What would Americans gain from eliminating every ton of carbon dioxide emitted from the use of fossil fuels in the United States? The answer, even accepting unfounded assumptions that make the so-called benefit look as large as possible, is nothing.
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The global campaign against carbon dioxide (CO2) rests on a promise that has never been audited. Governments around the world have instituted levies, cap-and-trade markets, fuel standards, and subsidies on the unexamined premise that national sacrifice – to the point of economic destruction – would avoid calamitous warming.
Washington signed on to the premise twice. The Obama administration delivered the Clean Power Plan and a Paris pledge to cut emissions more than 25% below 2005 levels. The Biden administration made a fiscal commitment that Congress put at $391 billion in the climate provisions of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Add rules for tailpipes and power plant exhausts, appliance standards, and fuel mandates, and Americans are financing the largest reordering of an energy system in history.
You were told this would help the planet. Nobody said by how much.
Demolishing Economies of 50 States for Zero Gain
A report by Advancing American Freedom’s Kevin Dayaratna, “Fifty States, Virtually No Impact,” puts the question through computer models emulating alarmist climate simulations of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In an accommodation to the IPCC’s far-fetched apocalyptic claims, the analysis assumes the fantasy that cuts in greenhouse gas emissions began in 2020 and became permanent. Disputed technical assumptions of the IPCC were included as well.
Even so, Dayaratna found that the amount of global warming avoided by elimination of U.S. CO2 emissions would be about 0.11 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 0.24 degrees Celsius by 2100. The report ranks the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia according to their theoretical warming potential, showing differences of tiny fractions of a degree. Of course, it is ludicrous to think that such small differentials could be predicted decades in advance when the weekend’s weather forecast often is wrong.
The report’s overarching message is that a state legislator voting for U.N.-style climate policies would impose catastrophic economic costs on constituents in exchange for a temperature reduction that cannot be observed or felt.
Real Physics Exposes Pseudoscientific Absurdities
To add to the absurdity, every figure in the Dayaratna analysis assumes the U.N. IPCC’s warming analysis is sound. Strip away the pseudoscientific assumptions, and the collapse of the case for favored climate programs compounds. Real-world physics tells a completely different story.
Greenhouse gases, including CO2, exhibit diminishing returns in their warming effect as atmospheric concentrations rise. At current levels, the infrared absorption bands for CO2 are already largely saturated, meaning additional molecules contribute progressively less to warming. Doubling CO2 from today’s 420 parts per million translates to a trivial temperature increase of less than 1 degree Celsius.
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Using more realistic assumptions, the amount of warming averted by 2050 would be 0.0084 degrees Celsius (instead of 0.11 degrees) if U.S. emissions were eliminated. Cutting out all global emissions would avoid only 0.070 degrees Celsius of warming, again assuming that any of this can be predicted at all.
Natural, Beneficial Warming
In 2025 comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Dr. William Happer, professor of physics emeritus at Princeton University, called the assertions of the IPCC “badly flawed science.” First, he said, greenhouse gases from the Industrial Revolution to the present have not caused catastrophic warming, extreme weather, or harm; saturation ensures their future impact will be even smaller. Second, most observed warming since 1750 reflects natural recovery from the Little Ice Age, with greenhouse gases contributing only a fraction.
The EPA, Happer said, should “inform the public of the real science that increasing carbon dioxide and other (greenhouse gas) emissions, and increasing the use of fossil fuels will benefit people worldwide with more food and cheap energy, with only a trivial effect on temperature and extreme weather.”
So, the return on trillions in subsidies, costs of regulatory compliance, higher electricity prices, and lost economic growth is hypothetical, minuscule temperature changes that mean nothing.
Policymakers should weigh their energy decisions accordingly, prioritizing affordable and reliable energy supplies over the vacuous gestures of an antihuman ideology.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
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Image: Oak Ridge National Lab