Opinion – Ezra Klein: Biden’s legacy depends on building a clean energy network

As the summer began, the Biden administration was mired in failure. Inflation was high; the Build Back Better program was defunct, and the Democrats were doomed.

And then came the quickest turnaround I’ve ever seen happen in American politics. The CHIPS law (Children’s Medical Insurance Program) and the Inflation Reduction Act were passed in a short time; President Joe Biden canceled billions of dollars of student debt; the price of gasoline dropped; the employment rate continued to rise, and Democrats began to outperform Republicans in special elections. Kudos to Dark Brandon.

Some recent presidents have stamped their most important achievements in the tax code, in regulatory language, in social security programs. If Biden succeeds, his legacy will be uncharacteristically physical: electric vehicle charging stations, battery factories, vast tracts of land covered by wind turbines and solar panels, tens of millions of homes heated by heat pumps, thousands of kilometers of new power transmission lines, new hydrogen power research and development centers, and the list goes on. Rebuild better, in fact.

But all this is just in the imagination for now. The passage of these laws does not guarantee the achievement of Biden’s goals. The president’s legacy and our climate future will also depend on what actually gets built, and how quickly.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS Act add up to about $450 billion in clean energy investments, subsidies, and loan guarantees. That’s a lot of money, although it’s less than what Biden had hoped to get and far less than what climate activists wanted.

But it’s not just money. In conversations with Biden’s advisers, I’ve heard the climate strategy described as a three-legged stool. Investments —money— are one of the feet. Another foot is patterns. The various payment programs are riddled with clauses requiring a xis proportion of electric cars to be manufactured in the United States, creating premiums for job creation in low-income communities, or insisting that the project pay prevailing wages.

The third leg is coordination and planning: creating structures and setting aside money to get the cooperation of the large number of stakeholders who need to work together to get anything built.

It’s an unstable stool. One of its legs—the money one—is longer and firmer than the others. There are standards set out in the law, yes, but the most important of them — the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would have used monetary incentives and ditto sanctions to persuade energy companies to produce zero-carbon electricity — was abandoned. And the provisions of the law relating to coordination and planning are even more inconsistent and, in some crucial cases, non-existent.

Transmission lines are a good concrete grounding point for all of this (sorry for the energy infrastructure joke). The decarbonization strategy is fundamentally as follows: the majority of cars, homes, buildings and industries today are powered by fossil fuels. In the future, they will be powered by clean electricity.

But right now, 60% of the electricity we use comes from fossil fuels. We need to rebuild our electricity grid around clean sources, and then we need to triple or quadruple the total amount of electricity we generate.

“A lot of it needs to be built where the resources are,” said Liza Reed, an electrical transmission specialist at the Niskanen Center, “that is, where the solar, wind, or geothermal resources are. is generated.” This requires building much, much more power lines than we have today. But the way we build transmission lines today is terrible.

There is no single framework for community planning or participation, and there is no accepted approach to remunerating communities or states that host infrastructure from which they do not directly benefit. There have been efforts in the past to give federal regulators more power over this process, especially in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, but that authority in many cases has fallen when it has been challenged in the courts.

There are some funds in the Inflation Reduction Act to encourage regulators and utilities to be more ambitious and cooperative, but there are no new and important authorities or structures to make possible tomorrow what was impossible yesterday.

And that’s just as far as electrical transmission is concerned. The foundation of our decarbonization strategy is an almost unimaginably large program of building wind and solar energy infrastructure. To put that in numbers: a plausible path to decarbonization, according to a model designed by researchers at Princeton University, predicts that this infrastructure will occupy 590,000 square kilometers — roughly the equivalent of the land mass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee combined. “The footprint [de carbono] it’s very, very big, and people don’t really understand it,” said Danny Cullenward, co-author of “Making Climate Policy Work.”

We haven’t built on that scale in decades in this country. Decarbonization is a construction project that, in terms of its dimensions, does not lose out to electrification or the construction of the interstate road network. And while there is public and private money for it, there is no integrated approach to its planning and execution.

The old theory was that we would put a price on carbon and the market would do the planning. But we never got around to passing a national carbon tax or a national emissions trading plan. Other countries rely on much more centralized planning by the national government, but our federal government has neither the authority nor the capacity to do so.

We are now betting on cooperation, in part lubricated by money. But it needs to happen on a scale and at a speed unlike anything in our recent history. We are already failing to build infrastructure on time and on budget. How will the fractured systems that are having difficulty completing these works manage to start building more projects, and at an ever-increasing pace?

That will be the focus of fights yet to come — and one of them is coming very soon. The deal that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer struck with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to pass the Inflation Reduction Act included a pledge to enact separate legislation that slashes environmental reviews and authorizes the passage of mandatory legislation.

The package is already dividing politicians with a strong climate vision. Some oppose him, such as independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, while others are in favor, such as Democratic Senators Brian Schatz (Hawaii) and Ron Wyden (Oregon).

There is no final text regarding the package, but people familiar with it describe four main components. First, an effort to speed up environmental reviews of energy projects, limiting reviews to two years, reducing the time period in which lawsuits can be brought to 150 days after final action, and designating an agency to coordinate the process. It is similar to the reforms made in the Obama administration for transportation works.

Second, a public list of 25 projects designated as strategically important, although this is primarily an effort to focus government and public attention; their inclusion in the list does not exempt these projects from any existing revisions or regulations.

It is the next two devices that have the greatest weight, both negative and positive. There is a special formula for accelerating the Mountain Valley Gas Pipeline, a natural gas project that is important to Joe Manchin (and his donors) but strongly repudiated by environmentalists. And there is a whole set of reforms to give more power to the federal government to plan, build and distribute the costs of national and interregional energy transmission lines.

From what I know about the package, I tend to hope it gets approved, for three reasons. The first is that lean authorization will do more to accelerate clean energy than to encourage the use of fossil fuels. New clean energy infrastructure will be built much faster and on a much larger scale than new fossil energy infrastructure, so a simpler and faster path to construction will lead to more clean energy in total energy.

Second, bolstering the federal government’s ability to authorize and finance multi-state power transmission lines is a far greater victory for decarbonization than the defeat represented by the completion of a single pipeline.

The devices over the Mountain Valley Pipeline are a single exception in a single project, while the new transmission authority is a structural change that will make it possible to transmit massive amounts of clean energy across the country.

Third, this was the bargain that secured Joe Manchin’s vote. Democrats will control the House and Senate until January’s lame duck session. There is a good chance that they will retain control of the Senate in the midterms and a small chance that they will also retain control of the House.

Anything they want to pass with just the Democratic vote is likely to need Manchin’s vote. And if they break the deal they made with him, they won’t make it. That’s a bigger threat to future climate legislation — and everything else on the Democratic agenda — than anything contained in the permit package.

But now the hard work begins. It will take a lot to go right, at all levels of US government and industry, for these laws to deliver what they promise. Biden will not be able to solve all this alone.