Opinion | The Green Transition Is Happening Fast. The Climate Bill Will Only Speed It Up. - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...uction-act-climate-change.html
bill law 2022 IRA climate change response energy politics policy economics
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Among the first things you likely heard about the Inflation Reduction Act was its size.The bill, signed into law by President Biden on Tuesday, makes $369 billion in climate and energy investments — by far the largest such investment in American history.
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But there are several ways to measure the size of a bill, and given how high the country’s emissions targets are, even many of the I.R.A.’s supporters will openly concede that it is, on its own, inadequate
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it is ultimately how much carbon we put into the atmosphere and not how much solar power we produce that determines the future of warming. But the power of carrots also just reflects some new realities: To simplify radically, a 90 percent reduction in the cost of solar power over the last decade means that the same amount of money now goes ten times as far.
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the broader economic and cultural landscape is so different now than it was just a few years ago that public investments of even this somewhat smaller scale appear poised to make an enormous difference.
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That’s because those public investments are being made not against dirty-energy headwinds but with the support of much broader tailwinds
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Thanks to technological change and the plunging cost of renewables, a growing political and cultural focus on decarbonization and increasing awareness of the public health costs of pollution and market trends for things like electric vehicles and heat pumps, it’s genuinely a whole new world out there. Not that long ago, the upfront cost of a green transition looked almost incalculably large. Today it seems plausible that quite dramatic emissions gains can be achieved for just, say, $369 billion
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For 90 percent of the world, clean energy is now cheaper than dirty alternatives, and while countries like Spain are boasting about more than tripling solar power capacity by 2030, in Texas, solar output has grown 39-fold in just six years. Globally, renewable output has grown fourfold in the past decade
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Ten years ago, when the United States endeavored to tackle the problem of climate change, it tried to do so largely by punishing the cost of dirty energy with a cap-and-trade system. This time, it’s giving a kick-start, or a boost of momentum, to an already ongoing green transition.
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this strategic choice of carrots rather than sticks has received some deserved praise: It’s better and more popular to subsidize cheap, clean energy than it is to make the bad stuff more expensive
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A “fair share” analysis suggests the United States — today the world’s second largest emitter, and historically the largest by far — should be moving faster than any nation in the world.
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it is fair to wonder about the uncertain economics of some of the bill’s technological bets, like carbon capture and storage, which could allow emissions from industry and power generation to be trapped and sequestered, and which some climate activists and environmental justice advocates distrust
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Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project, says he believes that the tech problems of C.C.S. have been solved and that, with tax credits, the bill will address its cost problem, leading to a dramatic scale-up in use. Julio Friedmann, a former Obama-era Energy Department official turned carbon removal advocate, says that a rapid scale-up of C.C.S. would be, while miraculous, also plausible.
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the fact that this much climate progress appears even remotely possible for less than the annualized budget of the State Department, as Ben Dreyfuss recently put it, is a remarkable reflection of the state of green energy today, even without the new law. When it comes to emissions, we are no longer fighting an uphill battle, at least in the United States and many other countries like it. We are deciding how quickly to race downhill.
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at the risk of playing Pollyanna, I think it is also possible to see the size of the bill — its relative smallness — as at least a mark of good news
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The headline projection of the I.R.A. impact appears, if inadequate by the standards of the Paris agreement, nevertheless impressive: a 40 percent reduction in just eight years
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already today the United States has reduced emissions 20 percent from 2005 levels, and was projected to reduce them further even without the benefit of the I.R.A. As recently as a few weeks ago, before the bill was revived, it might have felt like the United States was permanently stalled on climate action, but in fact the country was already moving to decarbonize, if not fast enough.
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peed really matters; as the writer and activist Bill McKibben put it, when it comes to warming, “winning slowly is the same as losing.” Simply moving in the right direction isn’t enough, and too much time has been squandered — within the United States and globally — to avoid what was once described as a catastrophic climate future.
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If the United States achieves that 40 percent reduction, that’s still well short of the country’s target of a 50-52 percent reduction by 2030. The gap may seem relatively small, but it represents more than half a billion tons of carbon each year. That’s a lot.
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the I.R.A. is a compromise, obviously and outwardly, tying new leases for wind power development to new ones for oil and gas, only moderately reducing the country’s demand for oil and gas over the next decade and investing less in environmental justice measures than Biden himself promised not too long ago
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But its basic bet — that many of these markets and technologies are close enough to tipping points that relatively small public support can get them racing toward inevitability — also means the ultimate impacts could be larger and far-reaching.
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The effects on prices and markets could make state and local action cheaper and easier, and even federal regulation more palatable
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the bill includes some unheralded provisions to help retire coal power more quickly, as Keane Bhatt, the policy director for the Progressive Caucus, has pointed out, as well as an under-discussed “stick” in the form of a fee for methane
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The impact of its “green bank” and Energy Department loans could be quite large — some estimates have suggested they could run into the hundreds of billions, and the $27 billion handed to the Green Bank could catalyze ten times as much private capital
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because much of the I.R.A.’s top-line “investment” comes in the form of tax credits, its outlays — and impacts — could ultimately grow substantially if certain sectors (wind, solar and C.C.S., for instance) really do take off.
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This might not ultimately be just a $369 billion package, in other words, but something quite a bit bigger. Enough to get us to 50 percent by 2030? “I think we have a pretty good chance,” Jenkins says.
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it is striking that, given where we were not that long ago, such a proposition seems credible at all. Here’s hoping.
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The provisions tying future auctions for wind power to leases for oil and gas development have been called “poison pills,” because they appear to lock in future emissions. But the ultimate impact is likely to be quite small. (Energy Innovation estimates at most 50 million tons of additional annual carbon emissions, compared with a billion in reductions from other measures in the bill.)