How to Make Climate Change a Bipartisan Priority

The environmental movement needs to invest in political infrastructure on the right.


Op-ed By Francis Rooney & Ryan Costello, Politico, Feb. 14, 2023

As a divided Congress gets underway, the environmental movement must confront a fundamental, and perhaps uncomfortable, reality: The U.S. will not be able to successfully address climate change without bipartisanship.

This is not to discount last year’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats squeezed through Congress without any GOP votes. However, there is still much work to do on climate and likely a decade’s wait, or longer, until Democrats again secure unified control of government. In the last half century, neither party has recaptured full control of Washington, after losing it, in fewer than 10 years. In the post-World War II period, the average time it has taken is 14 years. At this pace, it will be 2033, 2035, or 2037 before Democrats again hold the House, Senate and White House.

We simply cannot wait that long to pass additional climate legislation. The stakes are too high and the time is too short, especially in light of increasingly frequent and visible climate impacts. So relying exclusively on Democrats for continued climate progress would be a strategic blunder. Bipartisanship is the only assured path to decarbonizing at scale and speed.

Despite this reality, the climate movement has done far too little to lay the groundwork for bipartisan action. For years, philanthropists have poured money into progressive climate groups, while largely overlooking opportunities to engage right-of-center communities on this topic. The data bear this out. According to an analysis by Northeastern University, less than 2 percent of climate philanthropy has gone to engaging conservatives on climate change. On a very practical level, this imbalance misses an opportunity to build a broader tent and delays the elevation of climate as a bipartisan priority.

As former GOP congressmen eager to see further movement on climate, we know firsthand how difficult it can be to mobilize Republicans on this issue. Some of the blame lies within our own party, which has been too skeptical on climate action for too long. But without real engagement from the environmental movement, it becomes easy for our Republican colleagues to dismiss the issue as a liberal concern rather than a challenge confronting us all.

In its work on climate change, the Democratic Party is guided by a formidable civil society apparatus — including think tanks, grassroots organizations and more — that pushes, pulls and applauds Democrats as they act on this issue.

There is little equivalent on the right. The small assemblage of organizations that make up the “eco-right,” while growing, receive only a fraction of the funding that left-of-center groups do. If environmental leaders are genuinely committed to emboldening bipartisan action in support of increasingly ambitious policy, this must change. Far more resources need to be invested in building the kind of infrastructure that can rally conservatives to climate action.

Already, advocacy by the eco-right has demonstrated its ability to move the political needle. Just in the last few years, dozens of Republicans have joined the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucuses in both chambers of Congress; the newly formed Conservative Climate Caucus in the House now includes a third of the GOP conference.

These efforts have also produced concrete legislation, including the bipartisan Growing Climate Solutions Act, which passed the Senate with 92 votes. Several other bills, including the Financing Our Energy Future Act, Restoring Resilient Reefs Act, Protecting and Securing Florida’s Coastline Act, and National Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategy Act, have also garnered bipartisan support.

The Energy Act of 2020, which earned strong support from both parties, directs the EPA to reduce HFC gasses 85 percent by 2035. This measure will help limit global warming by a full half of a degree Celsius — one of the most significant climate actions in history. Additionally, the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in the last Congress includes an array of low carbon and clean energy measures.

There are meaningful, bipartisan victories to be achieved for those who seek them. This requires an openness to market-based solutions and a deeper commitment to climate engagement across the political spectrum.

Especially as philanthropic commitments to address climate change grow — including a new initiative announced this year at Davos — right-of-center climate engagement must be a core part of the portfolio.

One important place to start is in red states, where climate organizing, especially by trusted messengers, has paled in comparison to the vigor and energy of advocacy in blue states. At the end of the day, lawmakers are responsive to the voters in their own states and districts. Only with a greater mandate to lead, in Republican and Democratic districts alike, can we create the conditions necessary for bipartisan action on Capitol Hill.

While climate change is a unique and paramount challenge, the laws of political gravity remain the same. Legislative outcomes are born from the political infrastructure supporting them. If bipartisan climate solutions are our goal, then we must build toward them.

