36 United States
Links US
Geothermal Everywhere: A New Path for American Renewable Energy Leadership
36.1 IRA
Tooze
Energy abundance strategy
But the “cheap stuff is good” philosophy is integral to understanding the climate provisions of IRA, too, because the bill actually represents a conceptual revolution in how to approach climate policy. The original Obama-era idea was carbon pricing — making dirty energy more expensive — which failed in Congress only to be replaced by regulatory strategies like the Clean Power Plan that also aimed to make dirty energy more expensive. During the Trump years, activists and advocates continued to come up with more ways for the next Democratic administration to drive energy costs up. A big part of the push to declare Manchin a bad-faith actor was a sense that the White House was holding off on dramatic executive action in order to appease the West Virginia senator. If activists could convince Biden to give up on Manchin, then they could push him to do everything in his power to throttle fossil fuel production and drive the cost of dirty energy up. But that’s not what happened. Instead, IRA achieves emissions reductions almost entirely by trying to lower the cost of clean energy and electric appliances … and while Biden has certainly done executive actions on environmental issues, we’re also on pace to set an all-time record in American oil production this year. That’s the actual energy policy Democrats ended up enacting — an abundance-oriented approach to the energy transition that focuses on driving costs down.