Nothing we’ve done in 30 years has stopped the march toward climate collapse. Is the passage of the “Inflation Reduction Act” about to change that?
If that sounds modest, especially given the scale of the climate crisis – well, it is. In sheer dollar amount, the investment is modest too. IRA calls for spending less than $500 billion over a decade, compared with the American Rescue Plan’s $1.
9 trillion in a single year. And IRA will, in theory, reduce the deficit too. So how can such a modest investment have such a big impact? “The answer is that right now we’re sitting on a sort of cusp,” economist Paul Krugman. Renewable energy tech has made revolutionary progress, and renewables are already cheaper in many areas than fossil fuels. “A moderate push from public policy is all that it will take to transition to a much greener economy,” Krugman says. “And the Inflation Reduction Act will provide that push.”To put it another way, this climate deal is all about ripple effects and momentum. In theory, it works like this: subsidies and rebates will give home heat pumps the little push they need to replace gas furnaces, which in turn will reduce demand for natural gas, which will close down the fracking operations that leak methane into the atmosphere. Subsides and rebates will also give electric vehicles the extra shove they need to replace internal combustion engines, which will cut the demand for oil and that will in turn push companies like ExxonMobil and Shell and BP to accelerate their investments in clean energy. The faster this happens, the bigger it snowballs, and the faster the world is transformed. As writer Alex Steffen puts it, in what may be the single most important maxim of the climate era, “As the dynamic shifts, it will inevitably change how money flows in politics. In 2020, the oil and gas industry campaign contributions hit a record-breaking, much of it funneled through front groups and other dark money portholes, with more than two-thirds of it finding its way to Republican candidates and committees. But as the fossil fuel empire declines, that flow will be diverted, or at least spread to a broader spectrum of political players. Instead of dark money flowing to build new coal plants, dark money will flow to build new wind farms. And that’s a kind of progress, right? The increasing inertia of clean energy also changes the constituency for further climate action. “One of the bill’s many benefits is that it could finally break the partisan logjam,” Elizabeth Kolbert. Today, Kolbert points out, roughly five hundred thousand Americans work in the petroleum industry, and another two hundred thousand work in the natural-gas sector. That’s a big constituency for maintaining the fossil-fuel-powered status quo. “If the IRA functions as hoped,” Kolbert argues, “it will create hundreds of thousands of jobs in clean energy and, with them, a growing constituency for climate action.” This broader constituency will also encourage policy changes at the state and local level, which will further drive emissions reduction. In theory, all this will carry over to international climate negotiations and give the U.S. more authority to push other nations – including China and the EU – to do more to cut their own CO2 pollution. This is problematic on many levels, especially given the U.S.’s increasingly hostile relationship with China. But the hope is that more ambitious U.S. leadership will inspire more ambition from other nations and creating what amounts to a global clean energy tsunami. All this momentum will build on itself, helping people see not only that political action works, but that cutting fossils fuels is a clear and direct path to a better world. One with less pollution, more livable cities, better paying jobs, and more justice and equity. So that’s the hopeful scenario. There are, of course, other less inspiring ways of looking at how this may play out. First, as one friend who has worked on climate policy for more than 30 years puts it, “the question arises as to whether rebates/tax credits are enough of a piranha to really eat into greenhouse gas emissions quickly?” Energy modelers agree that the potential for CO2 reductions from these rebates and tax credits are in the realm of forty percent by 2030. But models aren’t the real world. . It could be that the reductions are understated – for example, the $27 billion that IRA pours into the formation of a national from green bank to fund clean energy and infrastructure projects isn’t in the models. But the models also make a lot of assumptions that may not fit well with reality. Just because in the hyper-rational world of the models it makes sense for people buy EVs, it doesn’t mean that they will. There are a thousand reasons why: maybe the backlog is too long, or they just like the purr of internal combustion engines. Ditto with transmission lines and other big infrastructure projects that the models assume will get built without NIMBY lawsuits and other delays. “We’re taking informed guesses with this stuff,” Ben King, an associate director at Rhodium Group, which analyzed the IRA, toldSecond, the fossil fuel thugs are not going to disappear quietly into the night. Exhibit A: thethat Senator Joe Manchin cut to keep the Mountain State Pipeline alive in West Virginia. There is also a mandate tucked into IRA that ties renewable development on federal lands and waters to auctions on millions of acres to fossil fuel drillers.that curtail fossil fuel investment. Other ploys are more subtle. In Texas, Occidental Petroleum is angling for hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to build carbon capture plants that pull very modest quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere but will allow them to market “Third, the climate crisis is a global issue. No matter what the U.S. does, it can’t make much progress alone. How long will China and India keep building new coal plants and Australia keep opening new mines? Will the Democratic Republic of the Congo allowin protected wildlife habitats? How will Russian president Vladimir Putin’s manipulation of oil and gas markets impact the consumption of fossil fuels in the EU? This is not just an issue of political leadership, but of competing interests. If the global demand for beef continues to climb, for example, it means more rainforest in the Congo and Brazil will likely be cut down for pastureland, which will lead to less CO2 absorbed by the rainforest, which will accelerate atmospheric warming, which will in turn push the rainforest itself closer to collapse. It’s not a feel-good feedback loop. Finally, when it comes to climate impacts from rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, it’s very late in the game. Until we get to zero emissions, temperatures are going to keep rising. And due to the warmth that is already built up in the ocean, even after we hit zero emissions, sea level rise is going to continue for a long time to come. Disease transmission, migration, wildfires, more intense hurricanes — none of it going to stop magically with this bill. That does not mean that every ton of CO2 that we avoid putting into the atmosphere doesn’t reduce the risk of climate chaos. It absolutely does. It just means that there is a very long road ahead. So let’s not wonder if this bill is ambitious enough to stave off the climate crisis. It is not. The climate crisis is not like a broken leg, where you find a good doctor and he puts you in a cast for six weeks and you’re back to normal. There is no “fix” for the climate crisis. There is no going back to “normal.” There is only a long, hard fight for a better world. The passage of IRA is a big win. The activists and policy wonks who shaped it and fought for it deserve a place on whatever the climate equivalent of Mt. Rushmore turns out to be.What’s next? Hard choices on deeper, faster CO2 cuts. Hard choices on who gets to live behind a sea wall and who doesn’t. Hard choices on how rich people can compensate poor, vulnerable people for their losses. Hard choices on how avert famines. Hard choices on how to ensure clean drinking water on a planet with nearly eight billion people. Hard choices on how to stop the rape and pillage of the ocean and the decline of coral reefs. Hard choices about how to protect the millions of people who are fleeing from parts of the world that are too hot or too wet to live in. And perhaps most of all, hard choices on how to beat down the fossil fuel thugs and keep democracy alive during all this climate chaos. In the end, the only metric that really matters is up in the sky above Mauna Loa. I want to believe we have hit an inflection point and this is the moment when the Keeling Curve starts to fall and it becomes clear that we took dramatic action to save ourselves and the world we live in. But it will be a while before anyone can say for sure.
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