As a steamy July drew to a conclusion, with Americans challenged not only by intense heat but by deadly floods roaring through eastern Kentucky and St. Louis and wildfires out West, some rare good news emerged from the halls of Congress. Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer (NY) and Joe Manchin (WV) announced that they had agreed to a bill that, among other things, would take major steps forward on climate change.
It’s a tad early to pop the corks on your bottle of champagne. Any number of problems could push this compromise off the rails before it rumbles down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Oval Office. But supporters are taking heart from the determination of powerful officials to see this legislation succeed.
If passed, the bill would cut annual emissions by as much as 44 percent by the end of this decade, according to a new set of analyses from three independent research firms, Robinson Meyer reported in The Atlantic.
I was skeptical of it when we started doing the modeling,” Anand Gopal, the executive director of strategy at Energy Innovation, told Meyer. Energy Innovation is a nonpartisan policy group in San Francisco and prepared one of the three studies. “But now I’m convinced that this is a really meaningful action by the United States on climate in this decade.”
The Manchin-Schumer bill wouldn’t get all the way to President Biden’s 2030 goal, said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor who leads the REPEAT Project. But, he told Meyer, it would get close enough that states, cities, companies, and EPA could get the country over the finish line. At its core, the bill has one idea that would help accomplish these cuts. “The biggest thing is, it makes clean energy cheap. That’s really the bottom line,” Jenkins said.
Like any compromise involving a controversial issue, the bill contains provisions that trouble one side or another. As a group that believes strongly in the power of a carbon fee, we regret that the legislation does not contain one. And as The Washington Post pointed out, to secure Manchin’s vote, Democratic leadership pledged to mandate new oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska. That will only worsen the climate crisis.
However, "for every ton of emissions increases generated by [the bill's] oil and gas provisions, at least 24 tons of emissions are avoided by the other provisions," Energy Innovation concluded.
The bill “reflects a careful balancing of ambition with political pragmatism,” Stephanie Hanes wrote in The Christian Science Monitor. “It balances economic needs with environmental achievement, spends more on incentives rather than imposing penalties, and focuses on optimism as opposed to ecological doom – attributes that many analysts say make it more palatable than some past climate efforts.”
While opponents of climate action contend that it will come at a steep cost to Americans’ pocketbooks, Moody’s Analytics concluded that the bill "mitigates the economic cost of inaction." As Axios reported on those findings:
They project that compared to a case with no additional climate policies, real GDP is 0.6% higher in 2050 and 2.7% higher by 2100.
"The clear lesson is that upfront investments in addressing climate change reap substantial long-term economic benefits."
The Wall Street Journal told its readers that some clean-energy executives in areas like energy storage said they have already been getting more inquiries from potential customers and partners since the bill was introduced. “It is a really important signal to the market and companies like ours,” said Geoff Brown, CEO of the battery-storage company Powin LLC, which recently privately raised $135 million from investors including Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund.
If this bill becomes law, our nation will once again be a credible leader in the fight against climate change. “You can’t preach temperance from a bar stool,” Markey said in 2008, adding last week that “you can’t ask China, India, Brazil or other countries to cut emissions if we’re not doing it ourselves in a significant way.”
Environmental champion Bill McKibben is one of those who had to have winced at some of the elements of the compromise, noting in The New Yorker that the bill “reflects not just the growing strength of the climate movement but also the lingering power of the fossil-fuel industry.” But he believes that “the political trade-off is worth it.”
“Taken as a whole,” McKibben concluded, “the bill is a triumph.” If you agree, please encourage your senators and representative to support it. Today.