Hey All, So the U.S.
passed the Inflation Reduction Act eight months ago last August,
If you told me ten months ago we'd have a climate bill.
I would probably not have believed you.
But we do, and it's a huge deal.
Truly historic.
A major victory
We’ve changed the world
The US federal government has said that we're going to spend something
like $500 billion. And the fancy schmancy energy system models
say that all that spending
is going to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 37 to 41% below
2005 levels by the end of this decade.
Not quite the 50% by 2030
President Biden has been promising, but a step in that direction.
More than half
of the spending on this bill goes into how we make and store electricity,
and most of that is tax incentives for renewable energy development and storage.
Rant on that later.
But first,
why am I making this video more than a half a year after the bill was passed?
Well, because I wanted to know if anything has happened yet.
Are those hundreds of billions of dollars actually getting spent?
Is it going to people that really need it?
Will it reduce fossil fuel use, shut down
peaker plants poisoning fenceline communities and build a just transition?
Can it mitigate drought impacts in tribal communities
and provide equitable access to clean water?
And the question that I saw a lot of folks asking when it passed,
is the good going to outweigh the bad?
To try to answer those questions,
I first called up Raya Salter, an energy justice and movement lawyer
who is deep in the weeds of the New York climate and energy policy space.
The Inflation Reduction Act is a really important piece
of legislation. It is of course, the largest investment
in climate that the United States as a country has ever made.
However, there is a lot of good in the IRA and there's a lot of bad in the IRA.
It is not the Green New Deal that a lot of us advocates really wanted.
And we're very concerned about what that's going to mean
for environmental justice communities in terms of oil and gas development
and of course, all communities in terms of permitting.
Despite these very real worries, let me just put on my excited hat for a second.
The federal government has written, passed and signed a law
that moves billions of dollars, the largest investment
in climate change response the US has ever done.
And it isn't even close.
This bill made it across the finish line when most people thought it was impossible
and has real potential to clean up our grid and build healthier communities
and even more importantly, it invest directly in environmental justice.
But all this money and intention isn't the end of the story.
Now that we have all this funding, it
extra important that we continue to pay attention
and make sure the money goes where it is needed the most.
That is particularly important when it comes to the money
for environmental justice, as laws tend to be.
It isn't explicit about how exactly the money needs to be spent.
It'll be up to agencies
like the Environmental Protection Agency to decide how these programs are executed.
This creates a lot of room for inconsistent
implementation of environmental justice provisions across agencies.
So we have to pay a lot of attention and hold these agencies accountable
to make sure that the demands for environmental justice are met.
So what is actually in the IRA?
Well, you could read it linked downstairs, but it's over 700 pages long,
though the margins are hilariously large, like an overtired seniors final paper
that they were going to hit the page limit and put a lot more effort to do.
Here's a super quick summary.
So like I said, the biggest chunk of spending is on energy,
the next largest manufacturing.
So trying to reduce emissions in the creation
of all those things we're funding to make and store electricity
while simultaneously building up the clean energy manufacturing sector in the US.
We've talked about it on here before, but buildings
are some of the largest sources of emissions in the United States.
So fittingly, the third largest category of spending throws money
at things like improving building energy efficiency and near
and dear to my heart, incentivizing heat pump installations.
Next, we've got transportation.
This is where the electric vehicle tax credit fits in, but also includes
funding for electrifying the United States Postal Service fleet and cleaning up
air pollution around major ports.
The next biggest spending category
after transportation is all about environmental justice and land use.
So cleaning up pollution.
Reinstating the Superfund,
environmental justice block grants and a bunch of resilience projects.
Last and also I suppose technically also least in terms of allocated
funding, is a little over $21 billion earmarked for agriculture,
and that's mostly conservation and climate friendly
ag techniques like cover cropping,
low tillage and methane management from all those burping cows,
plus dealing with nitrous oxide emissions.
Basically it's throwing money at ways of reducing the Big Three greenhouse gas
emissions: CO2, CH4, and N2O that are wrapped up in our agricultural system.
So one of the good things about the IRA is it really does have significant funds
to help states and local governments implement climate action.
