Although we’ve learned over the last year and a half that caution is always warranted where imminent Democratic legislation is concerned, the current glide path of the Inflation Reduction Act is a cause for optimism, not cynical commentary about how it will surely be blown up at the last minute. On the one hand, the inclusion of hundreds of billions of dollars to combat climate change should be seen as a triumph of science, reason, and the tireless efforts of those involved in pushing this existential issue to the political forefront. Writing about those who have fought to prioritize global warming, climate activist Bill McKibben reminds us that “this is a win engineered by everyone who ever wrote a letter to the editor, carried a sign at a march, went to jail blocking a pipeline, voted to divest a university endowment, sent ten dollars to a climate group, made their book club read a climate book. It’s for the climate justice activists who brought this fight into whole new terrain, the scientists who’ve protested, the policy wonks who wonked, and the people whose particular fights may have been sacrificed by the terms of this deal.” McKibben also makes the broader point that the entire zeitgeist around climate has evolved, so that “there’s no longer a real public doubt about climate change [. . .] the public mood is finally strong enough to at least begin to match the political power of the fossil fuel industry.” Whatever the ultimate fate of the IRA (and god I hope it passes), the ability of climate legislation to perpetually revive and fight on like some sort of benign Schwarzenegger Terminator (Gaia edition) is well worth being cheered by, and deriving hope from.
McKibben and others observers have also been pointing out the clear ways that environmental legislation, once it begins to be implemented, will start to build support for further action. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes that, “As long as serious climate policy was a proposal, not a reality, it was vulnerable to attacks from right-wingers portraying it as a nefarious plan to undermine the American way of life. But those attacks will become less effective once people start to see the real-world effects of climate action (which is why the right is so frantic about trying to block this legislation). If Democrats can pass this bill, the chances of additional action in the future will rise, perhaps sharply.” In a similar vein, McKibben outlines the various knock-on effects of passing the IRA, which include more momentum for international climate cooperation, fresh federal funding for state and local climate efforts, and further legislation (perhaps encouraged by the green energy sectors that will become more politically powerful as a result of this bill).
Let’s be clear — the climate provisions in the IRA represent merely a down payment on combatting climate change. The reductions in comparison with the defunct Build Back Better legislation amount to something like 75% of what the BBB Act would have achieved. The importance of continuing to press all levers of power to create rapid reductions in carbon emissions is as high as ever; the emergency is still upon us. But just as the climate has now changed to the point that disruptions are evident in the lives of millions of Americans, so that the issue seems real in a way that can’t be denied, so the IRA will change the reality of what is understood as possible in American politics. The fight is on to continue marginalizing the deniers, the do-nothings, the Christian dominionists, the oil CEOs and natural gas profiteers as the fantasists that they are, out of touch with the world as it is, and to build an enduring American majority that prioritizes actual life on earth over dreams of ill-gotten profit and self-destructive exploitation of the natural world.