Fantasy World

The New York Times

The Green Transition Is Happening Fast. The Climate Bill Will Only Speed It Up.
Opinion by David Wallace-Wells


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. Its many supporters have called it “transformational” and a “game changer.”



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. With overall investments of $437 billion, it is just one-fortieth of the size of Senator Bernie Sanders’s $16 trillion Green New Deal campaign package, one-twentieth of the size of Jay Inslee’s $9 trillion proposal and less than one-third of the size of Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which passed Congress last fall. Adjusted for inflation, the clean energy provisions of the I.R.A. are only about three times the size of the clean energy spending tucked into President Barack Obama’s Recovery Act of 2009, and less than half the total size of the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last fall. In fact, the infrastructure bill spent about half as much on climate and clean energy provisions as this one does, though it focused on long-term research and development rather than cutting emissions today.



But 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. A bigger expenditure would have achieved more, of course. But emissions trajectories are not narrowly a matter of public policy, and 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.

That’s because those public investments are being made not against dirty-energy headwinds but with the support of much broader tailwinds — and pretty intense ones. 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 — with an estimated payoff of nine million new American jobs, to boot. The average American household might pay $1,800 less a year for energy, too.

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