Earth Day Should Celebrate U.S. Progress & Innovation

Earth Day is here again, giving us another chance to celebrate nature’s bounty and resources, and remind us of the environment’s delicate balance and the roles we play in keeping it. This year, we should also celebrate progress—the progress that Americans and their businesses have made in making the air, water, and land cleaner and healthier for everyone—and remember the need to remain vigilant and mindful of misguided government programs that threaten that progress and the free markets that make it possible.

On Earth Day, the Biden administration ignores progress and prefers dictatorship

Since 2005, the U.S. has significantly reduced its greenhouse gas emissions, primarily by shifting much of its electric power generation from coal to natural gas. Natural gas is affordable and abundant, and it emits half the carbon gases that burning coal does. American power plants have capitalized on these advantages, finding new ways to extract natural gas less expensively and burn it more cleanly. Free-market forces and industry engineers gave us these victories, not government bureaucrats.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration and progressive activists deny the progress and forget the sources of our success. They prefer command economies to free markets, and government diktats and taxpayer subsidies to competition, profit motives, and entrepreneurial innovation. And they care little for the costs of those policy preferences.

The Paris Climate Accords do not work as advertised

On his first day in office, President Biden recommitted to the Paris Climate Accords, an international treaty that empowers his administration to enact draconian environmental mandates to achieve expensive, economically disruptive emissions targets. His Inflation Reduction Act has been a backdoor effort to revive the failed Green New Deal, and his federal regulators have strongarmed automakers and pressured car buyers to swap their unleaded engines for electric vehicles despite their shorter driving ranges, reliability concerns, higher maintenance costs, and consumer reluctance.

Rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and signing up for Euro-style agriculture will have the same devastating impacts here as they have had in Europe, where farmers have resorted to tractor blockades and dumping manure in city streets to protest heavy-handed eco-mandates. Farming costs have skyrocketed as fertilizer prices have risen nearly 30%, the propane needed to dry crops is more expensive, and the effort to replace gas-powered vehicles with weaker, less reliable battery-powered versions has made farm equipment more costly to purchase and maintain. As The Buckeye Institute recently demonstrated, the so-called “net-zero” climate policies favored by President Biden and his European counterparts will raise average farming costs in the U.S. by more than a third. Farmers inevitably will pass those higher costs on to consumers, and American families can expect to pay more than $1,000 a year for groceries—a 15% increase in their annual food bill.

Free markets, not central planning, lead to a clean environment

These are costs and outcomes inflicted by central planners, not market innovators or companies looking to maximize profits by developing new technologies that consumers actually need and want to buy. And the central planners’ solution to help off-set those expected new costs relies on spending more government money—collected via taxes from the same consumers now paying the higher prices—to subsidize building renewable energy plants and charging stations for electric vehicles. But even that effort has largely failed as $7.5 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies has yielded just a handful of new charging stations and new power plants are blocked by new government regulations at every level.

Celebrate Earth Day by celebrating America’s cleaner air and cleaner water brought to us by entrepreneurs, engineers, and innovators who have been able to bring usable, affordable new technologies to market despite the ham-fisted efforts of “green” government regulators and their misguided climate control mandates.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.