The Senate’s passage of a monumental climate bill comes after decades of legislative defeats, but it is still an early step indrastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions
CLIMATEWIRE | Three decades after ratifying the world’s first climate treaty, the Senate passed a sweeping budget bill Sunday that pours hundreds of billions of dollars into the clean energy projects needed to decarbonize the economy.
Instead, the bill came chock-full of provisions that have long been anathema to environmentalists. There were guarantees for new oil and gas leases, and tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration. Notably absent was any requirement to actually reduce emissions. New transmission lines will need to be strung to connect wind and solar projects in disparate parts of the country. Batteries need to be installed to backup renewable projects. Emerging technologies like clean hydrogen and advanced nuclear, along with seldom-used ones like carbon capture and sequestration, have to be installed to ensure the grid can run round-the-clock without pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
While the bill contains plenty of incentives for clean technologies, some could lock in polluting infrastructure for decades to come, she said. Fossil fuel projects that lower their emissions will be able to qualify for clean hydrogen subsidies or use tax credits to install carbon capture and sequestration. That may extend the life of power plants and other facilities that have polluted communities for years, she said.
But few experts think the United States can cut emissions half of 2005 levels by the end of the decade, as President Joe Biden pledged, without a massive push from the federal government. Modeling from Energy Innovation, Rhodium Group and Princeton University found the “Inflation Reduction Act” puts the United States on track for emission reductions of roughly 40 percent by 2030.
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