Yesterday, in a strictly party-line vote of 220 for and 207 against, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). The law, which is being touted as “a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions” by the Senate Democrats, will be signed into law by President Biden shortly.
From an environmental perspective, the IRA is in fact historic: it is the first piece of climate change policy to ever pass the U.S. Senate. Given that, I feel almost required to be a booster for it. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good! Something is better than nothing! And, well, sure, that much is true. If models from Princeton University’s Zero Lab are correct, the IRA’s policies will lead to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions being about 42% lower than at their peak in 2005 by 2030; without the legislation, they would have been about 27% lower. That roughly 15% difference in greenhouse gas reduction should be, I suppose, the big story: while it isn’t the 50% reduction that Biden campaigned on, it is an improvement.
Why, then, do I feel so ambivalent over such an apparently momentous victory for the environmental movement?
A natural gas vent in a field [Skitterphoto, Pixabay]
In part, it is the tangled path to passage the IRA faced, in which the Senate Democrats seemed to step on every rake available to them. The act is the direct-to-video version of the Biden administration’s original Build Back Better Act (BBB), which passed in the House last year but died in the Senate when senators Joe Manchin (D – West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D – Arizona) refused to support the bill, along with all 50 of the Republican senators. This led to eight months in which it appeared the Democrats were not going to be able to pass anything of substance on climate change before inevitably handing Congress over to the Republicans in November.
Many media reports gobbled up the drama of Manchin’s sudden change of heart last month. Manchin’s quote about his unexpected reversal – “It would be like hitting a homer in the bottom of the ninth, wouldn’t it?” as reported by the Washington Post – was catnip to people who relate to politicians like characters on Succession. But in practice what this means is that the historic first climate bill to pass through Congress was designed by a coal baron who could have – and in fact, already had – dashed any plan that didn’t give as many giveaways to the fossil fuel lobby as he liked.
This shows in the bill as passed: while much of the climate change provisions are similar to what the House passed last year in BBB, Manchin’s cooperation required a number of giveaways to fossil fuels, including speeding up permitting for some fossil fuel projects, an expansion of off-shore drilling, and tying the expansion of renewable energy on public lands to more oil and gas extraction leases. Another price of Manchin’s acquiescence: a piece of legislation designed to create a 300-mile-long pipeline for fracked natural gas in his home state of West Virginia, precisely the kind of infrastructure we should be avoiding if we want to keep greenhouse gas emissions down. This is to say nothing of all the non-environmental programs Manchin demanded cut from the BBB proposal, most notably the Child Tax Credit that lifted millions of children out of poverty.
While Sinema’s demands were not as obviously hypocritical as fighting climate change through fracking, they were simply maddening in terms of optics. Her big ask? That the legislation maintains the carried-interest tax loophole, the sort of policy that nobody can spin as anything other than a gift to private equity at the expense of the average voter. (The revised, Sinema-compliant plan did include a new 1% excise tax on stock buybacks, at least.)
In the end, it feels to me like so much of what could be positive about the bill has been obscured by the interests of finance and fossil fuels. Even the name change from “Build Back Better” – which at least gives a sense of positive change and improvement after the horrors of the pandemic – to the “Inflation Reduction Act” feels deeply cynical to me. As the Congressional Budget Office notes, its actual effects on inflation are likely to be nil.
Many will say I should just suck it up. That’s politics, baby! That’s how the sausage gets made. Sure. And if I had much confidence that this was, as the Senate Democrats say, just a down payment toward greater action on climate change, I would be more accepting of that. But there is a very good chance that this is the only climate bill that will get passed in the foreseeable future.
Congress is so dysfunctional that the only major legislation that gets passed is must-pass budget reconciliation bills like this one, which can bypass the 60-vote requirement of the filibuster, which already curtails most meaningful legislative action.
The chances that the Democrats maintain their trifecta in the House, Senate, and presidency are slim, even with the passage of this bill and the potential backlash toward the GOP over Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health, and, as mentioned, this bill passed on a strict party-line vote in both houses. I am willing to give the Republicans credit on the occasion that they do something good for the environment, but, as this vote shows, there’s little hope of broad action on climate change if the GOP takes control of either house of Congress. (And the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in West Virginia vs. EPA means that existing governmental agencies have sharply curtailed ability to fight climate change without congressional action.)
If this is the only climate bill we are likely to get before 2030, then it still has to be seen as a major disappointment, even if it is in the aggregate better than nothing.
“Although the current version of this new climate deal, if passed, would provide large investments into renewable energy and open up funding streams for low income and vulnerable communities, it is missing many critical solutions that Indigenous organizers have been uplifting for years,” said the NDN Collective, an Indigenous advocacy organization. “In fact, Black and Indigenous communities are at risk of being further harmed by this deal, as it moves to open up oil and gas leasing in Alaska and the Gulf Coast South, as well as includes further investment into carbon capturing technology – a false solution that has harmful impacts on land and people.”
Addressing the bill’s acquiescence to oil interests in the Gulf region, Colette Pichon Battle, speaking for Taproot Earth Vision, told the Guardian: “Once again, the only climate proposal on the table requires that the communities of the Gulf south bear the disproportionate cost of national interests bending a knee to dirty energy – furthering the debt this country owes to the South.”
This leads me to where I am today as I write this editorial. I’m a Pagan; the natural world is the foundation of my religious beliefs, and as a result, environmental issues are one of the most important political questions on my mind. I’m also a new father of a child who is going to have to deal with all the mistakes we have on the climate getting to this point. This is why I was so angry about BBB getting torpedoed last year, and why I am so ambivalent about the IRA we now actually have.
If this is the first bill of many to tackle the climate emergency and push us toward a saner, more sustainable way of life, then it’s great. But if it’s the only real action we take this decade – and I fear that it might be – our children are going to look back on this and ask us why on Earth we didn’t do more when we had the chance.
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