“Unprecedented” is often applied to the Inflation Reduction Act’s funding provisions to address the climate crisis. And as E2’s ongoing analysis shows, the dollars being invested in the nation’s green transition are already having a positive impact that IRA’s GOP foes would rather you not hear about—particularly good news such as 100,000 new manufacturing jobs. While notoriously praising the arrival of a new project in their own districts without mentioning that it wouldn’t exist without the IRA that every Republican voted against, they attack the overall program. They are determined to ax it if they get the opportunity should November work out for them.
Determined to backfoot America and its people in the global green transformation. Determined to sabotage hard-won environmental regulations that stand in the way of even more gargantuan profits. Determined to open the faucet even farther on the already-record flow of oil and gas right in the last moments we still have to turn it quickly down and off.
These planned reactionary attacks—whether voiced ad hoc by a congressional leader or enshrined in ideological tombs like Project 2025—are depressing when combined with the latest climate news. Whatever happens, however far the apparently non-linear climate changes so obviously now underway eventually go, and how fast they get there, rough times are coming no matter what we do. And “rough” could very well be the good parts.
But, to repeat for umpteeumph time, every extra bit of carbon we don’t emit into the atmosphere improves the odds of societal survival and every molecule of oil and gas we extract, transport, refine, and burn lowers them. Stopping those emissions cannot be an afterthought or #11 on our Top 10 priority list.
Given our circumstances, even unprecedented policy doesn’t cut it. Because the pace of climate change is way beyond unprecedented. Only the true numbskulls among us (in high places and low) brush off our current situation as not a crisis, not an emergency. But that is exactly what Republicans, hopeful of a two-house congressional majority and the presidency in their hands come January, clearly will do, and worse.
Democrats need offense as well as defense on climate policy
The Democrats are running partly, as well they should, on some major achievements of the Biden administration made possible by uncomfortable yet workable unity between progressives and the more centrist wing of the party. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) embodies the good results of that cooperation even though it is a shadow of its original self in the stymied Build Back Better Act, a byproduct of the stubbornness of Sen. Joe Manchin.
While Republicans wail about the evil “socialism” of the IRA, Democrats need both a defense of what they’ve achieved with the act and an offense—evidence of things they will initiate if November goes their way. Republicans aren’t shy about their agenda and Democrats shouldn’t be either, no matter how many times the Republicans screech malarkey about “Biden’s radical green agenda.”
Three years ago, Republicans, with some Democratic help, eviscerated key elements of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Last Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Rep. Mike Garcia of California, and a bunch of co-sponsors introduced a bill to repair some of the damage caused back then. It’s called the Build Green Act, and it would provide $500 billion to be invested in green transportation and the grid over 10 years.
Funding would be distributed under the IIJA and IRA. Warren’s office estimates it would create a million new jobs, save $100 billion annually in health damages, and prevent 4,200 deaths each year.
Warren said in a statement: "The time to accelerate towards a clean energy future is now. Modernizing our transportation grid will pump billions into the economy, create green union jobs, and safeguard against the worst effects of climate change. That’s good news across the board."
Marianne Lavelle has a good analysis at Inside Climate News:
The bill would resurrect much of the DNA of the $2 trillion “Build Back Better” idea that Biden touted on the campaign trail in 2020. Warren was the original sponsor of the Build Green Act introduced early in 2021, and it became part of the template for the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed later that year. (”Build Green” is an acronym for the bill’s full title: the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development and Generating Renewable Energy to Electrify the Nation’s Infrastructure and Jobs Act.)
But in order to win over the votes of Republicans and conservative Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), clean energy investments were sharply cut and spending on repair and widening of highways and bridges were ramped up. For example, an originally planned $174 billion investment in electric vehicles and a network of charging stations was pared back to $7.5 billion for EVs, charging infrastructure and electric school buses in the final bill.
Of the $15 billion in direct grants to cities and local governments so far under the 2021 infrastructure legislation, 35.5 percent has been directed to road and bridge projects and another 12 percent to airports, according to tracking by the National League of Cities. Only 19.6 percent of funding has gone to public transit systems. Many more projects have sought funding than could be covered under available dollars.
To address that shortfall, the new Build Green Act would allocate at least $150 billion for fixed-route public transportation projects like subways, light rail and bus rapid transit systems. That would be more than enough to fund the current full cost of every project on the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Program Dashboard—a regularly updated list of projects seeking funding.
The bill won’t, of course, pass this year unless at least 10 Republican Senators (and Joe Manchin) have a sudden change of heart. But it’s the kind of reply Democrats should be delivering to reactionaries who are determined to make climate impacts worse by throwing obstacles in the path of taking even modest action. It’s not the Green New Deal, but it certainly ought to be a piece of it. And if piecemeal is the only path to success, so be it. The public transportation focus of Build Green serves the needs of a sustainable society while reining in the defects of an overly car-centric society.
Said Rep. Garcia: “By making crucial investments into electrifying public transportation and implementing sustainable technologies, we can effectively tackle the climate crisis while building a well-paid workforce and green economy. The Build Act allows communities nationwide to take the steps necessary to create a future that is cleaner and greener, paving the way for generations to come. The time to act is now.”
There’s a bit of the green boilerplate in that statement, but he’s not wrong. Since the 1970s, many advocates have argued that changing to less polluting, more sustainable ways of living would pay huge health, economic, social, and environmental benefits. The words and ideas got considerable media attention; the people who truly took those words to heart were not so many. The time to act was then. But it’s not (yet) too late to act now. The only other option is submitting to destruction. Far too many reactionary politicians and their patrons want us to ride the climate bomb to its destination.
Nobody should be under the illusion that the unfolding crisis can be resolved simply by switching how we power ourselves and get around. But it’s a key element of dealing with it. Building the infrastructure to get off oil and other fossil fuels has to move a lot faster than it has been. And as fast as even California has been adding renewable energy plus storage, this needs to be tripled by 2030. Even more so elsewhere in this country and in others. The costs arising from challenges in agriculture—from water to weather, from soil to migrating bugs—are going to make even 10 times that $500 billion in the Build Green Act look like peanuts. (Peanut farmers face serious problems from climate change, by the way.) Then there is the profound societal disruption from an increasingly hostile environment, a byproduct very much of our own doing, which will generate perhaps the most immense costs as well.
The Build Green Act addresses just one impact of our energy use. But every effort to permanently reduce demand for carbon-spewing fuels is worth doing. Democrats should embrace that credo even if climate isn’t foremost on most Americans’ minds. It rarely is, but it soon will be. We shouldn’t always have to ponder climate change through the lens of partisan politics. With the stakes so high, we all ought to be pulling in the same direction. But history and the present teach us that if we have to depend on Republican participation to take serious climate action, then we truly are doomed.
Tick, tick, tick.
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