Consider This from NPR - What The Climate Package Means For A Warming Planet

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Up until a few weeks ago, meaningful climate legislation was sidelined in the U.S. Senate. But after months of wrangling votes — and adding concessions to oil and gas companies — Democrats in the Senate have finally passed the Inflation Reduction Act. The bill includes more than $300 billion in climate investments — the highest amount ever allocated by the federal government to tackle climate change. This episode lays out what the bill does, what it doesn't, and tracks the ups and downs of the legislation as it wound its way through Congress.This episode also features reporting by NPR's Laura Benshoff looking at the ways the legislation incentivizes individuals to fight climate change in their everyday life.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Late last year, just before Christmas, President Biden's climate agenda hit a brick wall. Joining us now, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Senator, welcome back to Fox News Sunday. Good to be with you, Brett. That was December 19th. For months, Senator Joe Manchin had been wavering on Biden's Build Back Better legislation, which included major climate provisions. If I can't go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can't vote for it.

And I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can't. I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there. You're done. This is a no. This is a no. That no sidelined the bill.

Democrats were trying to use something called budget reconciliation to pass the legislation, and they needed all 50 votes in the Democratic caucus. Things didn't get better for Biden's climate goals in 2022. In April, a federal judge ruled that the Interior Department had to resume leasing land to oil and gas companies. And then, in early summer... The Supreme Court capped off a week of landmark decisions yesterday by limiting the EPA's power to curb carbon dioxide emissions. In a 6-3 decision, the court's conservative majority limiting the Environmental Protection Agency... 19 Republican-led states were a part of the legal challenge to the EPA.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy spoke to NPR shortly after the Supreme Court curtailed that agency's ability to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. This was a decision which limited our ability to reduce pollution under that section of the Clean Air Act, and it literally threatens to use the same technique in others. And that we have to be disappointed in that and concerned. But then, in the past few weeks, something strange happened.

Washington's legislative gridlock eased up ever so slightly. Okay, does anyone notice anything? This is my lucky blue suit. I wear it on good luck days, and I had a feeling I'd be wearing it. Here it is. All right. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer earlier this week, he had finally wrangled his caucus. Manchin had come around. So as you know, it's been a long, tough and winding road. At last we've arrived. The Senate had just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that also included more

than 300 billion dollars in climate provisions. The Senate has now passed the most significant bill to fight the climate crisis ever. It's gonna make a difference to my grandkids. Consider this. A landmark piece of climate legislation has just passed the U.S. Senate. We'll walk through what it does, what it doesn't do, and how it helps individual people live more sustainably. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Thursday, August 11th.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. The day after the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer joined us live on All Things Considered. We reached a lot of dead ends. But you know, my father passed away in November, and he's still here sitting with me. He taught me one thing. If you're doing the right thing, and you persist, as he put it, God will reward you and you'll succeed.

Well, we persisted. There were a lot of dead ends, but I kept at it. And now we have probably the most significant piece of legislation in decades, particularly on climate. It's the boldest climate legislation ever. So how bold is it? Let's break it down. One of the key numbers that Senator Schumer and others have been touting is this, that the new bill will lower carbon emissions 40% by the year 2030. So will it? Yeah, so our numbers are somewhere between, I think, 37 and 40 or 41%. So that's right in the same ballpark.

And given the uncertainty in these models, I think that's quite plausible, the number that Senator Schumer's office is circulating. Jesse Jenkins leads a team at Princeton that analyzes the impact of government climate actions. The goal set by the Biden administration is a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030. Jenkins says this bill is a start. So it doesn't get us all the way there on its own, but it keeps us in the climate fight and it puts us within a close enough distance that further executive action, state and local government efforts and private sector leadership could plausibly get us across the finish line by 2030. Supporters of the bill also point out the sheer scope of it. We usually have this tendency to either focus on innovation, maybe a little bit of lip service to manufacturing, but this for the first time is doing all the things. Sarah Ladislaw is a managing director at RMI, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for clean energy.

It just has the full suite of things that you would want to see in a piece of energy legislation that takes seriously the transition that we need to consider. Okay, so what's in that full suite of things? Well, billions of dollars for renewable energy infrastructure, things like solar panels, wind turbines. There are tax credits for people who buy electric vehicles. There's $60 billion for environmental justice work, supporting communities disproportionately affected by climate change, and incentives for carbon capture technology. So the concept behind carbon capture is really as simple as it sounds. It's the idea of capturing CO2 before it gets into

the atmosphere. Jamil Farbs analyzes carbon reduction strategies at Evolved Energy Research. Here's how he explains carbon capture. Imagine a coal plant or a cement factory or really any large industrial process. And all those things are going to produce CO2. And the idea of carbon capture is as that CO2 gets produced, we try to remove the stream of CO2 out of the other gases so we can do something with it, either use it for industrial processes or to make fuels or potentially sequester it underground. It's one piece of the puzzle that some argue is necessary to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Others disagree. And here's where we get to the pushback against parts of the Inflation Reduction Act,

concessions to the oil and gas industry. Carbon capture potentially presents a solution where oil and gas production can look a lot like it does today. It doesn't do anything about all the production. So I think there's some concern that this could just be a delaying tactic. Carbon capture aside, the bill also requires the federal government to continue leasing federal land and parts of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas companies. Our co-host Ari Shapiro spoke with Manish Bapna, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

