Since 2013, Germany has spent $181 billion reducing CO2 emissions. Guess what the per-ton cost of doing this has been.
Giving Germany credit for pointlessly reducing annual emissions by a measly 200 million tons since 2013 — while spending $181 billion to do it — that works out to a cost (so far) of $905 per ton of CO2 reduced. Such a deal! The current price of CO2 credits on the European ETS is about $20.
If Germany had just bought CO2 credits via the European cap-and-tax system (which have spent most of the past five years around $5/ton), it probably could have spent way less than $1 billion to achieve the same virtue signaling.
It’s no wonder that Germans pay outrageous price for electricity — so much so that electricity has been called a “luxury good.”