And states like New York that have been very progressive and had made concrete
plans on how we can get there, what it's going to cost and what the benefits are,
really stand in a place to benefit and almost get an unfair share.
And since New York already has these plans
in place and local organizations and government reps are at the ready.
Having all these extra federal dollars coming in is a huge deal.
But how exactly all that money is going to be used?
What is it going to fund is still an open question.
One of the risk is that the IRA is ready to throw money at a lot of technologies
like carbon capture, which until I see otherwise is really just being used
by fossil fuel interests to say they're cleaning up their act when they're not.
Keep your eye on the ball.
Is the money in the infrastructure being used to move
on the trajectory away from combustion and away from fossil fuels?
Or is it being used in a way that will
maintain fossil fuel infrastructure and fossil fuel products?
It's as like, as easy as that.
Potentially, the Justice40 iniative can help with that.
One of the first things Biden did was sign an executive order
that included this goal of getting 40% of the overall
benefits from the federal investments to flow to disadvantaged communities.
And because the Inflation Reduction Act is a whole bunch of federal funding,
the new programs being built across all the various government agencies
need to meet this goal.
But as you can imagine, the bureaucracy and the wheels of the federal government,
they move slow and query in terms of,
you know, how is that going to roll out an equitable way?
One of the things that folks have been very concerned about is
what is the criteria for who is a disadvantage community.
And a lot of folks have been working on maps
and trying to figure this out, but something
the federal government has not done is include actual race as a factor,
which environmental justice advocates like myself have been perturbed about
because you can't take the r out of environmental racism
and you can't take the j out of environmental justice.
Well, one big hurdle to all that is those tax incentives.
Tax credits are one of the primary ways the IRA is trying to nudge us
into an energy transition
and incentivize clean energy development, which unexamined doesn't sound that bad.
Give people money when they make or buy good stuff.
But unfortunately, we live in a super broken world
and if history is any indication,
all those tax credits are just going to benefit the wealthy and white households.
The Congressional Budget Office found that in 2019, the households in the top
1% by income received about as much in tax credits as the bottom 40%.
If you take something
like the cheapest electric car, you can buy somewhere in the $30,000 range.
Even if you add the maximum tax credit, that's still a lot of money.
However, starting 2024, thanks to the High-efficiency
Electric Home Rebate Act, the IRA is making it easier
for those without the upfront cash to get the benefits of electrification
so those who qualify as low income are eligible for up to $14,000
at the time of purchase.
For things like heat pumps,
electric cooktops, air sealing and all the accompanying insulation costs,
moderate income households are also eligible
for up to 50% upfront discounts, up to that same $14,000.
This alleviate
some of the inherent inequality in a tax credit
because you don't need to first purchase the thing.
Then wait until you file your taxes to get the money back.
It's not perfect and you can run through that 14 K pretty quickly,
but it is a serious,
significant investment in home energy efficiency for low income households,
and we haven't really had anything like it before nationally.
And then there's the grants.
Many of the grants in the Inflation Reduction Act are competitive,
and we're starting to see these long, complicated applications
that, by their very nature are pitting
environmental organizations against each other.
And this just hurts the smaller most local organizations
who don't have a great writing office or any kind of capacity
to take advantage of the money available in the IRA.
At this point, an organization would need to hire a person or a team of people
just to know when what grants are available and apply for them in time.
And while it may get a sizable chunk of the funding energy,
just this is just one piece of this bill and its implications.
Folks working in the water justice space are seeing basically the same thing.
And to talk about that, we found another lawyer actually, yet
Yá’át’ééh abíní Shí éí Heather Tanana yinishyé
Diné níshlį́. Shimá éí bilagáana.
Shizhé'é éí Kiyaa'áanii.
So good morning. My name is Heather Tanana.
I'm a citizen of the Navajo Nation.
On my mother's side, I'm of European descent and on my father's
side, my clans are the Towering House and Black Streak Woods People.
I'm also a assistant research professor at the University of Utah Law School,
Now, the Inflation Reduction Act, with respect
to water, it's really narrowed in on drought responses.
