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How the Inflation Reduction Act set up the Biden administration to crack down on fossil fuels.
The Biden administration’s climate policy has entered an aggressive new phase. For the first time since the president took office, the star of the show isn’t Congress, the Department of Energy, or any other economic agency. It’s the good old Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA is back.
Over the past few weeks, the EPA has unveiled an ambitious set of proposals that could remake the country’s transportation and power sectors. One proposal could cut toxic air pollution and greenhouse gases from cars, trucks, vans, and other vehicles by 2032. Another will restrict the amount of mercury and arsenic that coal-fired power plants can release.
But the most important new rule could come as soon as next week, when the agency is expected to propose slashing greenhouse gas pollution from new and existing power plants. That proposal — which will likely rank among the bluntest and most pugnacious climate protections ever issued by the EPA — will likely require coal and natural-gas plants to capture a large share of carbon emissions from their smoke stacks, preventing it from ever reaching the atmosphere.
If finalized and enforced, those rules should help accomplish Biden’s goal of generating 80% of the country’s electricity with zero-carbon sources by 2030, part of his broader vision of halving climate pollution by that year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that every country must cut carbon pollution in half by 2030 in order for the world to hit the 1.5-degree goal.
The EPA’s reawakening heralds a broader shift in President Joe Biden’s climate policy. Since January 2021, much of his administration’s efforts have been focused on dangling new carrots in front of industry to entice decarbonization. Biden sometimes took a conciliatory approach to energy issues to win the support of Senator Joe Manchin, and the president has a major climate law — the Inflation Reduction Act — to show for it. Now, as his administration begins to implement that law, it has also picked up a big stick to crack down on unabated fossil fuels.
If you’ve hungered for a more punitive approach to the Biden administration’s climate policy, in other words, then you’re about to get it. But remember to thank the law that made it possible: the Inflation Reduction Act itself.
Although it has gone little acknowledged, the IRA is essential to Biden’s regulatory policy. Without the IRA’s generous subsidies, the EPA couldn’t adopt such aggressive rules to fight fossil fuels. In at least one case, the EPA actually needed the IRA to pass before it could issue its power-plant regulations, so that the climate law could underwrite the carbon-capture technology that the rules are expected to require.
This fact is essential to understanding the next 18 months of American climate policy — and it should prompt at least a modest reconsideration of the IRA.
Why is the IRA so important? It’s because of, well, the rules that rule how the federal government makes rules. Call them the meta-rules — the set of executive orders, court decisions, and informal precedent that constrain how agencies like the EPA can issue new regulations.
Since the 1970s, federal agencies like the EPA have had to consider a proposed rule’s costs and benefits before they can issue it. This is a technocratic and persnickety undertaking, conducted with Excel spreadsheets and groaning economic models, in which staff try to add up all of a rule’s costs to society and all of its benefits.
In the clean-car rules, these sums can rise into the tens of billions. To name a few categories: The cost of repairing EVs is $24 billion, while the benefits of reducing particulate pollution in the air are as high as $34 billion.
But this exercise is important, because it effectively determines how aggressive a proposed rule can be. If a rule’s costs exceed its benefits to society, then it’s too ambitious, at least under current law. Only proposals that make society richer in dollar terms are allowed to become law. (According to the EPA’s math, the clean-car rule’s benefits exceed its costs by more than $1 trillion.)
Here’s the key, though: These analyses only look at a rule’s direct costs, which means any status quo policies — and every existing federal program that makes it cheaper to follow the rule — are taken for granted. So the IRA’s hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits function effectively as “free money” in these analyses, allowing the EPA to adopt much more aggressive rules than it otherwise would.
This has a modest effect on the EPA’s proposed rules for cars and trucks, but it’s expected to be transformative for the forthcoming power plant rules. One of the IRA’s most controversial tax credits, for instance, pays power plants and other factories $85 for each ton of carbon pollution that they capture from their smokestacks and pump into the ground. At best, that might seem like a way to pay oil and gas companies for a form of greenwashing; at worst, it might look like a subsidy for fossil-fuel extraction.
But when coupled with an EPA limit on the amount of carbon that power plants can release into the atmosphere, it becomes revolutionary. The new rule will reportedly require some form of carbon-capture technology on existing and new fossil-fuel-burning power plants. Thanks to the IRA, the EPA can essentially ignore the first $85 a ton of regulatory costs that the rule places on companies.
These new “aggressive regulations would not have been possible without the IRA,” Leah Stokes, a political-science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me.
“It is totally a function of the IRA that they’re able to do this. They’re able to make arguments with 45Q, for example, that carbon capture and storage is a viable technology,” she added, referring to the carbon-capture subsidy by its section of the tax code.
Some climate experts expect that these rules will ultimately discourage new fossil-fuel plants from getting built, even if carbon-capture technology becomes cheaper, simply because it will be cheaper and easier to build solar, wind, or nuclear plants.
The IRA is important as well because the EPA is so limited in what kind of restrictions it can impose on power plants in the first place. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the agency could not fight climate change by creating a national market for carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act, but that it could issue technology-by-technology guidelines.
That fact should prompt a popular rethink of the IRA. Since the law passed last summer, a common line of criticism has focused on its magnanimity: that it mostly uses subsidies, and not new taxes or mandates, to decarbonize the economy. The IRA uses “carrots without sticks,” critics have written, subsidizing some of the technological investments that fossil-fuel companies were already planning on making.
This was never quite true. The IRA by itself included a few new taxes, including a fee on methane leaks from fossil-fuel infrastructure that was meant to go hand-in-hand with new EPA rules. (House Republicans have sought to repeal that tax in their new budget proposal.) But the IRA was also never meant to stand on its own, and many of its authors knew that by making clean energy cheap, it would make future climate regulations cheaper. In other words, Biden’s climate policy never entailed only a never-ending booze cruise of green subsidies, as some global commentators have alleged over the past eight months. Instead, it required adopting a politically sensitive sequence of policies: first, a reconciliation bill to subsidize the good; then, a regulatory revival to penalize the bad.
Of course, the sharply conservative Supreme Court must allow Biden to actually carry out the second half of that agenda. But if it does, then we’ll discover something new about donkey carts: The sweeter the carrots, the harder you can whack with the stick.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.