This is a Biden Big Fucking Deal. To understand it, I went to the experts I trust to tell it like it is:
Of all the questions I've gotten about the IRA, the most bizarre is: "is it enough?" Asking that question betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of climate change. Nothing we do in our lifetimes–individual countries, or collectively–will be enough. That's not how this works.
— David Roberts (@drvolts) August 12, 2022
David is having some health issues, so instead of blogging, he recorded his thoughts:
Listen to me talk for an hour about the history and policy context of the IRA. https://t.co/Zqw8siR4wU
— David Roberts (@drvolts) August 13, 2022
Legit crying this morning reading the top comments on my Climate Bill video. pic.twitter.com/cMtTdjiKxr
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) August 13, 2022
This video has two accompanying interviews…an hour-long interview with @JesseJenkins https://t.co/IKeOYgPWZe
And a shorter interview with @EPAMichaelRegan, the head of the EPA https://t.co/TVxYvsWjnM
Both of them were VERY HELPFUL for me!!
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) August 12, 2022
I hope this is somewhat helpful and at the very least, gets you started on understanding the pros and cons of this legislation. If you have anyone that is your go-to for understanding this bill, post it in the comments.
Another Scott
Thanks for this.
4 page PDF summary of the energy/climate provisions from Senate Democrats.
[eta:] Here’s the whole 730 page .pdf of HR 5376.
Cheers,
Scott.
West of the Rockies
I’m rejoicing the passage of this bill. It’s an excellent step. I’m hoping that because of Russian greed and violence, Europe will move further towards its own green energy future.
PAM Dirac
Any word on when the signing is going to happen?
Kent
Looking at this bill it is almost embarrassing how many benefits and subsidies I can personally capture as a reasonably affluent homeowner. Probably in the tens of thousands of dollars of things that I could pay for myself but probably wouldn’t have, at least not anytime soon. It is hard to justify tearing out perfectly good appliances and such and replacing them with higher efficiency units.
I guess that is the point. To light a fire under some of these necessary conversions. At least I know that here in WA our source of electricity is mostly carbon free. We are perhaps the most carbon free state in the country when it comes to power.
raven
@Kent: We’re in a reverse mortgage that requires us to pay taxes, insurance and upkeep. At 73 it’s going to be hard for me to make an investment beyond the requirements.
JaySinWA
@PAM Dirac: I can only find statements that Biden will sign sometime this week.
Roger Moore
My gut feeling is that most of the non-Republican bellyaching about the bill is from people who are constantly looking for a reason to feel betrayed by the Democrats. Yes, you can include all the caveats about the bill being too small, having too many corporate handouts, and whatever, but it’s a far better bill than we could have expected even a month ago. Now let’s go out and expand our majority in the next election so we can pass a better bill in the next Congress.
trollhattan
@Kent:
We have 30YO HVAC and I can foresee this bill, once signed and promulgated, might give us a path to ripping it out for a high-efficiency full-electric heat pump system. Fingers crossed.
Seems as though the EV incentives are not easily accessible, which is a shame, but with what Detroit has been doing WRT manufacturing and even assembling out of the country, it’s going to be complicated. Also true for foreign makers assembling here.
Offshore wind I’ll bet will become the Big Biden Thing.
trollhattan
This might rank as the goofiest wind power scheme I’ve seen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-62513387
After the cable unspools, I’m unclear on how it continues generating juice, nor how they reel it in w/o expending all they’ve generated.
Still, pretty cool.
Dan B
When we downsized in August 2009 it was 100°. The new mid century house had insulation only in the recently finished downstairs. We air sealed, insulated, reinforced the roof, installed solar PV, installed ductless heat pump system, and leased a Nissan Leaf. Nothing in the IRA bill will apply to us directly but I’d love to have our neighborhood of nearly identical house do what we did… but… they do not understand. There will be a great need for community organizations to provide outreach, education, and models for people to experience directly. When neighbors see our heat pump they have no idea what it is. They don’t see anything but “expensive” when they see the PV panels. They need to hear that they’re paid off and we get a $2,500 check every year. They need to hear this from people who look like them.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: Their web page has more.
