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.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member