From the nexus of climate and trade to pollution pricing to natural climate solutions, there are many promising areas for bipartisan progress. But unless the environmental community embraces this mandate, and dedicates resources and attention accordingly, we will fail to meet the responsibilities of our moment in history.

This is the environmental movement’s vulnerability, but also its opportunity. Building bipartisan routes forward on climate won’t be easy. But it is the work that can, and must, be done.

Ryan Costello, a Republican from Pennsylvania, served in the House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019 and was a member of the Climate Solutions Caucus.

Francis Rooney, a Republican from Florida, served in the House of Representatives from 2017 to 2021 and was the co-chair of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/14/environmental-movement-climate-change-bipartisanship-00082575

Floating ice around Antarctica just hit a record low

The record could be a hint that Antarctic sea ice is finally starting to behave as expected as the planet warms.

By Chris Mooney, The Washington Post, Feb. 14, 2023

The amount of floating sea ice encircling Antarctica reached the lowest level ever recorded, scientists reported Tuesday, a sign that one of the most remote and mysterious facets of the climate system may, at last, be responding to the overall planetary warming trend.

The latest measurements represent the lowest reading for overall Antarctic sea ice extent since satellite monitoring began in late 1978. This marks the second year in a row that, as the Antarctic summer wears on and the Southern Ocean’s blanket of sea ice shrinks to its yearly minimum extent, a record low has been recorded.

The extent of ice around Antarctica dwindled to roughly 737,000 square miles as of Feb. 13, based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado; it measured roughly 741,000 square miles during the previous low, on Feb. 25, 2022.

The ice is likely to decline even further throughout much of February, before beginning its seasonal climb as summer ends in the Antarctic.

“This will not just be a ‘barely made it’ record, it is looking like it will be another substantial jump downward on top of last year’s record,” said Ted Scambos, an expert on sea ice and glaciers at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Scambos and other scientists determine sea ice extent at both poles from satellite data, and their figures count all areas where there is at least a 15 percent concentration of floating sea ice. Because individual daily readings can jump up and down, researchers use a five day average of the satellite data to assess whether a record has been broken.

Separately, a research group based in Germany called the Sea Ice Portal, which includes scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute and other institutions, declared Friday that a record low had occurred for summer Antarctic sea ice.

The back-to-back record lows could begin to reassure scientists that Antarctic sea ice is finally starting to behave as expected as the planet warms.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also announced Tuesday that global sea ice reached a record low in January, driven in large part by diminished Antarctic ice.

In the Arctic, the downtrend in the extent of floating sea ice has been clear and pronounced since the late 1970s. Based on annual averages of the ice’s extent, the Arctic has lost a little over 20,000 square miles of ice per year since 1979.

In the Antarctic, no clear downtrend in overall sea ice extent has yet emerged. It has even appeared as if ice extent might be rising slightly — despite general expectations that a warmer Earth should feature less ice at both poles.

During the Southern Hemisphere winter of 2014, Antarctic sea ice actually grew to a record high of more than 7,782,275 square miles. The record set off massive chatter about the Antarctic’s apparent thwarting of climate predictions.

But scientists have cautioned that there are many differences between the Arctic and Antarctic, and our satellite records are still relatively short — meaning that Antarctic declines could manifest themselves soon enough.

In the Arctic, the pole is covered by an ocean overlain by ice that spreads outward, but soon encounters and freezes onto land masses including the coasts of Alaska, Russia and Canada’s Arctic Islands.

In the Antarctic, the pole is covered by a vast landmass. It is only at its edge, beyond the Antarctic glaciers and their great floating ice shelves, that thinner sea ice forms. Once the ice grows outward, it encounters no hindrances in the vast Southern Ocean, and eventually extends for hundreds of miles. It is usually thinner than sea ice in the Arctic.

Antarctic ice also declines more steeply when summer comes. The floating ice climbs to an annual peak of more than 7 million square miles in September — but then subtracts an area nearly the size of Russia by the following February. In the each of the last two years, the minimal extent has fallen well under 1 million square miles.

Scientists say that these vast seasonal swings have made it tough to detect trends in the Antarctic. But with two record lows for Antarctic ice in 2022 and 2023 — and before that a record low in 2017 — it could be that a signal is beginning to emerge, at least in the summer.