And Ari asked him about those tradeoffs and whether this bill goes far enough. This bill is less ambitious than your organization had been pushing for. So how are you feeling about it? Well, it is less ambitious than we hoped, but it contains by far the strongest climate action ever taken in American history, full stop. It will meet a 40% reduction in emissions in 2030, and that's a very significant step towards meeting President Biden's 50 to 52% goal that he set forth about a year and a half ago. And when you weigh that against the fossil fuel provisions that, for

example, require the federal government to sell leases for drilling on federal lands and waters, how do they compare? If you look at the positive provisions in the bill, whether it is around clean electricity, electric vehicles, decarbonizing heavy industry, they're at least 10 to 1 times greater than the emissions that would be produced from oil and gas leasing or some of the public support for dirty energy or biofuels. I know that there are many different provisions in this bill, but when you look at the different clean energy incentives and programs, what do you think will make the biggest single impact?

There are three or four that really stand out. Probably the most important are the programs that will help households and businesses install new clean electricity like wind and solar. They'll provide tax credits that lower the cost of those projects. Second, I think we see a lot of support for electric vehicles that will help people buy new and used plug-in or fuel cell electric vehicles. We also see significant support for heavy industry and manufacturing, helping cement, steel, aluminum implement more transformational technologies to decarbonize those plants. Finally, we actually see quite a bit of money for agriculture and forestry conservation that will help store carbon in our lands and in our forests. As you say, a lot of this comes in the form of tax credits or incentives, which are

not mandates, not requirements. What are the chances that companies don't take advantage of these incentives, that individuals don't claim these tax credits and the goal is not met? These are very robust, long-term tax credits where industry has been strongly advocating for their inclusion in such a bill. So we saw this whirlwind change from a deal that wasn't going to happen to a deal that was going to happen in no small part because industry stepped up about the importance of these tax credits. So I think there's very strong confidence that these tax credits will be used at scale. Okay, so you've talked about the goal of reducing carbon emissions 40% compared to 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

How does this package fit into the larger goal of keeping global temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius, beyond which we're told absolute cataclysms would occur? Well, the United States is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient for solving the global climate problem. The United States needs to do its fair share, which is at least a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030. This bill will take the United States from 30% without the bill, 30% less emissions in 2030, to 40% below. The United States

still needs to take additional actions to get to 50%. But with the credible pathway, the United States can lean in and help ensure that other major emitters, China, the European Union, India, do their fair share. But without this bill, the U.S. doesn't have the credibility to do so. And that's why this bill is so critical to unlocking greater global ambition on climate. And that was Manish Bhapna of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Just this week, we got yet another reminder of the urgency of that global cooperation on climate. A new study out on Thursday shows the Arctic is heating up nearly four times faster than the Earth as a whole. That means sea ice is melting faster, which means more open water to trap heat, which means more changes to the world's climate. That planetary scale can be hard to wrap your mind around. But getting back to the Inflation

Reduction Act, there are also parts of that new legislation that make it cheaper for individuals to fight climate change. NPR's Laura Binshoff took a look inside the bill. Most of the Inflation Reduction Act's climate benefits would come from changes that are just too big for individuals to make, like building more wind farms. But Jamal Lewis with the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America says it would help with things we can control. Household decisions that you and I make on the machines that we choose to

cook our food, heat and cool our homes, and get us from place to place. He says replacing an old appliance is an opportunity. It's a chance to lower home energy costs and carbon pollution by switching to a more energy-efficient model. The Inflation Reduction Act would set aside billions of dollars for appliance rebate programs so that switching is a better deal. For example, if you replace your old furnace with a heat pump, you could get up to $8,000 off the sticker price. Lewis says these discounts are designed to put the technology within reach of more people, especially lower and middle-income households. The rebate actually means just a discount that reduces the point-of-sale cost.

There's also money to retrofit homes so they waste less energy, says Lowell Unger with the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. It may be air sealing because there are drafts coming in. It may be that more insulation is needed in the attic. And there's money to start capturing your own renewable energy.

President of the Solar Energy Industries Association, Abigail Ross Hopper, says the bill's more than 10-year tax credits for residential solar and energy storage are a game changer. It really strengthens the grid for everybody. So even though one individual homeowner made a decision to invest in a solar and storage system, their neighbors are going to benefit. One drawback is that you have to own your home. There is money in the act to encourage retrofits of rental properties, but they tend to need a developer or a landlord to be involved.

Finally, there's your car. The bill's electric vehicle tax credit is a mixed bag. John Helveston, a professor at George Washington University, says part of the credit is only available for cars whose batteries are made from raw materials from the U.S. or its free trade partners. That's tying the hands of automakers because some of those batteries materials, they're just not available in North America yet. That means the full amount, up to $7,500 for a new EV, might be unavailable. But Helveston says prospective buyers shouldn't despair because they should still be able to get some of that money. That was NPR's Laura Benshoff reporting. The Inflation Reduction Act is expected to pass the House on Friday, and from there, it'll head to President Biden's desk for a long-awaited signature.

It's Consider This. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.