Climate bill alone won’t halve U. S. emissions by 2030
Since the Senate’s passage of the Democrats’ massive climate bill, backslapping and congratulations have been the order of the day among environmentalists from California to West Virginia. In their giddiness over the scale of the Inflation Reduction Act, they may want to pause to acknowledge the dynamics that allowed this moment to arrive.
The $ 370 billion package survived a political process that doomed many previous efforts because clean energy has finally become cheap enough to start moving the country away from fossil fuels.
The problem is that the chain of technological advances that will enable the climate bill to move the US to a less carbonintensive future are not enough to get the country all the way to its goal: cutting emissions in half by 2030, compared to 2005, and eliminating them in full by the middle of the century. For that, decarbonization must become even cheaper. And future gains will be tougher to come by.
The cost- cutting so far has little to do with American environmental activism. Credit should go, in large part, to China and Germany. And to George Mitchell.
Germany’s decision in 2010 to replace most of its power infrastructure with renewable energy may not have been entirely enlightened, but it created a reliable market for solar and wind technologies. China deployed its manufacturing prowess to drive down the cost of wind turbines and solar panels. Today, some sun and wind farms produce electricity at lower cost than the cheapest gas and coal generators.
And Texas oilman George Mitchell famously spent $ 6 million and a decade to figure out how to frack shale rock to release deposits of gas and oil, leading power companies to switch to suddenly cheap gas and cutting coal consumption by 42% from 2007 to 2020.
These three players illuminated the finish line, driving down the cost of carbondioxide reduction to a point where the American political class could be comfortable with it.
“The cost difference between fossil and low- carbon energy has shrunk over the last 10 years in dramatic ways,” Michael Greenstone, who heads the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, told me. “For the first time it has allowed modest policies to deliver real carbon reductions.”
A deconstruction of American carbon emissions helps explain how cheap it has become to reduce them. The US economy is about 25% bigger than it was in 2005, and yet the country emits 20% less CO2 from energy use.
That’s mostly because the economy consumes much less energy per dollar of gross domestic product than it did 17 years ago. Over the past 10 years, however, US energy has also become much less carbon- intensive.
Mitchell is largely to thank for this. For each unit of energy produced, natural gas emits only 54% as much carbon as coal
kidnap them into slavery. A base was also named for a secessionist ideologue, Gen. Henry Lewis Benning, who believed that sustaining slavery was the only way to prevent African Americans from becoming citizens and officeholders.
That myth of the noble Confederacy held sway in the American military for more than 100 years. It faltered in 2015, when a Confederateflagwaving white supremacist murdered nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. The myth collapsed in 2020, when protests following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer bolstered efforts to remove Confederate iconography.
A Man Called ‘ Black Death’
The Naming Commission had an abundance of highly decorated veterans to choose from, but it wisely refused to limit its definition of meritorious service to conduct in battle. The resulting roster of nominees covers what my Times colleague Helene Cooper has described as “a multicolored swath of Americans, including women and minorities — two long- ignored populations that have served in or supported the Army since its inception.”
The Naming Commission recommendations must still meet the approval of Congress and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. If this list passes muster, Fort Bragg in North Carolina — named for the failed general Braxton Bragg, “the most hated man in the Confederacy” — would be renamed Fort Liberty.
Fort Benning in Georgia would be renamed Fort Moore, after the distinguished career officer Hal Moore and his wife, Julia Moore. She is remembered for remaking the once callous process through which the Army notified families about the deaths of loved ones. This nomination recognizes the spouses and families who often devote their lives to the Army.
Fort A. P. Hill in Virginia would take the name of Dr. Mary Walker, an abolitionist and champion of women’s rights who became the first female surgeon in Army history. She worked as a Union spy and served several punishing months as a Confederate prisoner of war. She was awarded the Medal of Honor based on testimonials from Gen. William T. Sherman and Gen. George Thomas.
Fort Gordon in Georgia would be renamed for
Dwight D. Eisenhower, a career soldier who led the Dday assault on Normandy in France in 1944, became a fivestar general and finished his career as president of the United States.
Fort Hood in Texas would become Fort Cavazos, after Gen. Richard E. Cavazos, a native Texan who twice received the Distinguished Service Cross and served with extraordinary valor in Vietnam and Korea.
Fort Rucker in Alabama would take the name of Michael Novosel Sr., a much admired aviator and Medal of Honor recipient who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam — where he was 47 years old when he performed a helicopter rescue that saved the lives of 29 men.
The Naming Commission exercise draws emotional power from the fact that it calls for re- christening two Confederate- named bases in honor of Americans who rallied to military service at a time when Black people were confined to segregated units mainly designated for work such as building roads or loading ships.
Fort Lee in Virginia — named after the Confederate general — would become
Fort Gregg- Adams, to honor two of these Americans.
Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg commanded logistics units around the world and was part of the wave of African American officers who applied for training in 1948, the year that President Harry Truman ordered an end to segregation in the armed forces. As a young soldier in the 1950s, Gregg integrated the officers’ club at Fort Lee.
Lt. Col. Charity Adams left her teaching job for the Army after the start of World War II. She became a highly regarded instructor at Officer Candidate School and later commanded the first unit of African American women to be sent overseas. The postal battalion she commanded in England delivered mail to and from nearly 7 million soldiers in Europe.
World War I hero William Henry Johnson, who served in the era of Wilson, received the Medal of Honor he richly deserved nearly a century after his service.
By proposing that Fort Polk in Louisiana take Johnson’s name, the commission highlights the extremes to which the Jim Crow- era United States sometimes went to deny even the possibility of African American heroism.
At the start of the war, Johnson joined the segregated unit that would become known as the Harlem Hellfighters.
He might have spent the war in Europe digging latrines or loading supplies for the United States but was instead assigned to French forces.
On an evening in the spring of 1918, Johnson and a comrade were standing sentry at a forward position in the Argonne Forest when a German raiding party attacked. Johnson engaged two dozen Germans, killing at least four, and prevented the attackers from carrying off his wounded comrade. He continued fighting though wounded 21 times.
He became the first American hero of the Great War and received the Croix de Guerre, one of France’s highest military honors. He continued to fight with French forces and eventually became known as “Black Death.”
Returning to the United States, Johnson never received adequate treatment for his many wounds. He died destitute in 1929. His grave site at Arlington National Cemetery was unknown for most of the century and was located in 2001.
A decade later, an aide to Sen. Charles Schumer of New York discovered a previously unknown 1918 memorandum from Gen. John Pershing describing Johnson’s valorous performance in the field.
At the Medal of Honor presentation in 2015, President Barack Obama alluded to the delay in recognizing Johnson’s exploits when he said, “We believe that it’s never too late to say thank you.”
Naming a Southern military base for a Black hero who was nearly erased during the age of Jim Crow would be a highly visible way of breaking with the cult of the Confederacy.