If so, that also could make some physical sense — recent research has suggested that the broad warming of the planet’s oceans is now reaching the Antarctic, and affecting trends in sea ice.

“The level of Antarctic sea ice variability exhibited in 2016-2017 (extreme sea ice low), 2021-2022 (extreme sea ice low), 2023 (extreme sea ice low) is unprecedented in the satellite record and might signal a change in the Antarctic sea ice regime as a response to anthropogenic warming,” said Liping Zhang, a researcher at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at NOAA, who has studied how warming oceans could be affecting the ice.

“However, further data and analysis are required to evaluate and verify any claims for a changing Antarctic climate,” Zhang cautioned.

Scientists with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which provides the data, also sounded a cautionary note in their announcement.

“Antarctic sea ice extent has been highly variable over the last several years,” they noted. “While 2022 and 2023 have had record low minimum extent, four out of the five highest minimums have occurred since 2008.”

The significance of a decline in Antarctic sea ice, if it begins to emerge more clearly, would be different in some ways than for the Arctic.

At the top of Earth, Arctic sea ice is a main player in a crucial feedback that determines how much, and how rapidly, the Earth warms. Every time an area of ice melts and gets swapped out for an area of ocean, the Arctic absorbs more solar heat (because bright ice reflects much more radiation than dark ocean does). This unleashes a feedback in which warming shrinks sea ice, which enhances warming — one that is already afoot.

In the Antarctic, loss of sea ice also affects Earth’s reflectivity. But it has other, different potential consequences. One of them, Scambos said, could be exposing the great Antarctic ice shelves to more pounding by waves — which in turn, if those shelves have already been weakened by surface melting or warm ocean waters underneath, could further destabilize them.

Antarctic ice shelves are the seaward extension of the world’s largest army of glaciers, and provide a stabilizing function. If damaged or lost, glaciers will flow faster and sea levels will rise more rapidly.

Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the steep recent drop in sea ice around Antarctica has driven research on its potential causes and “whether sea ice loss in the Southern Hemisphere is developing a significant downward trend.”

Naema Ahmed contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/14/antarctic-sea-ice-record-low/

Carbon Tax

Policy 360 Podcast, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, Jan. 20, 2023

CO2 emissions play a major role in climate change. Guest host and J.D./UPEP doctoral candidate Gabriela Nagle Alverio speaks with Sanford Professor and Interim Director of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability Brian Murray about different carbon tax approaches and their pros and cons for curbing emissions.

Guest:

Brian Murray: Interim Director of the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Research Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy, and at the Nicholas School of the Environment

This is the third in a series of conversations about climate change.

Conversation Highlights

Responses have been edited for clarity.

Brian Murray on the definition of a carbon tax:

Carbon pricing is effectively putting a unit price on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere or in some cases as they’re removed from the atmosphere. The basic premise is it provides an economic incentive to reduce those emissions because currently they are untraced, so they’re treated as free. And when it’s free to emit greenhouse gases, we’re not incentivized to reduce those emissions.

 Brian Murray on emissions trading programs:

Another approach is called cap-and-trade or emissions trading. In a cap-and-trade program, the government issues a fixed number of permits, but they allow those permits to be sold in a market. So, if I need more permits to issue more greenhouse gases, I need to buy them from somebody else who’s able to reduce their greenhouse gases so that they won’t need the permit. It creates forces of supply and demand, which then creates a market price for emissions permits. And it’s that price that provides the same kind of economic signal to reduce emissions as a carbon tax.

Brian Murray on the Inflation Reduction Act:

The Inflation Reduction Act was just passed in August, much to the surprise of just about everyone I know, including people who work in the administration. It’s massive in terms of relative scale to any other climate policy. It’s mostly about energy – low carbon energy or zero carbon energy.

Brian Murray on the Duke Climate Commitment:

The new Duke Climate Commitment aims to deploy all aspects of the university’s mission: education, research, engagement, public service, campus operations and community partnerships, in pursuit of sustainable and equitable solutions to climate change. Climate change is a wicked challenge, but it’s a necessary challenge. It is among the most significant challenges of our time.

