Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act imposes fee on greenhouse gas emissions

  Concealed within the 700 and more pages of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a provision that gives Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) greater power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).

President Joe Biden is basically trying two kill two birds with one stone when he signed the IRA on Aug. 16, but critics say he’ll likely miss both targets.

The IRA establishes the “Methane Emission Reduction Program” under a new section in the Clean Air Act, allowing the EPA to impose a fee on certain “air pollutants.” This is the first time the federal government has ever imposed a fee on any greenhouse gas.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported the program applies to specific types of facilities that report their GHG emissions to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Emission Reporting Program.

Facilities that the charge applies to include: offshore and onshore petroleum and natural gas production; onshore natural gas processing and transmission compression; underground natural gas storage; liquefied natural gas storage; liquefied natural gas imports and exports; onshore petroleum and natural gas gathering and boosting; and onshore natural gas transmission pipelines.

This means that if the facilities in the above categories exceed a specific methane threshold, they will be charged $900 per metric ton of methane starting in 2024. In 2025, the charge will be raised to $1,200 and in 2026 and beyond, the cost will be $1,500.

Based on the data from 2019, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the new fees will increase to $1.1 billion in the fiscal year 2026, and almost $1.9 billion by fiscal year 2028. CBO projects revenues will decrease after that as facilities implement methane reduction strategies.

Biden declared previously that by 2030, he wants GHG emissions reduced by 40 percent compared to 2005 levels, and IRA’s implementation of a methane charge put the president’s goals achievable.

According to the EPA website, methane is a hydrocarbon that is a primary component of natural gas and also a GHG, so its presence in the atmosphere affects the planet’s temperature and climate system. The agency further claimed that its emissions accounted for 11 percent of total GHG emissions in the U.S. in 2020.

Reducing methane emissions is “one of the best opportunities for reducing near-term global warming,” the CRS stated.

Swiss physicist: Greenhouse gas effect does not exist

Meanwhile, an independent physicist from Switzerland has conducted a series of studies questioning the physical principles of the greenhouse gas theory. His findings published in peer-reviewed scientific journals could prove that Biden’s ambitious move to fight GHG in the atmosphere is a failure and a total waste of taxpayers’ money.

Thomas Allmendinger, also an independent scholar at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has dared to challenge the conventional politically correct climate dictum. 

In 2016, Allmendinger published a paper entitled “The thermal behavior of gases under the influence of infrared radiation” in the International Journal of Physical Sciences, where he addressed the conventional wisdom that “any infrared radiation (IR) activity of molecules or atoms requires a shift of the electric dipole moment so that two-atomic homo-nuclear molecules (like O2 or N2) are always IR-active.”

He stressed that “apparently no thermal measurements have been made of gases in the presence of IR-radiation, particularly of sunlight,” even though the primary climate concern with greenhouse gases involves the thermal absorption of IR energy.

A year later, he published an article refuting the climate greenhouse theory in Environmental Pollution and Climate Change.

“In gases, two kinds of energy are involved: ‘internal’ energy being related to intramolecular motions, and ‘external’ energy being related to intermolecular motions. The first kind is subject of the quantum mechanics, while the second kind is the subject of the kinetic gas theory. As a consequence, photometric or spectroscopic measurements cannot deliver quantitative information about the warming-up of gases due to thermal or other infrared radiation, while such measurements never have been made so far,” he wrote.

Allmendinger’s experiments found no significant differences between the IR absorption capabilities of carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen or argon when thermal absorption was measured instead of spectrographic wave absorption. “As a consequence, a ‘greenhouse effect’ does not really exist, at least not related to trace gases such as carbon dioxide,” he said.