Friday, August 05, 2022

Emissions Impact of Inflation Reduction Act

"The Inflation Reduction Act does about two-thirds of the remaining work needed to close the gap between current policy and the nation's 2030 climate goal".  

This was the quote from the group at the REPEAT Project, who have put together a terrific analysis of the effects of the bill. 

The nation's 2030 goal is 50% below 2005 levels.  So this is really encouraging, but this shows that we are both making a terrific step with this Act, but also have steps to go, on the same order as this one, to hit our targets. 

Senate Democrats have enough votes to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/us/politics/sinema-inflation-reduction-act.html).  As reported by the New York Times, "Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, announced on Thursday evening that she would support moving forward with her party’s climate, tax and health care package, clearing the way for a major piece of President Biden’s domestic agenda to move through the Senate in the coming days."

This opens the door for $369B of investment in to clean energy infrastructure at all levels, which is an amazing market signal for pulling our economy into a zero carbon future.  The effects of that investment is shown below.  The full report is here, but I'm just going to talk about one of the slides today - slide 7.