We are trying to train people to have climate fluency so they can be change-makers when they’re here on campus, but also soon after they leave campus. We educate students, but we also have a lifetime commitment to our alumni and to other partners of this university. We have a lot of exciting programs that we are developing right now to work with all these populations.

https://policy360.org/2023/01/20/ep-142-carbo-tax/

Dancing around the obvious climate solution

Op-ed by Bob Inglis, The Hill, Jan. 10, 2023

There’s a lot of dancing around a carbon tax as the obvious solution to climate change. What’s lacking is the confidence to go all in. If we had the confidence of a self-governing people, the steps would be obvious: untax payroll; tax carbon dioxide instead; apply the tax to imports; cause the world to follow our lead.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has penciled the idea on a dance card. He pointed out in that lengthy interview last month with the Washington Post that a border-adjusted carbon tax is the most powerful way to reduce worldwide emissions. That’s because trading partners would find it in their interest to skip a U.S. “border-adjustment” by implementing their own carbon tax. If so, the cost of CO2 would become visible to 8 billion people. Dirty products would be more expensive relative to clean ones, and accountable free enterprise would deliver innovation quickly.

Romney pointed out that Democrats could have enacted a carbon tax through the reconciliation process. They didn’t. Instead, they gave us the Inflation Reduction Act—a collection of tax credits that will drive clean energy innovation in America but likely fail to spur worldwide innovation. (American tax credits don’t incentivize foreign firms. Tax credits affect a firm’s decision to deploy clean energy only if it pays American taxes.)

A Democrat would be right to complain, though, that Republicans haven’t exactly stepped out onto the dance floor of the middle school gymnasium. Rather, Republicans seem to be standing on the walls of the gym, snickering about the history lessons of the 1994 midterm elections. Back then, Democrats lost control of the House, perhaps in part because of Al Gore’s BTU tax (British Thermal Unit tax).

Critics are right to point out that a BTU tax or a carbon tax would raise the price of nearly everything that we buy. That’s terrible policy and worse politics.

But what if we paired a carbon tax with a cut in payroll (F.I.C.A.) taxes, exercising the right of self-governing people to change what we tax? Such a tax swap requires trust, and that trust will come only if Republicans and Democrats work together.

The incoming Congress will have two opportunities to build that trust—in themselves and in their constituencies.  

First, Congress can work on bipartisan permitting reform. The clean energy that’s going to be created because of the IRA tax credits for nuclear, hydrogen, wind and solar energy will need to get to population centers. That means powerlines and, yes, pipelines—for natural gas, for hydrogen and for captured CO2. We need more copper and lithium and cobalt and nickel. That means mines. Our EVs don’t drop down from heaven like manna. Somebody’s got to get busy and make the materials for us. If we do it right, we can make those materials without fouling our air and water. But let’s be clear minded; there are going to be impacts on our landscapes. It’s a fallen world, and we have to make tradeoffs.

Second, Congress can anticipate the European Union’s enactment of a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM). American companies selling certain commodities to Europe are going to have to pay a carbon tax when their products land in European ports. That’s a tax that we could collect ourselves. If we did, those products would enter Europe without adjustment. The carbon tax revenue would be here, not there. And it would make no difference to the American exporter’s customers because the carbon tax is going to be built into the price of the product either way.

Thankfully, Republicans like Sen. Kevin Cramer (N.D.) are stepping forward with a somewhat parallel proposal for a carbon tariff. He would have the U.S. collect a tariff on Chinese steel, for example, to account for their heavy CO2 emissions. Cramer argues that our existing clean air regulations are equivalent to a domestic carbon tax. Perhaps the World Trade Organization would agree with Cramer, but even if they don’t, he’s much to be congratulated for starting toward the dance floor.

Our ability to govern ourselves is at the heart of who we are as Americans. We can decide to untax some form of income, to put a tax on carbon dioxide instead and to apply that tax to imports. That would get the world “in” on solving climate change, and accountable free enterprise would deliver innovation at scale and fast.

