The United Nations-backed International Panel on Climate Change is responsible for the “climate catastrophe” and “the world is burning” scenarios that environmentalists, academics and many politicians have promoted to force high-cost, coercive energy policies on Americans.

Yet last month, the IPCC quietly determined that those extreme scenarios are “implausible” — by which they mean impossible.

The most notorious of them — Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or “RCP 8.5” — posited a hellish world of 12 billion people in the year 2100.

The projection assumed the world would be burning more coal than exists, without such likely technological improvements as emissions-free nuclear plants.

RCP 8.5 was meant to represent a worst-case scenario for climate change.

But disaster sells, so environmentalists and politicians embraced it to make all manner of crazy claims.

They relied on academics whose careers depended on using RCP 8.5 and several other worst-case scenarios to predict everything from the demise of French wines and the end of pasta to aliens destroying the earth. (No, really.)

The claims were ludicrous, but the money that flowed to green groups and politicians to promote them and their preferred “solutions” was only too real.

Not for nothing did environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council collect hundreds of millions of dollars to institute bans on natural gas for heating and cooking.

And the economic and, ironically, environmental damages from the policies we’ve adopted to “save us” from climate change have been disastrous.

It’s safe to say that many hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been wasted on them worldwide.

In New York, these policies have included former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ban on fracking, which would bring lower natural gas prices to all New Yorkers and an upstate economic boom, creating thousands of high-paying jobs.

It also included shutting down all fossil-fuel electric generators in the state and promoting a fantasy electric system of wind, solar and batteries, together with “dispatchable emissions-free generators” fueled by “green” hydrogen.

Except such generators don’t even exist.

Cuomo’s green push forced the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant, which provided one-quarter of New York City’s electricity, and making electric customers pay billions of dollars for expensive, unreliable offshore wind turbines that will devastate some of the most productive fisheries along the East Coast.

New York adopted California’s Advanced Clean Car II standards, which would have required more than 40% of the state’s new car sales in New York to be electric vehicles starting this fall, and 100% by 2035. (An executive order from President Donald Trump put a stop to that horror.)

The batteries those EVs use require huge quantities of minerals, with devastating environmental impacts.

The RCP 8.5 panic has mandated all New Yorkers to pay a carbon tax through the state’s membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which levies a tax on all fossil fuels based on their carbon content.

And had it not been for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s re-election campaign, which recognized the political liability, it would already include another carbon tax as part of the state’s disastrous 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

In New York City, the toll of RCP 8.5 includes Local Law 97, a high-cost mandate to remove gas- and oil-fired boilers in local apartment buildings, and install electric heat pumps in their place.

The result will be even higher rents as landlords struggle to meet the requirements.

None of these mandates would have the slightest impact on the world’s climate.

New York’s annual contribution to carbon emissions is tiny, around 200 million metric tons in 2023 — equivalent to just two days of global emissions.

So much for New York saving the planet.

Now the IPCC has dropped its most extreme scenarios — but expect environmentalists and many left-wing politicians to continue citing them, to boost their favored policies.

As the saying goes, “follow the money.”

Jonathan Lesser is a Senior Fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics.