Federal Subsidies, Not Red-State Freedom, Cut American Emissions

The thing that cut American carbon emissions wasn’t freedom. It was money from Washington — by the truckload.

Drew Bond would like you to believe otherwise. In Red State Freedom Is Better for the Environment Than European Green Socialism, he argues that red states’ low taxes and light regulation built a clean-energy boom that outperformed Europe’s mandates — proof, he says, that “freedom” beats “green socialism.” He spends paragraphs making this case and exactly one paragraph — which he clearly hopes you’ll skim — naming the federal law that actually paid for the boom.

I’ll start with what’s true, because I’m not here to sandbag real numbers. American carbon emissions really have dropped roughly 20 percent since 2005. Texas genuinely produces almost twice as much wind and solar energy as California. Red states really have built enormous renewable capacity, and the workers who put up those turbines did something worth celebrating.

Now here’s how they actually did it — because the author already told you, if you were paying attention.

Eighty-five percent of clean-energy investment under the Inflation Reduction Act — Biden’s signature climate law, which every single congressional Republican voted against — flowed to Republican districts. That’s not a detail. That’s the story. The IRA delivered hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and production incentives, and developers followed the money to places with wide-open land, steady wind, and strong sun.

That isn’t freedom. That’s industrial policy — the government steering private capital toward a public goal through subsidies. It’s exactly what Bond accuses Europe of doing, except when American taxpayers do it, he calls it the free market.

Start with the geography the piece quietly skips. Wind blows hardest in the Great Plains and West Texas because of where the continent sits, not because of who won the last election. Kansas became a top-five wind state because it’s flat, it’s windy, and the federal government paid developers to build there. Replace “freedom” with “flat, windy, and federally subsidized” and the mystery runs out of air.

Bond waves around “Econ 101” like a winning hand. But the real lesson is about what costs don’t show up on anyone’s bill. When a factory dumps smoke into the air, the people downwind pay the hospital bill — the factory doesn’t. A power grid is one set of wires to your house. There’s no competing set. The textbook question is who pays for the wires and the cleanup. Bond’s frame skips that question and calls the result free-market success. The textbook calls it free-riding.

Then there’s natural gas, which Bond names as “the clear driving force” before moving on quickly — as though naming it were the same as explaining it. Gas replacing coal genuinely cut emissions. But the fracking boom that made it possible came with costs the piece pretends don’t exist. Methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, traps more than eighty times as much heat as carbon dioxide over twenty years when it leaks into the atmosphere — and satellite measurements keep finding that producers leak considerably more than they report at the wellhead. Oklahoma’s injection of fracking wastewater triggered more than 900 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater in 2015 alone, in a state that used to average roughly two a year. Pennsylvania’s water contamination complaints near drilling sites are documented, litigated, and unresolved. Calling this “freedom” is a marketing decision. The people whose wells went dry might choose a different word.

And then there’s the accounting trick — brazen enough to deserve its own paragraph. Bond points out, correctly, that when European factories close, their production moves to China, where it runs on coal — emissions shifting to someone else’s ledger. He calls this “environmental arbitrage,” and he’s right about that. Problem is, the United States has been doing exactly the same thing for thirty years. We shipped enormous manufacturing capacity to Asia, watched our production-based emissions drop, and congratulated ourselves on the declining numbers while buying the carbon-intensive goods back at the container ship. If emissions outsourcing is a scandal when Europe does it, it’s a scandal here too. You can’t call it a dirty trick in someone else’s suit and a policy success in your own.

German electricity prices really are painful. BASF is shifting some of its production abroad, partly because of energy costs. Fair — some mandates overreached. But the piece builds its whole case from Germany and the Netherlands while quietly ignoring the countries where mandates produced genuine results. Denmark charges its households some of the highest electricity rates in Europe — but much of that bill is tax and VAT, not generation cost. When the wind blows hard, Danish wholesale power prices actually go negative. Denmark runs the most wind-heavy grid on the continent and has some of the cleanest air in Europe to show for it. “Some mandates failed” isn’t the same as “mandates fail.” One diet that didn’t work doesn’t mean food is useless. The piece went shopping for evidence and bought Germany, hoping you wouldn’t notice Scandinavia.

Here’s what actually happened — worth understanding clearly. The United States cut emissions through a combination of cheap natural gas displacing coal, a massive federal subsidy program steering clean-energy investment into red states, and EPA regulations on coal-plant mercury and toxic particulates that made coal uncompetitive before the market would have on its own. Markets generated the energy. Government set the floor and steered the money. Both did real work. Neither alone would have gotten the result.

That combination — public investment operating alongside market forces — isn’t European socialism. It’s the pragmatic middle that every country actually cutting emissions is using, including the ones Bond wants to scare-quote into irrelevance. The question was never whether government should be involved. It already is, and Bond’s own numbers prove it.

And notice the sleight of hand in his closing: he slides “refineries” into a list with wind farms and solar arrays, as if oil infrastructure belongs in the same sentence as clean energy. The wind farms were built because of the IRA. The refineries were built because there’s oil in the ground. Those are two different stories, sold to you as one.

The real question is whether we keep the subsidies that built the boom or repeal them — which is exactly what some in Bond’s coalition want to do — while claiming credit for results the subsidies produced. Call public investment “freedom” if the branding makes you more comfortable. But at least have the decency not to gut the funding while you’re taking the bow.