QOTD -- Superlative Climate Deal

 

"...on climate and energy in particular, the bill is a landmark. It authorizes $369 billion of new climate spending, the largest investment in emissions reduction in American history—and, more important, the biggest blow against climate change ever struck by the U.S. government. 'This is it. This is the real victory,' Sam Ricketts, a co-founder of Evergreen Action, a climate think tank, and a former adviser to Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State, told me. 'I struggle to find enough superlatives to describe this deal.'  [snip]

"A few weeks ago, when the previous version of the reconciliation bill was still alive, I set out two questions by which any climate legislative effort should be judged: First, would the bill reduce U.S. emissions on net compared with doing nothing at all? (By that point, it seemed likely that Schumer would concede some amount of new fossil-fuel development to Manchin.) And, second, would the bill make global decarbonization more likely? That is, would it help make zero-carbon technologies cheaper, help produce them in abundance, and generally strengthen the political position of those who want to see the world decarbonize?

"The bill aces both tests. It will almost certainly slash U.S. emissions on net, even when accounting for the increased carbon pollution from leasing new sites for oil drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. And it puts Biden’s ambitious Paris Agreement goal—to cut emissions by 50 percent, compared with their 2005 level, by 2030—back in reach." -- Robinson Meyer, in The Atlantic, on the energy and climate provisions in the "Inflation Reduction Act of 2022."  To pass this as a reconciliation bill in the Senate before their August 5 recess, we need all 50 Democratic Senators on board (hello, Sen. Sinema);  it would then need to be passed in the House.  There are issues that could hang things up.  So it will take hitherto rare party discipline to pass this once- in- a- lifetime legislation that seemed dead less than a week ago.  Call us hopeless optimists, but we think it will happen this time.