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Congress’s last-minute scramble to cobble together a temporary budget deal last week underscores the likelihood that the year ahead will see major and messy changes in the legislative process and budgetary priorities. Among these, it’s widely expected that the Biden administration’s big-dollar push to transition the U.S. economy to low-carbon forms of energy and transportation, the Inflation Reduction Act, will be pared back if not altogether gutted. If so, that would be unfortunate for a simple reason: it’s working.
The $400 billion of IRA funds for clean energy projects and manufacturing enacted in 2022 is the single biggest effort to combat climate change in U.S. history. The goal was to help the country rapidly scale up production and deployment of large-scale wind and solar power projects, battery plants for electric vehicles and power storage and clean hydrogen projects. The results of that effort are becoming clear: domestic capacity to make solar panels has quintupled and there’s been a big jump in large-scale solar deployments. Likewise, low-cost federal loans and IRA grants, matched with billions of investment dollars from companies like General Motors, Ford, Rivian and Panasonic, are powering an unprecedented level of U.S. battery production.
“For the battery industry, $110 billion has been handed out and can’t be repealed,” says Simon Moores, CEO of London-based Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “The vast majority will come online during the Trump 2.0 years, so whether President-elect Trump likes it or not, he will oversee the great U.S. battery boom.”
A White House briefing with reporters last week tallied up nearly 4 million new jobs created as a result of clean energy investments that have happened under Biden, and falling costs for solar power generation, upgraded power transmission lines and cheaper costs for stationary battery storage – to hold onto more wind and solar energy.
The motivation, Biden said on Thursday, hasn’t just been to tackle the climate crisis. “Together we will turn this existential threat into a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform our nation for generations to come.”
Quick housekeeping note: This will be the last edition of Current Climate for 2024. It’s also Amy’s last issue of Current Climate as she moves to the healthcare beat and switches to co-authoring the InnovationRx newsletter. Alan will be back with Current Climate on January 6. Happy holidays!
The Big Read
The startup vaccinating honeybees
How do you vaccinate a honeybee? And will beekeepers care enough to do it?
Those are the questions Annette Kleiser has been wrestling since founding Dalan Animal Health in 2018. Five years after launching the Athens, Georgia-based startup, the government approved an oral vaccine her team created that’s designed for the world’s beekeepers to feed to worker bees, which then feed it to their queens in royal jelly. The result, strangely enough, is immunity for the queen’s offspring. Now, she’s on a mission to get as many bees vaccinated as she can — helping to safeguard not only the hives but the crops that they pollinate.
“We know that the loss of insects is dramatic for this world,” Kleiser said. “We cannot survive on this planet or anywhere else without insects.”
The Dalan vaccine defends against a devastating bacterial disease aptly named American Foulbrood, and Kleiser sees it as a first step toward keeping the roughly 3 million honeybee colonies in the U.S. healthy. It’s not the only disease bees can suffer from; about 50% of colonies and millions of bees die each year from a variety of ailments, including a nasty parasite called the varroa mite – devastating numbers for beekeepers.
Kleiser and her team at Dalan believe specially designed bee vaccines that work against American Foulbrood and other diseases such as deformed wing virus are an important tool in keeping more bees alive, enabling commercial beekeepers to continue bringing them around the country so they can pollinate crops like almonds, blueberries, cucumbers and apples.
The next step is to expand beyond honeybees to other invertebrates, starting with shrimp, where early tests are showing positive results. “It’s much, much bigger than the honeybee,” Kleiser said. “The honeybee is big because we need this animal to survive to feed us, but the science that is unfolding is way bigger than this.”
Read more here
Hot Topic
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s long-term impact
We don’t know what will happen in the next administration, but what has some legs in terms of infrastructure accomplishments during your tenure?
When it comes to those projects, I think about 14,000 of them are complete. There are 66,000 getting support, and many of them will be the work of many years. So we’ll be looking forward as well as back at the results of the work that we did. What we know is we’ve launched a true infrastructure decade.
One of the things I’m proudest of is not just the projects that are getting done, but the fact that long before the projects are complete, we have put people to work. The people I’ve met, veterans coming off active duty, students entering pre-apprenticeship programs who realize that good-paying, skilled jobs are ahead for them, years and years worth of work, regardless of whether they go to college. These are things that are really transforming lives in addition to the fact that the bridge or the tunnel or the airport will also affect people’s lives once it’s done.
That’s been really rewarding and maybe a story that was not told as widely as just the projects themselves.
What Else We’re Reading
The CBO assesses U.S. climate change risks
Despite Tesla’s wild stock surge, Musk turns to discounts to juice sliding sales
PG&E gets a $15 billion loan offer from Biden’s green bank
Florida workers died in the heat. Their deaths were kept from authorities.
Ocean heat wiped out half these seabirds around Alaska
As teenagers, they protested Trump’s climate policy. Now what?
Data centers are dragging Big Oil into the power business
U.S. Supreme Court to hear dispute over California tailpipe emissions
AI is changing how we study bird migration
How this tiny town in Maine is keeping the lights on through ferocious storms
