Blue States Keep Missing Their Global Warming Goals

D espite decades of effort, billions of dollars, and largely Democratic political control, deep-blue states keep missing their global warming emissions targets. Yet they never seem to question if their attempts at central planning might be why they keep failing.

New evidence suggests that deep-blue Minnesota dramatically missed its 2025 emissions reduction goals by an enormous 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide; the state already missed its 2015 goals a decade ago. State law requires Minnesota’s electric utilities to reduce their carbon emissions to zero by 2040, with phased-in targets for years in between. The state hasn’t come close to hitting a single one of these as yet.

For years, Democrats have had total control over every level of state government in Minnesota, dominating the governorship, state House, and state Senate. The state hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1972. Yet the only response from Democratic politicians is to demand that the state double down on failure and blame the federal government. “The federal government has certainly tried their best to bury their head in the sand when it comes to climate change,” State Representative Jamie Long, who helped draft the state’s climate law, told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “But I think that just makes it all the more important for states to pick up the federal government’s slack.”

Over the decades, Democrats have used their dominance of Minnesota to enact 127 policies and fiscal incentives that encourage the use of green energy, according to the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency. The state enacted its first pro-solar net-metering legislation in 1983, yet in 2024, it still only got 5 percent of its electricity from that method, according to the Energy Information Administration. If a policy hasn’t worked for 40 years, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate that policy.

Minnesota has a plethora of lucrative financial incentives to boost green energy, including state energy rebates, renewable-energy credits, special property tax exemptions, and a 100 percent sales tax exemption for solar and wind energy system purchases and installations, while the state directly budgets over a billion dollars for green energy each legislative session. As I’ve previously written, Minnesota has more pro-green-energy legislation than any other state but California, which is much sunnier and therefore far more naturally suited to solar power generation.

But despite its formidable natural advantages, California is floundering on a global warming benchmark of its own. The Golden State is set to miss its 2030 emissions reduction target of reducing greenhouse gases by 40 percent of 1990 levels. Right now, the state is just over 17 percent of the way there, an enormous gap considering that “low-hanging fruit” reductions make an early dip in emissions inherently easier. And as in Minnesota, Democrats have totally dominated every level of California politics for over a decade and a half; it hasn’t backed a Republican president since 1988. If these policies were ever going to work, they already would have done so.

In fact, there are seven U.S. states that both voted for Kamala Harris and made a legally binding pledge to reduce their emissions. None of those states is on track to meet its pledge. This means Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington will join California and Minnesota in missing their targets. Democrats politically dominate in all of these states; Colorado was the most recent of these states to vote for a Republican president — 22 years ago.

These states’ climate shortfalls persist despite immense centrally planned efforts, including cap-and-trade systems, wind and solar mandates, incentives for electric vehicles, and many comprehensive climate action frameworks. Tens of billions of dollars and millions of man-hours have been spent on this, and yet blue states continue the same failed strategies of mandating which technology gets used. Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act alone dedicated more than $1 trillion to grants, loans, and tax credits for wind, solar, and other green energy boondoggles between 2022 and 2031, according to estimates by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Clearly, a shortage of federal money was not an issue.

Democrats’ international allies deployed a similar strategy against global warming in the Kyoto Protocol, setting binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in 1997 which went into force in 2005. It is widely agreed to have been a massive failure, as the U.S. Senate unanimously rejected the agreement and Canada ended up formally withdrawing from it after it became clear it would never meet its targets.

Is there any hope for the emissions reductions that blue states seek? What the data say has actually worked to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is a technology despised in blue states: fracked natural gas. The Energy Information Administration said in 2024 that 60 percent of carbon dioxide emissions reductions came from increased use of natural gas. This increased reliance on natural gas has contributed to pragmatic emissions trends in red states, often without explicit climate goals.

In now-deep-red Florida, the electricity sector’s emissions have dropped even as population and energy use have risen. That is thanks to natural gas’s lower carbon intensity. Natural gas has actually reduced U.S. carbon dioxide emissions so much that America would’ve actually met its Kyoto Protocol emissions reduction obligations, had we signed the treaty.

These differing experiences between blue and red states demonstrate why relying on bureaucrats to “solve” global warming is fundamentally silly. It’s impossible for any government to predict how any given technology will develop. The plot of the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun revolves around a fictional economical form of solar power, which is portrayed as cutting-edge and capable of replacing conventional energy. Progressives truly believed that environmental problems could be solved by using bureaucracy to force the adoption of similarly fantastical energy systems, and they haven’t updated that belief in the subsequent 50-plus years.

If even the most progressive jurisdictions — with decades-long commitments of strong political will, detailed mandates, and dedicated funding — cannot meet their own targets, that proves the inherent limitations of the government in addressing environmental issues. Blue states’ aggressive mandates generate headlines and costs, but they haven’t delivered anything close to what they promised while demanding yet more money and power be invested into their failed projects.