It does sound interesting. The “trick” is probably finding a tether strong, light, cheap, and robust enough to make it economical.
Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bill Arnold
@West of the Rockies:
Another issue that Russia has is that a large part (I recall reading roughly 50 percent) of the development/operation of their oil fields was being done by Western oil companies. When equipment/pipelines in the Siberian areas shut down for a while, they can be hard to restart.
We’ll see over the next year. It is possible that Russia’s fossil carbon extraction will decrease significantly, which would also be a win for the global climate.
Hopefully some plans to shut down nuclear power plants are put on hold. (The drought in Europe isn’t helping matters; many thermal plants (not just nuclear) are water cooled , because that’s cheaper than a cooling tower(s). (River levels way down.) )
Russia has really been encouraging non-fossil-carbon power in Europe; they do not intend to do such good, but they have failed in that aspect of their evil.
Dan B
@trollhattan: There are many great concepts being tested. One I like a lot are the floating wind turbines they showed. Farther from the coast wind speeds are higher. There’s enough wind to power the entire states of California, Oregon, and Washington just off Oregon.
Also very cool is the CO2 battery / energy storage and sand storage. They’re inexpensive, easy to build and scale for communities. YouTube has some great videos.
wmd
There needs to be phase in for requirements on domestic sourcing on batteries or it will tank demand for EVs in the short term.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/08/climate-bill-passes-it-could-short-circuit-ev-tax-credits-making-qualifying-for-them-nearly-impossible.html
Bill Arnold
@Dan B:
Many parts of the world have enormous areas of exploitable off-shore wind. The tech for off-shore windmills (hostile environment compared to land) will be improving too, probably fairly quickly.
sab
@Dan B: In Ohio when we replaced our old aluminum siding we also replaced all the windows. What a difference.
I just told my dad’s nurse’s aide who is replacing her windows on her 1920s house. Everyone says you need better insulation, but the new windows will do so much more. No more cold drafts in the winter. Keeps in the cool night air in the summer. The difference is amazing, and really saves money.
Bill Arnold
From some notes:
Offshore Wind Outlook 2019
“Offshore” is near coasts. (9 percent of suitable offshore ocean would meet 2040 projected electricity demand. All suitable offshore ocean would be the 11x.)
Geminid
A good resource I’ll use to understand the benefits of this bill is searching “clean energy news.” There are a plenty of articles ranging from general interest publications and environmental sites to industry newsletters. It’s a good topic to search anytime because there is always something happening in this area
Searching wind energy” and “photovoltaic energy” also yields good results.
sab
Ohio S Ct finally decided we can have our first offshore freshwater wind farm. One justice on other side. The opponents were a couple of birders from Bratenahl funded by Murray Energy Group. Like they really worried about birds. Cleveland highrise buildings kill more migrating birds than the windfarm will.
For non-Clevelanders, Bratenahl is an extremely tiny, extremely wealthy suburb with lakeshore property on Lake Erie. Every house is huge and worth multi-millions in a not very expensive part of the country. If I ever won the mega lottery I would consider movimg there except I’d be queasy about the neighbors.
My brother’s million dollar house in Marin County Ca, and my nephews million dollar house in Oakland CA are both much smaller than my $100,000 house in NE Ohio. And my lot is bigger and we have lots of water.
Ryan
Are we the people we’ve been waiting for?
Elizabelle
Thank you for this thread.
Fake Irishman
@sab:
Ice Breaker finally went through? Good.
And Murray energy’s coal plants kill far more birds than Cleveland’s buildings and Ohio wind farms combined.
gene108
@Roger Moore:
Listened to “The New Yorker Radio Hour” on PBS, while out this afternoon. They had “New Yorker” climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert on.
She was critical of the lack of “sticks” to push people and companies away from carbon dioxide producing energy sources, which the BBB bill had.
