The trio of major bills signed into law by President Biden will inject more than $800 billion of climate-related investments into the U.S. economy.
That’s according to Samantha Medlock, senior counsel for the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, who spoke yesterday at a Climate Summit webinar hosted by the publication GovExec.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act together represent $800 billion “in climate and environmental justice authorizations and direct investments,” Medlock said, saying the laws would impact everything from home energy bills to the job market.
Spending the money wisely is the next step, she said, and providing technical assistance to states, cities, tribes and territories will go a long way toward ensuring equitable and efficient investment, she said.
“If we had all the information in the world and all the funding in the world but we did not prioritize investing in technical assistance, we would be missing out on the most critical opportunity to make the best use of these resources,” she said. “If all we’re doing is helping the big urban areas, we really missed an opportunity.”
Climate data is also key to spending the money wisely, Madlock said, noting that the federal government is already using advanced computing and other models to guide investment.
“Today we better understand the conditions that are coming over the expected life of important assets like bridges or water supply plants,” she said. “So it’s critical that decisions about where or how we build or rebuild or retrofit ….reflects that understanding.”
The public and private sectors on the receiving end face challenges tied to the federal aid, said Michael Gerrard, a professor at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
There are not enough blue- or white-collar workers to start on projects, Gerrard said.
Federal agencies will need to staff up, especially by hiring environmental analysts to speed up federal permitting process, and states are going to have to add staff to handle all the new federal money, he said.
“There are also challenges in getting the permits to build individual facilities; a lot of local opposition arises to new wind or solar transmission,” and local governments sometimes pass ordinances to block renewable energy facilities, he said. “The money is going to be there but… all of us are going to have to work very hard to make sure it’s used and it’s effectively used.”
Future climate policy may look a lot like the Inflation Reduction Act, which features more carrots than sticks, Gerrard said, predicting that tools like cap-and-trade will become less popular. On top of project support, the new laws feature money for research and development, which will be key to developing the technology needed to reach future climate goals, he said.
California’s move this week to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 is an example of where climate policy is headed, said Vicki Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.
“We’re at an inflection point where climate policy will create enormous benefits for our people,” Patton said. “It’s at a place now where the solutions we have at hand are going to be cheaper, cleaner and create a lot of jobs and economic opportunity that will just continue to accelerate climate progress.”