Historic—The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act

Author: Alan H. McGowan, Lecturer, Environmental Studies Program, New School in New York City.

This Q&A was originally published in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, here (open access through June 7, 2023)

EESI held a "Back to School: Catalyzing Climate Action in K-12 Schools" Congressional briefing on Capitol Hill on September 28, 2022. As part of the briefing, EESI organized an electric school bus tour by the Capitol's Reflecting Pool. Congressional and EESI staff are posing in front of the electric school bus, which drove all the way down from New York. Eighth from the right is Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.).

You have called the Inflation Reduction Act “historic.” Why is that?

In terms of investments, there has never before been anything like the $369 billion for climate solutions included in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. But I think the “how” of the IRA is just as important as the “how much.” The wide range of benefits resulting from its equitable implementation would be transformational and would not go unnoticed in our daily lives. The incentive-based approach will be attractive to more people, which I think will help justify additional policies and investments in the years to come. In any case, we should be perfectly clear: even though the IRA does a lot of really good things, we still have a long way to go, and more will be necessary if we want to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change.
One of my core beliefs is that the transition to a decarbonized, clean energy economy can be done in a way that leaves us all better off. We have been pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for so long and at such a level that we are already feeling climate impacts in the United States as well as in every other country, and many of those impacts will become more severe. But advancing climate solutions in the buildings, transportation, agriculture, industrial, and power sectors will represent improvements compared to the status quo. I envision a future of trading up, not trading off, made possible by the range of initial investments provided by Congress in the IRA.

On November 15, 2021, President Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. How important is this act? What provisions are particularly important? What is left to be done?

Before the IRA, we had the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA. There is a lot to like in the IIJA as well, including massive investments in transportation sector electrification, energy efficiency, and electric grid modernization. We also have to acknowledge the bipartisan nature of the IIJA—commonly referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The scale and scope of the IIJA represent the overlap of Republican and Democratic priorities, which add up to many billions of dollars to reduce emissions from the transportation, buildings, industrial, and power sectors.
In many ways, the IRA and IIJA are complementary. The IIJA came first and provided a solid foundation to build on, and the authors of the IRA had leverage on their mind. The Department of Energy released a report about the IIJA and IRA that shows how the two pieces of legislation add up to more than the sum of their parts.
The timing of the IIJA was also important. It was enacted while climate negotiators were in Glasgow, Scotland, for the UN climate talks. I issued a statement after the IIJA passed that said, “Congress sent a positive message to the world: the U.S. takes this challenge seriously and our leaders can come together on a bipartisan basis to support climate solutions.” U.S. leadership on the world stage is essential, especially when it also demonstrates that our political system can act in response to the challenges of the climate crisis.

Commercial aviation has a considerable climate change impact through greenhouse gas emissions and persistent contrails. This may be one of the economic sectors most difficult to electrify. Does EESI foresee that a transformation of this sector could be facilitated by legislative or executive action?

There are a lot of climate topics that Congressional staff always say they want to learn more about. At the top of the list is sustainable aviation, and especially electrified or alternative-fueled aircraft [There are sustainable aviation fuel provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act]. Jeff Overton, who joined EESI as a policy fellow after a career flying commercial airliners, put together our fact sheet about sustainable aviation, one of our most popular written educational resources.
One thing that we have been tracking very closely is the voluntary commitments that airlines are making to purchase and use domestically produced sustainable aviation fuels. The service life of a new aircraft can be 25 to 30 years. And we are several decades away from a large electric airliner that can make it over long-haul routes. Jet fuel is not great when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, so we need an alternative unless we are prepared to give up on long-haul air travel. Biofuels offer us a low-carbon alternative while other technologies are developed and commercialized. A rapid increase in sustainable aviation fuel production is essential to lower the climate impact of air travel. We have hosted briefings that have covered aviation-related topics that some members of Congress are studying. It would not surprise me at all for a consensus proposal to emerge from the airline industry that would lead to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and that could pass Congress on a bipartisan basis.