now does it. It had to be done with intention, and a master plan in place.
Biden was an easy choice, as he is also the most malleable individual possible, due to his deteriorating position. His wife helps a lot, due to her lust for power and a new husband.
Hillary was not going to take No for an answer, so they gave her money and behind the scenes power. This was easy because of her greed for riches, and her desire to rule the World, and she has to be in the MSM all the time to feed her gigantic ego! They accomplish this with her to keep her quiet, but feel important, which is all she requires.
Founders and investors returning to San Francisco for the AI.boom. I guess there’s no critical mass in the other cities they flocked to during the pandemic.
link to wsj.com
Google is leaving San Francisco. I guess “flocking” is more hyperbole.
The oil companies should immediately cease supplying all gas stations in Chicago / Crook County –
link to chicago.suntimes.com
And this is before anything is actually built, verified and commissioned?
Where are the bond vigilantes??? We need a US Treasury bond rate that sends a message. California has a rain problem. God has been known to use rain to send a message.
Rain is first needed to fill the faults. Then when an earthquake hits, the energy will be easier to transmit and cause destruction.
Only we geriatrics that pay attention and connect the dots for the crime scene that is the Biden administration’s, Soros / Obama puppet massively stupid attack on the country connecting the dots of the deranged stupid effort to destroy the country with open border, etc.
No doubt the country has forgotten the idiot running up to a few folks at a rally screeching insanely, “Look into my eyes, I promise you I am going to eliminate hydrocarbons!” Air Force One to run on windmills and solar panels??
All he managed to do was DOUBLE the price of gas and diesel thus jacking the price of our groceries and everything delivered with the tens of millions of trucks on the road.
A stupid ignorant criminal fool is too kind of an assessment.
$466 billion! holy cow that’s a lot of profit for someone positioned in the right stocks to take advantage of all the government money. Any ideas on who the big players are? I’ll go check seekingalpha for some recommendations.
Just heard on the news tonight that a new defense bill for Ukraine, Israel AND Taiwan is in the works…Choo! Choo! Gotta position for profits there too.
Excellent post.
Govern me harder daddy! The “profits” and government money you are lamely referring to comes directly out of your pocket.
Exactly, I’ll be taking money from your pockets because I’m positioned for it. You seem positioned for whining and getting poorer.
A) you have no idea how I am positioned, other than on top of your mom, B) people who put on airs about taking money and being ahead of the market are usually broke
It’s almost like the Inflation Reduction Act was just a re-branded “Green New Deal”…..almost.
It was, but under a much less notable way, and with lots more money, and good stuff, that will never occur, in there too. In other words, Government at its finest, and sunlight be damn…
Not the first time we’ve been lied to about costs… Medicare many years ago (1964 or so) wasn’t going to cost that much, and more recently we were told we’d save $2,500 a year each and keep our Doctor with Obamacare….
Unfortunately a lot of those doctors, dentist, eye doctors etc. have retired due to not wanting to deal with all this crap being thrown at them. Most take there oath and profession very serious, and don’t appreciate having that be dictated differently and n some cases actually mandated.
My family lost one doctor to retirement, and an eye doctor to a different position in the industry, behind the scenes. I have friends with similar situations and worse in some saves, due to loss of a specialist.
This is deemed Medical Progress, and better care for all? I don’t know one single person better off with their medical situation. I have heard and seen total chaos, wait times, medicine shortages, discontinued items, not replaced with anything (a special probiotic situation was a scare for 6 months in my family, but they worked it out a couple months ago TG!
God Speed
Wow, who would have known that they sold us a bill of goods and estimated less than half the cost (maybe way less than half by the time it’s done). You know what they say, half a trillion here, half a trillion there … before long you’re talking about real money.
That chart is for 9 years. 120% inflation over 9 years is actually very conservative for these clowns.