The Biden administration doggedly has pursued a “net zero” climate-control policy since President Joe Biden’s first day in the Oval Office when he recommitted the country to the Paris Climate Accords. And as anyone who has shopped at grocery stores in the last three years will tell you, it’s been all downhill from there.
Biden has issued executive orders targeting future domestic oil and natural gas supplies, which will make chemicals more expensive to produce and purchase. His agents at the Securities and Exchange Commission have proposed ESG reports to track carbon emissions from the farmer’s field to the family dinner table. And that’s just the start.
This misguided ideological climate agenda is designed to make fertilizers, tractors, trucks, heating and drying equipment, electricity, oil, gas, transportation, freezers, and food more expensive. The higher price tag for each stage of food production, from field to fork, is a feature, not a bug of the Biden economy. It is part and parcel of the Left’s concerted effort to make carbon energy more expensive and reduce consumption.
The European Union has tilted at these same quixotic windmills for decades, and its economies have been battered and bruised as a result.
Europe’s electric companies foisted their higher energy costs on consumers, and residential and industrial power prices promptly rose 131% and 59%, respectively, between January 2021 and January 2022. Germany’s manufacturing and chemical industries were tagged with escalating cap-and-trade prices and taxes designed to curb emissions. They responded by spending hundreds of billions of dollars to leave Europe’s grid.
Several EU countries have even gone so far as to encourage private banks to withhold vital loans from farms deemed to emit too much greenhouse gas. Fewer farms, lower emissions — all part of the climate-control plan.
But fewer farms also means more expensive and less available food. People are already paying historically high prices at the local grocer. As reported in April, a typical list of groceries costs 36.5% more today than it did in 2019, with the prices for eggs and sports drinks up more than 40%. The price increases now have consumers spending more than 11% of their income on food — a peak not reached since 1991, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. And when the Euro-style climate controls envisioned by the Biden administration reach our farms, grocers, and restaurants, families in the United States will pay even more for even less.
To better appreciate the costs American farms and households should soon expect, the Buckeye Institute modeled the anticipated expenses for the “social cost of carbon emissions” on a typical corn farm. Unsurprisingly, diesel fuel for trucks, tractors, and combines will be more expensive. The propane for powering grain dryers, heating barns, and commonly used nitrogen fertilizers will all cost more, too.
Once adopted, the Biden administration’s climate-control carbon pricing scheme will raise operating costs for farmers by at least $65,000 per year — a 34% spike.
And those price increases won’t stay down on the farm. Here, as in Europe, farmers will pass their higher costs along to grocery stores, restaurants, and consumers still struggling to make ends meet while fending off inflation. As the Buckeye Institute’s model warned, Biden’s new rules will make the food chain more expensive and raise an average four-person family’s household grocery bills by $1,330 annually, a 15% jump. Some carbon-intensive foods such as processed cheese and beef could rise by as much as $9 per pound each, making $20 cheeseburgers a staple of the Biden administration’s net-zero policy menu.
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But these price increases are not just the carnivore’s dilemma. Bananas will cost an extra 59%, strawberries will cost another 47%, and rice may soon cost everyone 56% more than it does today.
People looking for a better economic agenda and more affordable backyard barbecues this summer will not find them in the current president’s plan. Biden has made his “net-zero” aspirations a firecracker feature of his economic vision for the country. Good luck paying for it, America.
Rea S. Hederman Jr. is vice president of policy and executive director of the Economic Research Center at the Buckeye Institute in Columbus, Ohio.
