The U.S. has a new climate law. Now comes the hard part
Emissions rise from power-generating station in Ghent, Ky., in April 2021. (Bloomberg News)
At the beginning of summer, it looked as though Congress would spend yet another session failing to act on climate change.
by the Washington Post Editorial Board
Then Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) announced unexpectedly in late July that he would vote for a major climate bill, which Democrats promptly passed on a party-line vote. Suddenly, the United States has what many observers had all but assumed was unattainable: an ambitious, legislated strategy to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, setting the country on course to reduce its carbon footprint by roughly 40 percent by 2030.
This is a signal moment in the struggle against this century’s greatest environmental threat. But the new law does not guarantee success. It has gaps. And achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century, as scientists recommend, will require policy that has not yet been written and technological breakthroughs that have not yet been achieved.
The law rests on the notion that paying people and businesses to make cleaner choices — rather than penalizing them for continuing to pollute — will result in big emissions cuts. It offers tax credits to utilities that build or operate renewable electricity facilities, set to run until the electricity sector achieves substantial emissions cuts. It provides consumers with generous new incentives to buy electric vehicles and more efficient home appliances. And it pumps money into energy research and development, in the hopes that doing so will drive down the cost of clean technologies.
The Princeton University ZERO Lab, which models the effects of climate policies, reckons the law will reduce yearly emissions by roughly 1 billion metric tons by 2030. Before the law, the country’s emissions were set to decline by 27 percent from 2005 levels by the end of the decade. Now, Princeton’s experts predict a 42 percent cut — nearly reaching the Biden administration’s goal of halving emissions by 2030.
A difference of 15 percentage points might seem small relative to the volume of environmentalists’ loud cheering about the law. Yet it implies that the United States will slash emissions at roughly double the pace it did between 2005 and 2020, and with some of the easiest shifts already made. Moreover, a future Republican president cannot easily rip up this new policy. Before now, climate wonks rested their hopes on President Biden taking executive actions that might not survive his administration. “The period of American exceptionalism on climate policy — that is, not having a climate policy — is over,” said the Michael Greenstone, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
Big challenges remain.
If you build it …
The law foresees a vast buildout of industrial-scale solar, wind and other facilities, along with miles of new heavy-duty transmission lines to zip electricity across the country and thousands of new electric-vehicle charging stations. Because the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine in all places at all times, and because wind and solar facilities occupy more land than fossil-fuel-fired power plants, Americans will see a lot of new energy infrastructure — and, in a country in which NIMBYism is practically the national pastime, renewables operators will have to fight bitter state and local opposition to build it. Another complication: Most of the nation’s deposits of lithium and other critical minerals lie near Native American reservations, raising questions about whether and how quickly they can be tapped.