So $4 billion went to reclamation for drought resiliency efforts.
And how that's going to pan out isn't totally clear right now.
Tribes can definitely access some of that funding and we can,
use creative solutions like updating
infrastructure that currently is losing a lot of water.
Right.
That might be a measure because you're putting in more climate resilient systems,
but it's less directly targeted at tribal drinking water projects.
I will note there is $550 million that reclamation
also got specific to domestic supply
water projects for disadvantaged groups.
And again, like how are they going to implement that?
They're still working it out.
We're seeing the same story everywhere.
There's a lot of money, a lot of new projects.
But the IRA is so recent agencies are still scrambling
to figure out internal structures and implementation plans.
And like with the environmental justice grants,
tribal communities don't necessarily have the capacity
to find, apply for and then use the money that is available.
there are these federal programs, though, that are really complicated to navigate.
And we have so many different federal agencies.
we counted up well over seven
probably 7 to 12 different programs depending on your needs.
That could be access for tribal water.
And how do you piece all of those together?
Right.
That is really hard for communities to do because of past
policies and lingering.
Right.
Systematic racism
and discrimination, that we have a lot of these communities are under resourced.
They don't have that expertise that, say, the community across the street
that's predominantly white would have,
and that's exactly the situation with our tribes and and again, directly
connected in with the boarding school era like child welfare removals.
But they lost a lot of expertise that otherwise
Because of this, tribal communities are reliant on the federal government
to follow through on its promises and build programs that make it easier
for them to access funds and not to be too optimistic.
But there is some progress there.
If you look at the Infrastructure and Jobs Act that was passed in 2021
and has had a bit more of a runway to get projects from funded to in practice:
Yeah, the Infrastructure Jobs Act
since that came out first,
we've seen a little more progress.
And the biggest amount of money
was that $3.5 billion awarded to Indian Health Service
for their sanitation facilities construction program.
And just, gosh it was probably this past month,
they put out a news press with a website
that's tracking the projects that they're working on with that IJA (Infrastructure & Jobs Act) money.
it just seems magnitude of the problem.
You know, I think people tend to think, oh, okay,
I heard a lot about Navajo, so it must really be Southwest focused.
And yeah, Southwest has a lot of need, but you go up into Alaska,
a lot of deficiencies up there and then also in the East.
And so it gives a good picture of one where tribal homes are located in the U.S.
and then also kind of the need that they're trying to address
and how big of a problem it is.
So it's not something that can be solved overnight for sure.
But IHS is very much working to get out those dollars.
And that's a program, right, that is fully
managed by the federal
the US government is often really slow and often needs to be yelled at
or have a strongly worded public comment-ed at
to actually get the funding where it's needed.
Fortunately, folks are starting to build up the programs and groups
to make sure as much information is available
so that the people that need the funding can get it
without waiting for the US government to figure everything out.
So the Universal Access to Clean Water, we have a website:
TribalCleanWater.org, and we've put out two different reports so far.
And really looking at the different federal programs that are available.
That was our first report to fill these gaps.
And then the second one
was recommendations of how to make those programs more efficient.
Some regulatory changes that the agency could make
so that tribes are more easily able to access funding.
And then right now, we're doing exactly that.
We're putting together a tribal handbook for tribes to be able to use
to navigate the system, because again, definitely not easy or intuitive.
the Inflation Reduction Act is far from perfect,
but it is a lot of money sloshing around that could and will do some real good out
in the world.
So long as it actually gets to the people and organizations who need it.
And while, yes, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill
before it are these large pieces of legislation,
we--and by we I mean you and me-- have to stay involved.
We aren’t the ones deciding where the money goes,
but we can still have a say in what the future of the IRA builds
just because we got this landmark legislation doesn't mean our job is done.
So if you're itching for a way to get involved, I've got some good news.
This video is funded in part by the Let's Get Loud campaign, which is embodying
this idea that we need to keep informed and loud about the issues we care about.
So if you'd like to learn more or participate in an action, head
to get loud dot org, or follow the links downstairs for more information.
Thanks so much for watching. Bye.