- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
Forecasters say the president’s clean-energy incentives will be more effective than they had originally expected, in part because of new federal regulations.
The estimated price tag for President Biden’s clean-energy and climate agenda has effectively doubled since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law a year and a half ago.
Nearly all of the increase is attributable to forecasters’ belief that the law will be more popular than they had originally expected, in part because of the way the Biden administration wrote certain regulations. That rising price tag may actually be good for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — and for the U.S. economy.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed on a party-line vote in summer 2022, includes tax credits and other subsidies for low-emission energy technologies that are meant to help wean the nation from fossil fuels.
Many of those credits are effectively unlimited, meaning the more people or companies choose to claim them, the more they will add to federal deficits. The uncapped credits include incentives for manufacturers to build solar-panel or wind-turbine factories, and for consumers to buy electric vehicles. Budget scorekeepers have to estimate how popular those credits will be, in order to forecast how much they’ll cost.
I can’t wait for the IRA to actually go into swing as far as the incentives for efficiency upgrades and electrification for residential properties are concerned.
I own a super old house and I’m not at all well off (bought in 2013, because I needed somewhere I couldn’t get evicted from, and my disability covers most of the mortgage, but I don’t have stable employment) so taking care of weatherproofing is way outside of my budget.
My house is drafty af, being 140 years old and not super well maintained, and we get cold winters - yearly average temp here is 40f. If I keep the heat at 60, which is a temp at which my hands and feet go numb if I’m in it all day, my heat-only bill is like 150/mth (which is still high) at 62 it’s $200+\mth. 65 it jumps to 300+, and heaven forbid I go with 68, cuz that’s well beyond 400/mth.
Sure that saving for myself would be great, but my house is heated with gas, so it would also reduce emissions, and that’s sort of the point. It would also free up a bit of funding for economic stimulation (what with spending a small fortune on heat every year). Win-win.