Decades ago, major impediments to addressing climate change included political polarization and the high cost of relatively poor performing green technology.
Today, effective clean energy is available at reasonable prices in many places—so much so that fossil fuel companies are becoming investment liabilities, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has said. Climate denialism has also become less pronounced, leaving factors such as consumer uptake and burdensome red tape among the most pressing issues, according to environmental economist Matt Burgess from the University of Colorado Boulder, lead author of a recent publication highlighting these factors.
As a result of the affordable availability of clean energy, the United States has approached a pivotal moment in which laws such as the Inflation Reduction Act could either reduce emissions dramatically or flop painfully, depending on their execution. The barriers Burgess and his colleagues describe in their Nature Climate Change perspective are among those that climate scientists say are preventing the United States from maximizing the benefits of recent legislation.
Red Tape
Jacquelyn Gill’s house was designed for the cold Maine of yesteryear. With climate change making humid 90°F (32°C) days more common in the Northeast, however, sweltering temperatures made her bungalow an unhealthy environment.
The Inflation Reduction Act made 30% tax credits available for energy-efficient heating and cooling systems called heat pumps, plus additional funding that states can distribute as rebates. Gill and her husband saw a potential solution to their overheated home. A heat pump can cost between $4,000 and $20,000 to install, but with the additional funding, the system “felt like it was more within the realm of affordability,” said Gill, a paleoecologist and biogeographer at the University of Maine.
“We all have to either get really smart about a lot of really granular, crunchy policy and electrical grid minutiae—and really fast—or we need our leaders to streamline everything.”
But 18 months after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, Gill still hasn’t figured out how much she can expect it to help her, largely because the state is still figuring out how to access and distribute the money that’s available. Gill was able to install a heat pump using a rebate from an existing state-level energy efficiency program, but when it comes to the federal program, the whole system is “so arcane to me,” she said.
The 30% tax credit is available now, according to communications officer Afton Vigue from the Maine Governor’s Energy Office. But the state is still in the process of applying for the funding that can be used for rebates. She said she hopes such rebates will be available later this year.
Administrative issues such as Gill’s used to be the fine print in the struggle to address climate change. Burgess and his colleagues argue that creating frictionless processes for consumers would boost uptake in climate policies and initiatives.
Without that type of leadership, consumers are forced to put a lot of time into figuring out how to access and use energy-efficient technology that’s available, Gill said. “We all have to either get really smart about a lot of really granular, crunchy policy and electrical grid minutiae—and really fast—or we need our leaders to streamline everything.”
Making the Leap
Reducing climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions is central to many climate policies.
Fortunately, clean energy has developed far faster than anyone thought possible 20 or 30 years ago, said climate scientist David Schimel from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose comments reflect his own views and not those of his employer. For example, the cost of solar power dropped to less than a quarter of the original price between 2010 and 2017. Electric vehicles have also penetrated the market faster than expected.
“There’s every reason to believe that technical solutions to some of the real imponderables in decarbonization are within our grasp.”
Now, “there’s every reason to believe that technical solutions to some of the real imponderables in decarbonization are within our grasp,” Schimel said.
The Inflation Reduction Act is intended to help drive adoption of green technology. For example, it includes funding to electrify buses, garbage trucks, and mail vehicles, as well as to bring clean energy options to rural parts of the country.
Many of these industries will require a beefed-up power grid for widespread adoption. That’s another key challenge in the energy transition: Unless the United States more than doubles the rate at which it’s increasing grid capacity, the Inflation Reduction Act’s full potential to reduce emissions may never be realized, Burgess and his colleagues wrote.
Onerous permitting processes, sometimes in place to protect environmentally sensitive areas or marginalized communities, often delay power transmission projects. Federal electrical transmission projects, for example, typically spend 6–8 years in the permitting phase, according to Burgess and his colleagues. Similarly, New York’s South Fork offshore wind farm—the first commercial-scale wind farm in the country—began the permitting process in 2018 and just delivered power to consumers for the first time in late 2023.
Burgess said he hopes policymakers and stakeholders can find a balance that respects “both the importance of where we’re trying to go, but also the goodness and the fragility of the society and the democracy that we have.”
Community Initiatives
Many stakeholders have strong views about which sources of energy—such as nuclear and wind—are acceptable for their communities. “And they’re kind of rigid in those preferences,” said energy modeler Neha Patankar from the State University of New York at Binghamton.
That’s not necessarily a problem, because there are many routes to a sustainable future, Patankar said. The problem develops when communities have trouble visualizing alternate paths they can take to achieve their clean-energy objectives.
“We need big Manhattan Project, Panama Canal, Apollo projects—moonshot level actions on climate. And we’re not getting that.”
To remedy this, Patankar and her colleagues are developing a tool called the Community Energy Compass that will help jurisdictions (starting with those in New York State) visualize how they can improve their carbon footprints and how their choices affect the larger region.
Community-level initiatives are a great starting point for climate action, said atmospheric scientist Marshall Shepherd from the University of Georgia. And larger initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act are a tidal change in making climate action practical, but he said he’d love to see the United States devote the same level of attention, funding, and research to climate as it did to developing COVID-19 vaccines.
Ultimately, he said, “we need big Manhattan Project, Panama Canal, Apollo projects—moonshot level actions on climate. And we’re not getting that.”
—Saima May Sidik (@saimamaysidik), Science Writer
