It may be a distant memory, but back in 2019 and 2020, when Joe Biden was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, climate change was one of the biggest issues in the primary. And at the time, Biden put forth a remarkably ambitious clean energy plan. He had to.
“Every candidate seemed to try to one up the other,” says Zoya Teirstein. She's a columnist for Gris, where she and her colleague Jake Bittle recently wrote a piece about Biden's legacy, “Joe Biden Was America's First Climate President.”
Biden, of course, would go on to win the primary, and then the 2020 election. And for Zoya and Jake, even if Biden's climate proposals started off as just talking points, history may well remember him as our first climate president.
In 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, or the IRA, which promised vast sums of money from the government to support green energy programs. Since 2022 also feels like ancient history at this point, I asked Jake to remind me of some of the IRA's key provisions.
“There's a consumer subsidy for electric vehicles, right? So you get a rebate if you buy a certain set of electric vehicles with enough components made in the United States. And then there's a set of tax credits for utilities or companies that build, you know, new renewable energy, right? So basically just subsidizes solar and wind,” Bittle said.
And that's not all.
There's also something called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which gives community grants for carbon reducing projects. There's actually government money available for tons of different things.
And in the piece, Jake and Zoya called the Inflation Reduction Act a “Beltway miracle.” It had to overcome months of resistance from people like former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, and even after Manchin got on board, the legislation underwent countless rounds of revision and compromise. But in the end it passed and became law.
And even though one of President Donald Trump's first executive orders placed a 90-day pause on payouts of IRA funds, Trump can't kill the inflation Reduction Act on his own. He would need Congress to repeal it. And according to Jake and Zoya, that's not a sure thing.
Full conversation
ZOYA TEIRSTEIN: There's a fair amount of funding that's out the door already, and, and the majority of it is actually going to benefit red states. So Trump's gonna have a hard time sort of facing those, those constituents and saying, actually, you know, never mind.
JAKE BITTLE: Before he took office, there was a group of maybe 18 to 20 House Republicans, many of them in sort of swing districts, who sent him a letter saying like, “President Trump, please do not, you know, try to repeal these, you know, tax credits for consumers and the, the money that's gonna go to build like battery plants and, and, you know, EV plants in our states, like that seems like a really bad idea.”
DINGMAN: I think one of the examples that you cite, speaking of red states is Georgia. And where Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is, as I understand it, a somewhat unexpected supporter of the Inflation Reduction Act, right?
TEIRSTEIN: Right. Money talks.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I think it's, it's, as you report, it's something like 40,000 jobs that have already been created in that state.
BITTLE: Right, yeah. And, and, you know, while a good portion of the grant money has already been sent out the door and the Biden administration did their best on the, the tax credits themselves, you know, for manufacturers who open a plant in a red state or,or, you know, a solar farm getting built. Those last for years to come. So a repeal of those would really be a huge body blow. It really seems uncertain whether, whether that will happen.
DINGMAN: As remarkable as it is that a piece of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act got passed in the first place. For those concerned about climate change, it, it obviously did not do nearly enough to pull back on American oil consumption. We've already seen President Trump signal an intention to, as he puts it, “drill, baby, drill.”
Did any of your reporting turn up any remorse about not taking a more forceful tack on drilling restrictions during the IRA negotiations?
BITTLE: This is a good question. I mean …
TEIRSTEIN: No, there's, we did not detect any remorse, but you know, I think that In retrospect, they, they probably could push a little harder.
BITTLE: I think what you, what you really saw, right, is like, if you can't do it through legislation, you have to do it through the executive branch, and we're at a point of American history where the judiciary has sort of started to rein in executive power to interpret the laws passed by Congress, right?
So at almost every turn, when they tried to restrict exports of liquefied natural gas, which is a big boom industry in the South, in the Gulf of Mexico. A court basically said, you know, you, you, you can't, you can't, you don't even have discretion over whether to approve these exports. You can't unilaterally pause them. So I think like, they, they made a half-hearted attempt.
We didn't really detect remorse for not doing more, but even what they did, it just didn't work out because they just got slapped around by the courts and they didn't really, they didn't really go whole hog on restricting fossil fuels. They really focused on the subsidies and the carrots. That was their big thesis, was like, if we pass consumer facing subsidies and and try to, you know, reduce energy costs, people will love us and they'll reward us for creating jobs. That didn't happen, they just didn't get a political reward for it.
TEIRSTEIN: You know, if inflation hadn't skyrocketed, that wager might have paid off, right? So we'll never know, you know, whether those consumer facing benefits were the right tact, you know.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and one of the things that your answers point to is again kind of the miracle of the fact that this legislation got through it all because as, as you're alluding to, I mean, in some ways the presidency has become this executive order sword fight. And it makes me want to ask you guys, is there anything in your reporting that suggests that Democrats see climate, or maybe climate-related government subsidies, as a winning political issue?
I mean, it's not so long ago that somebody like Jay Inslee was a somewhat credible presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, purely based on climate as the center of his platform. Are those days gone, do you think?
TEIRSTEIN: I think that we actually saw a little bit of a golden age for climate policy in 2019 and 2020. I think even at the time, folks on the left who were observing this and pushing Democrats to go even further on this issue didn't even realize that, that it was such a golden age for this topic. I think that Kamala Harris is a good example of someone who probably deeply regrets what she said when she was campaigning for president at the time, you know, she, she indicated that she would be in favor of banning fracking and then later that obviously came to bite her really hard.
I think that's a lesson for Democrats. I think that, you know, the next time they're up there on the primary stage, they're going to think twice about how they talk about fossil fuels. At the same time, the impacts of climate change are impossible to ignore, and so at some point something's got to give. There is going to be a moment when, and in fact many moments, when climate change will infiltrate American politics to the nth degree. It's just a matter of how Democrats decide to talk about it, if they talk about it at all.
BITTLE: The one thing I would just add, and it's sort of it's sort of separate from what you're saying, is that the, the weird pyrrhic victory, I think for climate policy going forward is that like you said, presidency is now an executive order sword fight. If you can't get anything through Congress, you try to stretch the existing law, you know, within your interpretations of federal agencies.
Well, guess what? The, you know, conservative lobby finally, after 40 years, succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to overturn Chevron deference, which is the sort of Supreme Court precedent that gives a lot of leeway to the executive branch in interpreting the laws.
So what they might have accidentally done, I think, is sort of thrown open the door for, it's it's not exactly clear how much the Trump administration will have leeway to adjust, you know, existing interpretations of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, as they try to sort of unwind environmental policy, you know, cause that, that victory over executive power may come back to, to bite them in the butt, I think, although it's it's still too early to tell.