From listening to her, her criticism comes from staring into the abyss of inaction by most of the world on non-CO2 producing energy sources. The U.S. had a window to lead by example, in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, but squandered it by electing Republicans.
Now there’s not much to do to lead a global effort to reduce CO2 emissions. Developed countries didn’t do enough to have a high ground to stand on. Developing countries are going do whatever they think they need to do, in order to become wealthier and up lift their people.*
We need a serious rethinking of the entire global economic system, with different measures for economic success than selling more widgets year-to-year. I think the ultra competitive types, who rise to the top in most companies will not be willing to change. I doubt they can bring themselves to accept a situation, where sharing is rewarded over amassing wealth, in terms of the benefits society provides.
* EDIT: Developed world CO2 reductions will be offset by developing world deforestation, and increased CO2 emissions.
Fake Irishman
The Roberts podcast is a good listen. I listened to it while my infant dozed off in my arms on Friday night. It was the best I’ve felt in a long time.
one of the best points he makes is about how the IRA came out of a both an experts-designing policy paradigm AND and massive political coalition building enterprise among environmentalists, social justice types and workers. He is flabbergasted at how much of the original plan got through intact. It lost some elements, but is far more radical than anything that was even PROPOSED until the last 2-3 years.
gene108
@sab:
Replacing my windows was the best money I spent on any home improvement. The lack of a major draft in winter is feels almost life altering.
lowtechcyclist
@Roger Moore:
Hell, a month ago we weren’t expecting any bill at all. This is a frickin’ miracle.
The kiddo is fifteen now, and he could live to see the opening days of the 22nd century. (The 22nd century?! That’s science fiction territory! I know, right? But he’d be 93 on January 1, 2101, and in a hospitable world, there’s no reason he couldn’t live to see it.) So I always think about climate change in terms of his future life. I’ll be checking out of here sometime around mid-century, so I’ll have a pretty good idea by then of whether we’ve managed to save his future, but if we fail, I’ll have missed out on the worst of it. So when I think about it, I’m thinking about him.
So ever since the cap-and-trade bill failed in the Senate in 2009, I’ve been wondering if my generation had already failed him, especially when it became clear that there wouldn’t be another tilt at that particular windmill for quite a few years.
I’m not the sort to give in to despair, but it sure is good to finally have reason to hope. And while we are going to need to do more, this bill is reason enough for now.
Thank you, Democratic Party. (New motto: “Dems in array.”) You did good.
Martin
So, I’m skeptical of the reported benefits from this bill. I think there are two factors that are being missed:
This bill doesn’t address the underlying issues:
A) All power utilities in the US need to be decoupled like California, because in the end, you have to curtail accelerating consumption due to subsidy. There’s an old assumption that power utilization is a strong function of GDP, but that’s untrue, and California was the proof. CA has had flat per capita power consumption for 40 years, but in just the last 25 years, CA GDP per capita has increased from 4% above the national average to nearly 25%.
B) The bill should have put alternate transportation forms ahead of EVs for subsidy. There’s no ebike subsidy which would go dramatically further both in terms of the number of taxpayers that could benefit as well as the environmental benefit. It would also force a shifting of transportation and road use policy in a manner that would allow for smaller EVs to be viable in the US. Same for investments in electric rail and electric buses – particularly school buses. China has 420,000 electric buses in use. The US, just over 1,000. My employer was one of the first to deploy electric buses and found that they paid for themselves in about 4 years due to lower fuel and maintenance costs, and ridership nearly doubled. There are a lot of subtle reasons why people don’t like buses – fumes, noise, but also the jerky ride of a conventional transmission – all issues that go away with electric buses. It feels more like riding a train than a bus.
No doubt the bill will do a lot of good, but I’ll be shocked if it achieves anywhere near what it promises because it fails to address the underlying problems, including the vicious cycle of vehicle land allocation (roads and parking) squeezing housing into an ever smaller fraction of the available space, driving up housing costs while transportation costs are all subsidized (how many of you ever pay for parking?). More land area in the US is dedicated to parking than to housing:
Further subsidization of automobiles will only make this problem worse, and this bill does a LOT of subsidization of automobiles.