Rep. Bob Inglis represented South Carolina in Congress from 1993-1999 and 2005-2011. He is the executive director of republicEn.org, a growing group of conservatives who care about climate change.

https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/3807530-dancing-around-the-obvious-climate-solution/

Parts of Greenland now hotter than at any time in the past 1,000 years, scientists say

New research in the northern part of Greenland finds temperatures are already 2.7 degrees warmer than they were in the 20th century

By Chris Mooney, The Washington Post, Jan. 18, 2023

The coldest and highest parts of the Greenland ice sheet, nearly two miles above sea level in many locations, are warming rapidly and showing changes that are unprecedented in at least a millennium, scientists reported Wednesday.

That’s the finding from research that extracted multiple 100-foot or longer cores of ice from atop the world’s second-largest ice sheet. The samples allowed the researchers to construct a new temperature record based on the oxygen bubbles stored inside them, which reflect the temperatures at the time when the ice was originally laid down.

“We find the 2001-2011 decade the warmest of the whole period of 1,000 years,” said Maria Hörhold, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany.

And since warming has only continued since that time, the finding is probably an underestimate of how much the climate in the high-altitude areas of northern and central Greenland has changed. That is bad news for the planet’s coastlines, because it suggests a long-term process of melting is being set in motion that could ultimately deliver some significant, if hard to quantify, fraction of Greenland’s total mass into the oceans. Overall, Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 20 feet.

The study stitched together temperature records revealed by ice cores drilled in 2011 and 2012 with records contained in older and longer cores that reflect temperatures over the ice sheet a millennium ago. The youngest ice contained in these older cores was from 1995, meaning they could not say much about temperatures in the present day.

The work also found that compared with the 20th century as a whole, this part of Greenland, the enormous north-central region, is now 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer, and that the rate of melting and water loss from the ice sheet — which raises sea levels — has increased in tandem with these changes.

The research was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday by Hörhold and a group of researchers at the Alfred Wegner Institute and two other institutions in Germany, the Niels Bohr Institute and the University of Bremen.

The new research “pushes back the instrument record 1,000 years using data from within Greenland that shows unprecedented warming in the recent period,” said Isabella Velicogna, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine who was not involved in the research.

“This is not changing what we already knew about the warming signal in Greenland, the increase in melt and accelerated flow of ice into the ocean, and that this will be challenging to slow down,” Velicogna said. “Still, it adds momentum to the seriousness of the situation. This is bad, bad news for Greenland and for all of us.”

Scientists have posited that if the air over Greenland becomes warm enough, a feedback loop would ensue: The ice sheet’s melting would cause it to slump to a lower altitude, which would naturally expose it to warmer air, which would cause more melting and slumping, and so forth.

That this north-central part of Greenland is now 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 1900s does not necessarily mean the ice sheet has reached this feared “tipping point,” however.

Recent research has suggested that Greenland’s dangerous threshold lies at about 1.5 degrees Celsius or higher of planetary warming — but that is a different figure than the ice sheet’s regional warming. When the globe reaches 1.5C of warming on average, which could happen as soon as the 2030s, Greenland’s warming will likely be even higher than that — and higher than it is now.

Researchers consulted by The Washington Post also highlighted that the northern region of Greenland, where these temperatures have been recorded, is known for other reasons to have the potential to trigger large sea-level rise.

“We should be concerned about north Greenland warming because that region has a dozen sleeping giants in the form of wide tidewater glaciers and an ice stream … that awakened will ramp up Greenland sea level contribution,” said Jason Box, a scientist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

Box published research last year suggesting that in the present climate, Greenland is already destined to lose an amount of ice equivalent to nearly a foot of sea-level rise. This committed sea-level rise will only get worse as temperatures continue to warm.

The concern is focused on the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, which channels a major portion — 12 percent — of the ice sheet toward the sea. It’s essentially a massive slow-moving river that terminates in several very large glaciers that spill into the Greenland Sea. It is already getting thinner, and the glaciers at its endpoint have lost mass — one of them, the Zachariae Isstrom, has also lost its frozen shelf that once extended over the ocean.

Recent research has also demonstrated that in past warm periods within the relatively recent history of the Earth (i.e., the last 50,000 years or so), this part of Greenland has often held less ice than it does today. In other words, the ice stream might extend farther outward from the center of Greenland than can be sustained at current temperatures, and be strongly prone to moving backward and giving up a lot of ice.

