According to compilations of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) data by groups such as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and independent fiscal trackers, the federal government spent roughly $154-$166 billion on climate activities between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s. By 2017, the OMB reported annual climate-related funding across 19 agencies at roughly $13.2 billion.
A significant portion of reported climate mitigation spending goes to multi-purpose programs where climate is not the primary mission. For example, a 2018 GAO audit found that in a review of six major agencies, up to 94% of their reported climate funding went to programs that simply touch on emissions reductions (like broad nuclear energy research or basic energy efficiency) rather than being single-focus climate initiatives.
There are also hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits that go to green companies for their "climate mitigation" efforts in wind, solar, and electric cars.
That's a ton of green for green. And a lot of it was based on bad science, the misapplication of good science, and the deliberate exaggeration of the climate change problem for political purposes.
RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5) is a greenhouse gas concentration trajectory that climate scientists use for climate modeling and research. It was introduced in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) in 2014. Also at that time, three other emissions models were introduced:
One very low mitigation scenario (RCP2.6)
RCP4.5 a "very low baseline"
RCP6.0 a "medium baseline"
Historically, RCP8.5 was designed to represent a high-emissions baseline scenario where no explicit climate mitigation policies are enacted. It assumes continuous, rapid increases in global greenhouse gas emissions throughout the 21st century.
In other words, if the human race stood by and did nothing, we'd be cooked by 2100. While frequently labeled by the media and some studies as the "business-as-usual" scenario, many prominent climate experts and organizations (including the International Energy Agency) argue that RCP8.5 has become highly improbable.
Thanks to the rapid global decline in solar and wind power costs, a significant real-world shift away from coal, and the widespread adoption of emissions policies over the last decade, actual global emissions trajectories are tracking much more closely to intermediate pathways such as RCP4.5 or RCP6.0, or less.
So what's the problem? Governments, insurance companies, and scientists used the RCP8.5 scenario to calculate spending, insurance rates on homes and businesses, and to develop other scenarios of the impact of climate change. Governments and insurance companies had no business using RCP8.5 when they knew it was a "worst-case scenario" and not a plausible future.
Scientists who developed the RCP8.5 scenario were shocked that policymakers actually used it to create programs and pass legislation.
Despite the warning, tens of thousands of papers have been published that pair RCP8.5 as a reference scenario with the other RCPs as policy scenarios (typically RCP4.5 and RCP2.6). In particular RCP4.5 was often treated as representative of the consequences of aggressive climate policy,1 when under the RCP framework, it should have been treated just like RCP8.5 — as a baseline.
Without correction from people who knew better — which includes the many people who have participated in scenario development the entire time — the misinterpretation of RCP8.5 as the only baseline scenario in the set took off and came to dominate how the RCPs (and SSPs) have been used for the past 15 years in both science and policy.
As one unnamed Dutch scientist told De Volkskrant in 2020: “You simply do not realize that the RCPs can start a life of their own.”
"The lesson here is that the value of a scenario set lies in the breadth of assumptions it spans, not in the correctness of any single pathway," Roger Pielke, Jr. writes. "Incorporating a range of assumptions into scenarios is the hedge against the flaws of the details of any individual scenario, because the builders cannot know in advance which of their assumptions will hold up and which will not."
The New Zealand government's use of RCP8.5 had catastrophic economic consequences for some homeowners. "In a letter shared on 1 July 2026 with local communities across New Zealand, the country’s Minister of Climate Change, Simon Watts, has asked public officials to reconsider using RCP8.5 and other retired scenarios in their planning decisions," writes Pielke. Watts admits using "these implausible emissions scenarios" in a way that “results in unnecessary costs being imposed on ratepayers, businesses, and communities.”
On the Kapiti Coast, residents describe hazard notations stamped onto their property files that are based on a consultant's report built on futures projected under RCP8.5. One local resident complained: "They're using RCP 8.5 which is the most extreme outcome. House prices are on the way down, insurance prices are skyrocketing, because they have put notations on all of our LIM reports [Land Information Memorandum, which assesses hazards], which uses the extreme modeling."
A former Wellington city councilor in the film argues that the problem lies in "the use of the IPCC 8.5 model that is supposed to be used only for stress-testing and not for policy-making." (author emphasis)
The New Zealanders can sue and hope that their descendants will eventually be compensated, but what about the rest of us? Do we even know which policies, taxes, tax breaks, and regulations were created to address a "worst-case scenario" that the IPCC considers "improbable"?
We're not likely to hear an answer from climate activists. They're too busy spouting nonsense about RCP8.5 and claiming it's gospel.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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