US President Joe Biden fights for political gain a year after ambitious climate law

If he could do it all over again, he’d probably pick a different name: After a year, US president Joe Biden is still battling to persuade Americans of the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The massively ambitious initiative aims to accelerate America’s transition to sustainable energy, rebuild its industrial prowess, and improve social fairness.

When Joe Biden signed the $750 billion proposal into law on 16 August 2022, the country was in the middle of a major price increase that was undermining the Democratic leader’s popularity.

So “the Inflation Reduction Act” seemed a natural name, even if the plan’s primary goal was to accelerate the transition to green energy with $350 billion in subsidies and tax credits.

“I wish I hadn’t called it that, because it has less to do with inflation than it has to do with providing alternatives that generate economic growth,” Biden said at a recent meeting with donors in the western state of Utah.

The previous day, the 80-year-old Democrat, who is up for re-election next year, had launched a renewable energy project that he described as embodying the best of the IRA.

This project, in adjacent New Mexico, entails the building of electricity-generating wind turbines on the site of a former plastic dish plant – in a state suffering from the harsh consequences of climate change, such as wildfires and excessive temperatures.

Private investment

According to the White House, the IRA has stimulated $110 billion in private investments in the renewable energy sector since its passage, causing worry among Europeans and other allies because of its declared goal of industrial independence.

“This is the most significant climate and clean energy legislation in US history,” said Lori Bird of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group.

The incentives it provides “are designed to last for a decade,” and their effects “should last beyond that,” she said.

A study by nine teams of American researchers found that the IRA should reduce US emissions by between 43 per cent and 48 per cent by 2035 compared to 2005 levels.

That falls short of the official objective of halving emissions by 2030.

Reaching that goal, many activists say, will require not just the enticements of financial “carrots” but the threat of regulatory “sticks” — which could, however, face a major obstacle if they reach the conservative Supreme Court.

For now, Biden’s urgent concern is finding ways to capitalize before the November 2024 presidential elections on what he calls “Bidenomics.”

That term is meant to embrace both the current vigour of the US economy and a promising future built partly on the IRA but also on major investment programs in technology and infrastructure.

‘Going to take time’

Most Americans are only vaguely aware of the varied promises of these programs — supporting the development of quantum computing in the face of Chinese competition, building millions of electric cars while creating jobs, lowering the price of insulin and democratizing access to the internet.

“People don’t know the changes that are taking place are a consequence of what we did yet,” Biden told the Utah donors on Thursday. “And it’s going to take a little time for that to break through.”

The Republican Party has pushed back against Biden’s campaign, recently issuing a statement deriding his “desperate attempt to sell the so-called Inflation Reduction Act,” which it blasted as a “scam.”

Biden, however, has seemed to take pleasure in pointing out that Republican lawmakers don’t seem to have any problem accepting IRA funding when it pays for projects in their own districts.

On Wednesday, he even singled out a particularly virulent supporter of Donald Trump, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert.

Biden noted, with clear sarcasm, that the Inflation Reduction Act was helping pay for a huge wind turbine factory in the Colorado district of this “very quiet Republican lady” who, like others of her party, had opposed the IRA.

“She railed against its passage,” Biden said, adding with a smile, “That’s OK, she’s welcoming it now.”