House takes aim at climate change
U.S. legislation would commit record funding for programs to battle global warming
WASHINGTON The United States took a major step toward fighting climate change Friday with passage through the House of Representatives of a $2.2 trillion (U.S.) spending bill that includes the largest expenditures ever made by the federal government to slow global warming.
The legislation provides about $500 billion for programs that could significantly curb the fossil fuel emissions that have been heating the atmosphere, fuelling deadly and record-breaking wildfires, floods, heat waves and droughts. However, the bill faces an uncertain path through the Senate, and negotiations between the two chambers may change its form.
On its own, the legislation isn’t enough to fulfil President Joe Biden’s pledge that the United States will cut its emissions by half from 2005 levels by the end of this decade. But it goes well beyond any other climate policy that has come before it, in the United States and in many other countries.
It features tax incentives to cut the costs to consumers and manufacturers of electric vehicles, electric heat pumps, solar panels, wind farms and other equipment designed to power the economy without pollution.
“The science is clear. We only have a brief window left before us to raise our ambitions and to raise to meet the task that’s rapidly narrowing,” Biden said at a global climate summit this month. “But ladies and gentlemen, within the growing catastrophe, I believe there’s an incredible opportunity. Not just for the United States, but for all of us. We’re standing at an inflection point in world history. We have the ability to invest in ourselves and build an equitable clean energy future.”
The House passed the bill by a vote of 220-213, with one Democrat joining every Republican in opposition. Its passage follows Biden’s signing Monday of a separate $1.2trillion infrastructure package that included about $50 billion to help fortify communities against the effects from global warming. And it comes after leaders from nearly 200 countries struck a major agreement in Glasgow, Scotland, last Saturday aimed at intensifying efforts to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 C, compared with pre-industrial levels. Past that threshold, scientists have warned, the risk of deadly heat waves, destructive storms, water scarcity and ecosystem collapse grows immensely. The world has already warmed 1.1 C.
Republicans, who unanimously opposed the bill, assailed the climate provisions.
“This includes payoffs for electric vehicle owners,” said Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Senate energy and natural resources committee. “It includes higher taxes on American energy and higher prices for consumers.”
The measures, he said, “would raise costs for working families.”
In an eight-hour attack on the bill on the House floor that started Thursday night and bled into Friday morning, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, said: “Every moment you heat your home in the winter or cool it in the summer, you will pay more. That alone is enough reason to defeat the bill — defeat the bill!”
Climate change is the single largest spending category of the new legislation, which also encapsulates the rest of Biden’s broader domestic agenda, including expansions of child care, health care and education programs. Nearly one-quarter of the bill — about $500 billion to be spent over the next decade — is devoted to pulling the U.S. economy away from its 150-year-old reliance on fossil fuels and toward clean energy sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power.
By comparison, the largest amount previously spent by the federal government to combat climate change was about $80 billion, in the 2009 economic stimulus package signed into law by president Barack Obama. Obama also put in place the nation’s first major climate change regulations, but they were later weakened or erased by the Trump administration.
Once enacted, the new legislation could prevent emissions of about one billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, according to an analysis by Rhodium Group, an independent research organization. That’s the equivalent of taking roughly all the cars in the United States off the road for one year. But it would bring the country only about halfway to Biden’s goal, the analysis found.
“With passage of this bill, Biden will have made an outstanding accomplishment which can get the U.S. part of the way there,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.
Tax incentives, charging stations
The centrepiece of the new climate legislation is $320 billion in tax incentives for producers and buyers of wind, solar and nuclear power. Buyers of electric vehicles would receive up to $12,500 in tax credits, depending on what portion of the vehicle parts were made in America and whether they were built by union workers.
The legislation provides funds to create charging stations for electric vehicles and update the electric grid to better accommodate transmission of wind and solar power, as well as money for climate-friendly farming and forestry programs.
The bill would ban new offshore oil and gas leases off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and off the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and repeal the oil and gas leasing program in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, while authorizing lease sales for wind power in federal waters in the Atlantic Ocean and eastern Gulf of Mexico. It would increase the royalty rates paid by oil and gas companies that drill on federal lands, while reinstating a tax on crude oil and imported petroleum products.
It includes a suite of programs designed to promote environmental justice — addressing the history of environmental degradation and vulnerability to climate change experienced by low-income and minority communities. Those include about $30 billion for a “Green Bank” intended to help communities finance new clean energy projects, of which $15 billion is designated for low-income communities; $3 billion for grants to reduce pollution and climate threats for poor and vulnerable communities, and $12 million to help schools in disadvantaged communities remediate air pollution.
“This is a fundamental shift in tax policy,” said Ron Wyden, who chairs the Senate finance committee. “What makes this landmark legislation is that, for the first time, you would have, in the tax arena, a clear statement that the bigger your carbon reduction, the bigger your tax incentives.”
Most of the incentives are 10-year extensions of existing tax credits. In the past, those credits have expired after one to five years, and they often lapse before they are renewed.
“Some of them had a shelf life barely longer than a carton of eggs,” Wyden said. Extending them for a decade, he added “provides certainty and predictability to the clean energy producers.”