Tax Day Truth Bomb: Where Your Climate Dollars Really Went
Global emissions are up. Western economies are down. Someone’s winning... and it’s not you.
On Tax Day, as Americans send trillions to Washington, most of us want to know: Are our dollars actually solving problems like climate change… or are they funding a global shell game? Western nations claim progress on emissions, but the truth is, much of the "success" comes from outsourcing pollution to countries like China and India, raising serious questions about fairness, effectiveness, and who’s really benefiting.
The Illusion of Domestic Emission Reductions
Let’s start with what the data shows. According to the Global Carbon Project, since the year 2000:
China’s emissions have soared by over 208%,
India’s by 155%,
While the U.S. has reduced emissions by 10% and Europe by 16%.
At first glance, that might look like climate progress. But it’s anything but.
Those reductions in the West haven’t occurred because of cleaner innovation alone, they’ve come because we outsourced our manufacturing and heavy industries. The steel, cement, aluminum, and petrochemicals we once produced domestically are now made in countries burning more coal, emitting more carbon, and bypassing the same environmental standards we impose on ourselves. In "The Green Revolution’s Dirty Secret", I explored how this offshoring affects not just emissions, but also human rights, resource depletion, and geopolitical stability.
This isn’t decarbonization. It’s creative accounting. We didn’t reduce emissions… we outsourced them, then patted ourselves on the back.
This is clearly illustrated in Le Quéré et al. 2018, where Figure 5c shows CO2 emissions for developed countries continuing to rise. That means emissions embedded in imported goods are simply replacing domestic emissions. The optics may have improved, but the atmosphere doesn’t care where the emissions originate.
Still Developing? Really?
Despite being the world’s second-largest economy and the largest emitter, China still enjoys “developing nation” status under the Paris Agreement. That means no binding carbon caps. No emissions taxes. No transparency. India, too, gets a free pass under this classification.
In "China's Coal Paradox", I showed how China is building more coal plants than the rest of the world combined, including financing them abroad through Belt and Road energy projects.
If CO₂ really is a global pollutant, as the climate consensus insists, why does it matter where it’s emitted? Why is a Chinese coal plant less regulated than an American one? Are we pretending CO₂ molecules carry passports? Do carbon molecules from Chinese power plants behave differently than those from European ones?
Europe’s Energy Suicide
This second image says it all. Europe is committing economic suicide.
Industrial electricity prices in the UK, Germany, Italy, and France have skyrocketed above $200/MWh, nearly four times higher than in China. These aren’t abstract numbers. They’re killing manufacturing, decimating competitiveness, and shifting industrial power eastward. Germany’s Energiewende, its multi-decade green energy transition, has cost over €500 billion, delivering higher costs, increased reliance on coal, and lost industrial output.
In "Prosperity in the Shadow of Carbon", I detailed how cheap and abundant energy is the foundation of modern prosperity, and how we're systematically tearing that foundation down in the name of optics.
If emissions just go up elsewhere, and our factories close here, is that really a climate win… Or just economic suicide dressed up as moral superiority?
But What Are We Actually Preventing?
Now let’s talk about the impacts we’re supposedly avoiding. The IPCC’s own Table 12.12 from AR6 (see table below) maps climate-related drivers: heatwaves, floods, cyclones, and droughts… and shows where they’ve already emerged or are projected to emerge.
It’s a sea of white boxes.
In IPCC-speak, white means low confidence, insufficient evidence, or no clear signal. Even under extreme high-emissions scenarios like RCP8.5, most of these feared impacts either haven’t emerged or aren’t projected to emerge even by 2100.
And yet we’ve spent trillions to “solve” this problem.
I tackled this disconnect in “Forgotten Extremes”, showing how lies of omission by the IPCC, not the measurements, are driving the narrative.
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