The Inflation Reduction Act Is a Huge Deal for the Climate – bestinau

Start with the environmental side. Many people I talk to assume that President Biden’s environmental agenda, as contained in his original Build Back Better proposal, must have been greatly watered down in the legislation we actually got. After all, didn’t Democrats have to make big concessions to win over Senator Joe Manchin? Aren’t there important giveaways to fossil fuel interests, like aid for a controversial natural gas pipeline?

However, energy analysts believe that any adverse climate effect from these concessions will be swamped by the gains from tax credits for clean energy. The REPEAT Project, compiled by Princeton’s ZERO Lab, has produced a side-by-side comparison of emissions cuts under the Inflation Reduction Act and the earlier House version of Build Back Better. By 2035 the I.R.A., they estimate, will have delivered more than 90 percent of the emissions reductions that B.B.B. would have achieved. After all that legislative drama, Biden’s climate policy has emerged essentially intact.

How was this possible? Right at the beginning, the Biden administration decided that its climate policy would be all carrots, no sticks — that it would provide incentives to do the right thing, not penalties for doing the wrong thing. This strategy, it was hoped, would prove politically feasible in a way that, say, a carbon tax wouldn’t. And this hope has been vindicated.

Furthermore, it’s a strategy that seems likely to pay political dividends in the future. One new study, by E. Mark Curtis and Ioana Marinescu, finds that “the growth of renewable energy leads to the creation of relatively high paying jobs, which are more often than not located in areas that stand to lose from a decline in fossil fuel extraction jobs.”