'Changed history': Gore, environmentalists react to landmark climate change bill

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With passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, by the House of Representatives on Friday, Congress passed a significant effort to address climate change for the first time ever. President Biden indicated he would sign the bill into law this week.

To many longtime leaders in the climate movement, it is a watershed moment: a directional shift from inaction and fossil fuel dependence to a clean energy future. Recognizing the bill’s limitations and shortcomings — it is expected, at most, to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 40% from 2005 levels by 2030 — they argued it is only the first step of many that will be taken.

“In crossing this threshold we have changed history and will never go backwards,” former Vice President Al Gore told the Guardian in an interview on Friday. “I’m extremely optimistic that this will be a critical turning point in our struggle to confront the climate crisis.”

In 1981, when Gore was a Democratic member of Congress from Tennessee, he co-chaired the first-ever congressional hearing on climate change. His first book about the subject, “Earth in the Balance,” was published in 1992. The energy industry has long had influence over American politics, and previous climate change proposals from Democratic presidents have failed to pass Congress. George W. Bush, who beat Gore in the 2000 presidential race, was in part an oilman from Texas. So one might expect Gore to see the obstacles to future climate action as formidable and the risk of backsliding as significant.

Al Gore speaking at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland
Al Gore speaking at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Nov. 5, 2021. (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

But instead — pointing to the fact that the incentives for wind and solar energy production, home energy efficiency upgrades and electric vehicles will save consumers thousands of dollars — Gore predicted that the electorate would demand that future lawmakers keep the ball rolling.

“This is momentum that I think will be unstoppable,” Gore said. “The savings to consumers will be so impressive, and so massively deflationary, that people will not support politicians who will want to take us backwards. We’re not going back again.”

Gore’s views were echoed by the heads of environmental advocacy organizations.

“A great tide has turned,” said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. “This is the strongest U.S. climate action ever in the moment when we need it most. It sets us on course for a clean energy future. The country will never turn back, and the gains will be profound.”

“This is a stunning achievement,” said Dominique Browning, co-founder of the environmental nonprofit Moms Clean Air Force, in a statement.

“Plenty of people underestimated our power. ... And now, here we are,” she continued. “But sometimes the hard part begins when you get what you wish (and work) for.

“With this investment, we are at yet another beginning. The beginning of building out a massive clean energy grid, with all the thorny issues of permitting and siting of industrial scale technologies. The beginning of overhauling our transportation system. The beginning of strengthening our Environmental Protection Agency in its mission to protect human health.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with other House Democrats
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House Democrats celebrate after she signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 on Friday. (Susan Walsh/AP)

Congressional Democrats, who passed the measure on a party-line vote, hit similar notes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, referring to the bill’s frequent collision into stumbling blocks in the Senate, told the Washington Post on Friday, “It’s not anything that anybody, three months ago, would have said is a possibility.” On the floor of Congress that day, she said the IRA is “the most consequential climate action in the history of our Congress, of our country.”

Republicans, who uniformly opposed the measure, focused their criticism mainly on other provisions, such as tax increases on corporations and beefed-up enforcement of tax laws.

To the extent that they talked about the clean energy subsidies in the bill, it was to inveigh against government spending and its potential to exacerbate inflation.

“Your pocketbook is their plan to fund more inflationary spending,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said. (Democrats contend that because the IRA will raise tax revenue more than spending and help reduce the budget deficit, it will reduce inflation.)

McCarthy also complained that wind and solar power are treated more favorably than fossil fuels.

“It hands out tax credits with no accountability,” he said. “But when it comes to natural gas, which heats our homes, cooks our food, it raises taxes.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy speaking to reporters at the Capitol on Friday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

There is no tax on natural gas as such in the legislation. McCarthy was likely referring to a fee for leakage of methane, a potent short-term greenhouse gas, in oil and gas wells and pipelines, that is included in the IRA. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry trade group for oil and gas companies, is referring to the methane fee as a “natural gas tax.”

The climate change and energy components of the bill were also criticized both by interest groups that support fossil fuel extraction and by those that oppose it. The API, while welcoming provisions that will mandate oil and gas leasing offshore and on federal land, criticized the methane fee.

The group also argued that corporate tax hikes will cause oil and gas companies to pass the added costs on to raise consumers in the form of higher energy prices. And it said higher taxes will deter investment in future fossil fuel exploration by reducing the profits reaped from making the high-cost investment in oil and gas drilling infrastructure.

“While the Inflation Reduction Act takes important steps toward new oil and gas leasing and investments in carbon capture and storage, it falls well short of addressing America’s long-term energy needs and further discourages needed investment in oil and gas,” said API president and CEO Mike Sommers.

On the other end of the spectrum, groups focused on environmental issues — combating the disproportionate effect of pollution, climate change and fossil fuel extraction on disadvantaged communities — were dismayed at the bill’s inclusion of oil and gas leasing.

Mike Sommers
Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“To say this moment is bittersweet is an understatement,” said Jade Begay, climate justice director at NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights advocacy organization. “On one hand, the IRA — which puts us on track to meet national climate goals by 2030 and will provide much-needed support around health care, jobs and infrastructure — was only made possible by the tireless organizing of frontline and Indigenous communities, young people and climate justice advocates. On the other hand, the IRA dismisses fundamental, decades-long demands by Indigenous, Black, brown and low-income communities to end fossil fuel expansion.”

The larger environmental groups, including the NRDC and Moms Clean Air Force, acknowledged these criticisms and argued that the fossil fuel extraction provisions were painful compromises worth making to win support from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a moderate and the pivotal swing vote in the evenly divided Senate. Other measures to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption will follow in future legislation, they hope.

“We can’t let this be a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” argued Gore. “The path to net zero [emissions] requires us to move forward, and a lot of the hard work lies ahead.”

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