By Roger Straw, July 30, 2022

The proposed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is important, no doubt about that.  Here are a number of ways to learn more.

If you’re a wonk for details, read the first of these two articles below, Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act: What’s Good and Bad for Climate News. by Drilled News.

If you want a one-page exposé on the bill’s weak points, check out the second article, Manchin Poison Pills Buried in Inflation Reduction Act Will Destroy Livable Climate, by Brett Hartl of the Center For Biological Diversity.

Offsite reading – see also:

• • Senate Democrats –  The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, one-page summary
  • Washington Post: How the Schumer-Manchin climate bill might impact you and change the U.S.
  • New York Times: Democrats’ Plan to Fight Inflation May Lower Costs Over Time
  • Vox News: How Democrats plan to overhaul taxes, climate spending, and health care before the midterms
  • Senate Dems: The whole enchilada – 725 pages

It’s a sad day when “progress” must be taken in great big baby steps and a few backward leaps.  I fear for the generations to come….

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Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act: What’s Good and Bad for Climate

Drilled News, July 28, 2022

Weird coincidence: My power was out when the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was announced. By the time it came back on, Twitter was awash in takes on what Senator Joe Manchin’s proposal means for climate. Quick aside here, how annoying is the dude who shits on everyone else’s proposal and then finally submits his own worst-of-all-versions approach as the most sensible path forward? We’ve all worked with this dude at some point, and he is no one’s favorite.

Negotiating on climate policy with Senator Coal Baron began with the first iteration of the Build Back Better Act, which earmarked more than $500 billion for climate-related programs. That was still less than half of what is needed to actually transition off of fossil fuels, but it was a start and clean energy advocates were particularly excited about the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would have required electric utilities to clean up their electricity mixes by 4 percent each year. That doesn’t sound like much, but even the fastest-moving utilities were hitting around 2 percent each year (2020 was the best year on record, when the utility sector hit a 2.3 percent increase in clean energy), so the mix of regulation and incentives aimed at pushing them to 4 percent would have delivered meaningful emissions reductions. It was one of the first programs Manchin killed; he said utilities were already moving quickly enough. The fee proposed on methane emissions went too, as did a whole host of other regulatory measures.

“What we’ve seen is that carrots are much easier to pass than sticks,” Dr. Leah Stokes, professor of political science at University of California at Santa Barbara and author of the book Shortcircuiting Policy, about the way utilities have influenced and controlled energy policy over the years, told me at the time. “It’s really hard to actually require change,” she adds. “It’s a lot easier to say, ‘Hey, if you’d like to go solar, cool! Here’s some money. But you know, you don’t have to. You want an EV? Sure, that’s great. But you know, you don’t have to get an EV. Everything is just kinda voluntary and that’s important. Don’t get me wrong. Carrots are really important. But the problem with climate change is that we actually have to move fast enough. We need everybody to be doing the right thing at the pace and scale that’s necessary.”

And therein lies the rub. Politicans are still treating climate change like, well, politics. In doing so they’re missing the one really key difference between this issue and every other issue they might address: time. If Washington fucks up on healthcare, people will die, it’s true. But we’re not locked into mass death year over year, compounding and increasing all the time with no way to stop it. A new policy could literally stop the bleeding from one day to the next. The same is not true of climate. A compromise today may well be smart politics, but it is also genocide. It is a choice to put corporate profits above human life, and not just the humans walking around right now but also those who will walk the Earth 50 years from now. It’s the sort of thing that makes me wonder all the time whether politics is just fundamentally incapable of meeting this challenge.

Which is not to say that doing something, anything isn’t always better than doing nothing. Every percentage of a degree matters, and despite the fact that this Act supports fossil fuel extraction alongside clean energy development, on the whole we will emit less than had Manchin proposed absolutely nothing. So, with our climate realist glasses on, let’s take a look at the details of this proposal, which Manchin and Schumer agreed to and announced on July 27, 2022, and which they say could be law as early as August 2022.

The Weeds

This is a 725-page bill, and I have not read every single page yet, so please if there are climate provisions lurking outside the “Energy Security” section give me a shout. The section begins on page 232, and it starts with “Clean Electricity and Reducing Carbon Emissions.” Here’s what it does (I’ve put ** next to provisions that were part of the original BBB climate proposal):
…….(>>>…continued, click here…)  [An EXTENSIVE listing of provisions follows, a thorough analysis of the bill’s pros and cons.  Excellent for a deep understanding.  – R.S.]

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