Although the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which passed the House of Representatives on Friday, would be by far the largest federal action ever taken to address climate change, it would fall short of the US commitment to the agreement 2015 Paris Climate Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52% from 2005 levels by 2030. While President Biden reaffirmed this commitment at last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, the statistical models show that the IRA will reduce emissions by only about 40% from 2005 levels by the end of this decade. President Biden delivers a speech at the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 2, 2021. (Evan Vucci/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that to avoid catastrophic climate change while staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, global carbon emissions must be halved by 2030. Other nations have made it clear in the climate negotiations that the United States — the world’s largest historical polluter and one of the largest per capita emitters — must do its part if it wants to get everyone to do theirs. . And so attention is already turning to what else the government can do to close this gap between the trajectory set by the IRA and what science and global climate diplomacy require. Even before the bill passed the House of Representatives, longtime climate leader Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said it was “just the first chapter” in the fight against climate change. “More is needed: We are not done post-IRA,” Anand Gopal, executive director of the Energy Innovation think tank, which produced an analysis that estimated the IRA alone would achieve emissions reductions of between 37% and 41% by 2030, said. on Yahoo News. The IRA seeks to curb climate pollution through a variety of means, the largest of which is subsidies for the manufacture and purchase of clean energy and electric vehicles. Rivian R1T electric vehicle (EV) trucks on the assembly line at the company’s manufacturing facility in Normal, Illinois on April 11, 2022. (Jamie Kelter Davis/Bloomberg via Getty Images) According to experts and activists working on climate policy, there are four main ways to achieve additional emissions reductions in the decade: regulations from the Biden administration, future bills in Congress that could target emissions from other sectors, state-level policies – and finally, to stay below 1.5°C of warming, other major emitters such as China will need to adopt their own additional policies. The story continues Of course, just as the IRA was the result of many compromises made to pass the evenly divided Senate, there is a difference between policies that might work in the abstract and those that have a real chance of becoming law. “In theory, there are a lot of reasonable next steps,” Barry Rabe, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Michigan, told Yahoo News. “On a political level, it’s not at all clear what would be more likely.” Here’s an overview of the main options in each of the four categories.
Regulations by the executive branch
While there will be no further action on climate change from Congress this year — because of unified Republican opposition, Democrats have only been able to use the annual budget to pass climate action with a simple majority — the Biden administration can take some steps to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels. Federal laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act require the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate pollutants that are “injurious to human health,” which include carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. President Biden signs an executive order during an event in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on July 8 in Washington, DC (Alex Wong/Getty Images) But in June, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court limited the scope of the EPA’s authority when it ruled that the agency’s approach to regulating carbon emissions from power plants under former President Barack Obama was outside the bounds of the law. The Obama-era EPA had proposed a rule that would set carbon emissions standards based on emissions reductions that could be achieved in part by switching from coal to clean sources like wind and solar power. Instead, the court held that it can make rules based only on emissions control technology. “What really gets interesting is basically the minute after this law is passed and signed… [is] How far can the Biden administration go on its own using the Clean Air Act or whatever?” Rabe said. “We will see a series of steps to use regulatory powers that will control what the courts will allow.” “The most important set of policies the IRA will have to pursue will be a series of enforcement actions led by EPA and supported by other agencies, DOE [the Department of Energy] and DOT [the Department of Transportation]Gopal said. A very important regulation will be the upcoming rule that will limit carbon emissions from power plants. Most environmental observers believe the EPA can set strict limits on carbon pollution by basing the standard on a requirement that coal-fired power plants adopt technology that captures carbon in the stack and stores it underground, known as carbon capture and sequestration. or CCS. Fossil fuel industry advocates and conservative legal experts are skeptical that the Supreme Court would uphold such a rule, but IRA subsidies for CCS could help such a rule pass a cost-benefit analysis. The headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, January 19, 2020. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters) Transportation has overtaken electricity generation as the sector of the US economy with the largest carbon footprint, and the Biden administration will introduce new rules for cars and trucks as well. The EPA announced in June that it plans to finalize by March 2024 a new emissions rule for new light passenger vehicles for model years 2026 through 2030. Environmental experts from groups such as the League of Conservation Voters and the Union of Concerned Scientists are asking the EPA to require 60 percent of new car sales to be electric vehicles by 2030. The agency should also write a post-2030 rule for heavy-duty trucks, which Gopal said should require almost all trucks to have zero emissions by 2040. Another major source of greenhouse gas emissions—which has largely escaped public scrutiny—is the industrial process, such as manufacturing, which often requires high levels of heat and therefore the burning of fossil fuels on site. The IRA includes some money to help decarbonize heavy industry, but in the future, federal regulators could actually require, for example, packaged food makers to switch from burning gas to using electric heat. “One of the things that is important for EPA and DOE is to consider establishing standards for industrial boilers for at least low-temperature heat to incentivize the transition to heat pumps for low-temperature heat,” Gopal said. The IRA also creates an opportunity for the regulations to operate in accordance with some of the spending provisions of the Act. The EPA is already drafting regulations for leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into oil and gas wells and pipelines. The IRA imposes a cap on methane emissions from oil and gas companies, and coordination of the cap and regulations could be more effective than either on its own. A gas collection wellhead is seen at the Frank R. Bowerman Landfill in Irvine, California where collected methane is used to power 26,000 homes in neighboring Anaheim, California June 15, 2021. (Mike Blake/Reuters) “[The fee] it would create further incentives for industry and states to improve their performance [on methane leakage] because it will take longer for these EPA regulations to go into effect, but it’s also possible for companies to avoid the fee altogether if they already comply with what EPA is proposing in advance,” said Rabe. “So there’s an interesting interactive effect here between a fee and a regulation. We’ve never seen this before in the climate region.” However, Biden will limit himself to reducing fossil fuel extraction. In order to win the support of Sen. Joe Manchin, the centrist Democrat from coal- and gas-rich West Virginia — and in violation of Biden’s campaign promise to end new sales of oil and gas drilling leases on offshore and federal land — the president and Democratic leaders agreed to rules mandating federal offshore and offshore fossil fuel leasing to the IRA. Some environmental groups, including Greenpeace and the Center for Biological Diversity, are urging Biden to declare climate change a national emergency, which would give him more freedom to curb fossil fuel development in other ways, such as banning crude oil exports.
New bills in Congress
The US Capitol building on May 14, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) In the abstract, the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions would be for Congress to pass a law that simply limits the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted, usually with carbon credits that can be bought or sold or that charges a fee on carbon pollution. The politics of this is scary. In 2009, when Democrats enjoyed much larger majorities in Congress, the House of Representatives passed such a plan, but it died in the Senate. With gas and oil prices rising recently following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the chances of even a Democratic Congress getting the votes to charge more for gasoline or home heating fuel are slim. When the predecessor of the IRA, the more…