Fake Irishman
@gene108:
maybe. But one very hopeful thing is that not every country has to develop in the same way. Most places in Africa never bothered to install telephone landlines, they’ve all gone directly to cell phones. We have some indications that the power generation transition may do something similar. There are still too many coal power plants in the pipeline, but far, far fewer than 5-10 years ago. (And remember we had something like 100 new coal power plants in the pipeline to be built in the US 20 years ago. Almost all of them weren’t built)
cintibud
Question – I know in some red states laws have been proposed that would tax people using alternate energy sources to make up for lost utility profits or not allow homeowners to sell excess electricity generated by their solar panels back to the utilities. While I don’t think many of these proposals have become law, I think a few have. Can anyone describe what and where such type laws have been passed and if they have does the IRA deal with this problem? TIA
lowtechcyclist
@Bill Arnold:
I was reading just the other day that the Netherlands has plans for two new nuclear power plants. And a couple years ago, France decided to increase the already-large fraction of their power that was coming from nuclear, and that would seemingly have to involve building new plants as well as maintaining the old ones.
Over here, there’s money in the IRA for keeping existing nuclear power plants running.
Fake Irishman
@Martin:
i agree with you that this bill could be better (esp use is a problem for emissions), but I tend to think it will outstrip its emissions reduction targets rather than undershoot them, because modeling tends to be extremely conservative on environmental policy and has tended to undershoot improvements and overstate costs in the past.
Brachiator
@Martin:
How much of this is a function of more energy efficient appliances and other devices?
Otherwise, a lot of interesting ideas in your post.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue team
Video made me cry. Amazing.
Ty for this TaMara.
gene108
@Martin:
Some states will look for ways to reduce consumption, as renewable energy is more readily adopted.
Some states won’t.
What has been a stumbling block in the USA of doing anything about global warming has been an unwillingness to change the way we live in any serious manner. It’d be great to build out more mass transit, redesign roads and zoning laws to make walk ability a factor in city design, and much more but people don’t want to change their lifestyles that much.
Getting more EV’s on the road is the only possible solution in the USA right now to reduce CO2 vehicular emissions.
Mining minerals for batteries is going to be its own environmental and social justice disaster, because some of the most mineral rich nations are also among the poorest. They will be ruthlessly exploited to get the raw materials for EV batteries for developed nations.
Solving global warming is the first issue to fix. Trying to clean up mine contamination will be the second issue to address.
Any solution to global warming will ugly and not at all elegant.
Bill Arnold
@lowtechcyclist:
Touchy point for me. Locally, activists spearheaded efforts to shut down the Indian Point nuclear power station on the Hudson River well-north of NY City. The power has mostly been replaced by natural-gas-generated power, spewing many millions of tons per year of CO2 into the atmosphere (plus a share of the methane (a much more potent greenhouse gas) leakage that results from the rather leaky natural gas extraction and shipment/pipeline industries). (Entergy was running that plant in its final years and it has a deserved bad reputation, but still.)
Robert F. Kennedy Jr was a leader in the successful effort to get that plant shut down.
I regard that effort of his, and his anti-vaxxer efforts, as acts of large-scale mass murder. (If I ever meet him I will say so to his face.)
Another Scott
@Martin: It’s the first bill, not the last. Legislation is always changing over time.
There are going to be problems in the transition, but we know that it needs to happen.
Like you, I’m a big fan of efficiency and getting the incentives right – as best we can.
One perspective on how to address the battery mineral problems
Cheers,
Scott.
dnfree
@sab: Way back in the 1980s we replaced the windows in a Victorian-era house instead of adding insulation, because sometimes adding insulation to lathe-and-plaster retains moisture and causes plaster to fall off the walls. Just putting in new windows cut our heating costs in half.
