The Senate yesterday passed on a party-line basis Democrats’ latest tax and spending bill, which they call the Inflation Reduction Act. President Joe Biden extolled that legislation, saying the bill “makes the largest investment ever in combatting the existential crisis of climate change.” That $369 billion green energy “investment” includes new and expanded subsidies for consumers who purchase electric vehicles, energy-efficient appliances, and solar panels, along with vast new spending for other green priorities. On passing the legislation, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said “This bill will kickstart the era of affordable clean energy in America.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has called the plan “transformational,” adding without flinching that “we have never spent this much money” on green energy.

If that all sounds
very familiar, that’s because it is.

Today’s rhetoric closely echoes liberal braggadocio about the nearly $800 billion Obama stimulus package. That February 2009 legislation similarly included over $80 billion for dozens of new programs that President Barack Obama described as creating “a big step down the road to energy independence, and laying the groundwork for a new, green energy economy.” Obama argued the legislation was needed because “we can’t power America’s future on energy that’s controlled by foreign dictators”—although it didn’t prevent what President Biden now calls “Putin’s price hike.” The stimulus law also was sold as needed to create millions of jobs, but when it didn’t, President Obama wanly admitted “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

Then-Vice President Joe Biden issued a December 2009 progress report reviewing the “transformation to a clean energy economy” he claimed was already resulting from “the largest single investment in clean energy in American history.” Now over a decade later, it’s obvious that transformation was more rhetoric than reality, as today’s Democrats insist far more spending is needed to do the same job—through what they naturally call “the single biggest climate investment in U.S. history.”

The
similarities extend well beyond just shared rhetoric. The Inflation Reduction
Act also revives and expands many of the same supposedly “transformational” green
energy initiatives in the Obama stimulus law—at far greater taxpayer expense.

The New York Times summarized today’s bill as including $98 billion “to increase production of electricity from renewable or non-carbon sources.” The Obama stimulus law spent $23 billion on “investments in renewable generation and advanced energy manufacturing,” including for wind and solar energy, according to Biden’s 2009 report.

Today’s bill also proposes a “$4,000 consumer tax credit for lower/middle income individuals to buy used clean vehicles, and up to $7,500 tax credit to buy new clean vehicles.” Counting related “clean vehicle” policies, that would cost taxpayers $14 billion and disproportionately benefit higher-income individuals. That’s because, even with these subsidies, they’re the only ones who could possibly afford a new electric vehicle, whose average cost has soared to over $60,000. That also shows the $16 billion the 2009 law spent subsidizing “plug-in hybrids, all-electric vehicles and the infrastructure needed to power them” was just a down payment.

The new proposal also adds more taxpayer support for carbon capture, beyond the $10 billion in the 2009 law. Biden in 2009 declared that, as a result of that former spending, “We will lead the world in clean coal technology,” but it wasn’t enough. Other green spending—then and now—bankrolls left-wing “environmental justice” causes, climate slush funds, green government buildings, and far more.

Upon securing the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, Barack Obama famously declared that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The record green energy spending included in the 2009 stimulus law was supposed to be the Obama-Biden administration’s means to that end, or what then-Vice President Biden called “the transformation to a clean energy economy.” It’s clear those policies didn’t achieve that transformation, as Speaker Pelosi now argues even more spending is needed due to “rising sea levels,” among other ills. Pelosi also predictably says this latest and far larger green energy spending is “about the future.” If enacted, however, that raises the question: How soon into the future will the next record green energy spending plan appear, because this one, like the last, didn’t prove as transformational as its supporters claimed?

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