“Paleoclimate and modeling studies suggest that northeast Greenland is especially vulnerable to climate warming,” said Beata Csatho, an ice sheet expert at the University at Buffalo.

In the same year when the researchers were drilling the ice cores on which the current work is based — 2012 — something striking happened in Greenland. That summer, in July, vast portions of the ice sheet saw surface-melt conditions, including in the cold and very high-elevation locations where the research took place.

“It was the first year it has been observed that you have melting in these elevations,” said Hörhold. “And now it continues.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/18/greenland-hotter-temperatures/

US emissions rose in 2022. Here’s why that’s not as bad as it sounds.

As renewables overtook coal, economic growth outpaced the rise in carbon emissions.

By Jake Bittle, Grist, Jan. 10, 2023

A new report from the Rhodium Group, a research firm that models greenhouse gas emissions, brings good news and bad news. First, the bad: U.S. emissions increased by just over 1 percent last year, making 2022 the second consecutive year of carbon emissions growth since the American economy began recovering from the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The good news is that there are signs that the U.S. economy is already starting to kick its addiction to planet-warming emissions, even before the implementation of the landmark clean energy law passed by Congress last year. Although carbon emissions grew in 2022, the 1.3 percent year-over-year growth was far smaller than the 6.2 percent surge in 2021. More significantly, emissions didn’t rise as fast as overall economic output, indicating that the U.S. economy became less carbon-intensive even as it roared back to life after the 2020 lockdowns. 

The main reason for this increasing divergence between economic growth and emissions growth is the decline of coal power, which is by far the most carbon-intensive form of electricity generation. As coal plants across the U.S. have shuttered over the past decade, natural gas plants have largely opened up to replace them. While natural gas is a fossil fuel, burning it produces around half the emissions that burning coal does.

Even more notably, the past two years have seen a dramatic surge in renewable energy. Carbon-free power generation grew 12 percent in 2022, according to Rhodium, driven by the breakneck adoption of solar and wind. This growth came in spite of the fact that new solar deployments actually slowed down in 2022 as the industry grappled with snarls in the supply chain for polysilicon and other critical materials used to make solar panels. An ongoing squabble over tariffs on Chinese solar materials may further hamper the industry.

Even so, the continued rollout of solar and wind facilities helped renewables overtake coal power in 2022, marking a major milestone in the energy transition. Solar, wind, and hydropower combined now account for around 22 percent of U.S. power generation, more than coal at 20 percent or nuclear at 19 percent, according to Rhodium. That hasn’t been the case in more than 60 years, ever since coal first surpassed hydropower.

The new data from Rhodium suggests that, despite the shocks of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the U.S. is on a long-term path toward a cleaner grid. The drop in power-sector emissions last year doesn’t reflect the potential effect of the Inflation Reduction Act, the major climate law signed by President Biden last August, which provides extensive new tax credits for renewable energy as well as for electric vehicles and home energy efficiency. The first projects that benefit from the legislation aren’t expected to arrive until late 2023, but the subsidies will only further juice the current trend toward clean energy over the coming decade.

Last year, as the United States emerged from the first wave of the pandemic, emissions grew faster than the economy did, thanks to a temporary resurgence in cheap coal and a huge jump in the number of automobile trips taken nationwide. Carbon pollution from the transportation and building sectors continued to rise this year, according to Rhodium’s data, reflecting the continued dominance of internal-combustion vehicles and gas heat. It was only in the power sector that emissions fell year-over-year.

That’s in keeping with a long-term trend. U.S. emissions have fallen by 15.5 percent since their peak in 2005, largely thanks to the slow death of coal power. It was a market-driven shift toward gas and renewables, rather than any climate-focused public policy, that spurred this reduction, but now the Inflation Reduction Act should help extend these gains to other segments of the economy, pushing the U.S. closer to meeting the goals of the 2016 Paris climate accords, in which the world’s countries collectively pledged to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

The report from Rhodium notes that federal policy, “together with additional policies from leading states as well as action from private actors, can put the [Paris] target within reach—but all parties must act quickly.” The report also says that the U.S. may see emissions fall as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act as soon as this year — “if the government can fast-track implementation.”

https://grist.org/energy/us-carbon-emissions-2022-rhodium-report/