Kent
The problem is that the Pacific gets REALLY deep really fast as you go offshore. There isn’t a wide shallow continental shelf like off New England. So that will complicate things greatly and there aren’t any shallow banks like off New England. So we are talking about water depths in the 3,000 meter range off the Oregon Coast while there are lots of places off the Atlantic Coast where it is only 100 meters or so deep
You can put in nearshore wind towers along the OR coast but that will be hugely controversial due to the views. Better to put it all out over the horizon which is much much easier along the Atlantic. Unless they can figure out how to make floating anchored wind turbines.
Another Scott
@Kent:
There are a few operational floating wind turbines. The cost is higher than for fixed offshore platforms, so far. But everything’s more expensive when it has to float… ;-)
I’m reminded of Lockheed’s efforts since the 1970s to push ocean thermal power. (Taking advantage of the fact that you can get power from temperature differences and the ocean surface-to-depths has a quasi-infinite reservoir with a fairly big temperature difference. A pilot plant off Hawaii a few years ago apparently was a failure, but they are (or were in 2013) trying again for China. And apparently South Korea is/was in 2016 working on the technology as well.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Kent: TBF he specifies floating wind installations, so not anchored to the seafloor (maybe cabled to keep them located? IDK).
The CA north coast doesn’t have enough rich residents to fend off visible wind farms, so there’s that option too.
Martin
@Brachiator: A lot of it is that. But what the decoupling unlocked is the utilities can use their buying power to, for example, bulk buy LEDs and hand them out to consumers for far less than the consumers would pay, and they wind up being cheap enough that the utility gets the revenue back through the rate increase from the reduced consumption. Left to the consumers, they can’t get the same benefits. Energy Star was originally a CA program, and Californians are significantly more likely to buy high efficiency appliances than in other states. That decoupling led to a culture of conservation that while not super strong in CA, largely doesn’t exist in the rest of the country. That’s the part that needs to be kickstarted nationally.
Another advantage this has is that CA utilities have enormous deltas between cost of generation and retail, meaning that they can afford to strand assets like gas plants that no other utilities can do. Grid upgrade, new generation are all a lot easier to do when you’re paying $.025/kWh and charging $.18.
Martin
@gene108: My point on the EVs is that even if you get 100% fleet replacement, the US will fall short of it’s Paris targets. EVs don’t do enough *even if* you can replace every vehicle on the road (trillions in outlay).
EVs aren’t designed to solve climate change. They’re designed to sovle flagging auto sales, which is why automakers are going upmarket with them. Median car price by 2030 is likely to top $60K. It’s already $47K. And cities are going broke over the road costs. Most cities pay more for roads than for schools, and that is tipping every more toward roads as vehicles get heavier.
So EVs are better, but not sufficient. The risk is that we dump a trillion dollars in subsidies into the market only to realize that it’s a dead-end and an even more massive investment in mass transit and Micromobility is needed to solve the EV problem. Nothing coming out of the industry suggests that EVs will scale. The charging network, despite a lot of effort out of CA, is still pitiful. We have 13,000 public chargers. The state’s goal is 1.2 million by 2030. We’re not going to come close.
Martin
@trollhattan: Yeah, floating wind is cabled to the floor. The state has 200% of current state demand in potential offshore wind, so it’s a HUGE market. From what I can see in the VC market, the goal isn’t to make money off of the generation. Once you go with full renewables, you have no marginal costs for generation, so you might as well make as much as you can. The money then shifts to who can convert that essentially free power into a good of higher value. I’m guessing there’s going to be ongoing money in water, so desalination is a good bet. Maybe green hydrogen. You invest to couple those markets together, as the geothermal/lithium plant at Salton Sea is trying.
Martin
@trollhattan: Oh, the offshore wind is like 100 miles off shore. At about 40 miles an 800′ turbine is below the curvature. At 100 miles, you’d need to be above like 3000′ at the coast to see over the curvature to see it.
There will need to be coastal power connections though.
Another Scott
@Martin: Eventually the power from off-shore wind could be transmitted to land via microwave links. There has been recent progress in that area – a topic that has been talked about for generations.
Cheers,
Scott.