Biden’s new climate act may meet fierce foe

It is not true that we need to gut our environmental protections in order to scale up green energy,” said Mahyar Sorour, deputy legislative director for Beyond Dirty Fuels at the Sierra Club. And thus goes the next chapter in the political war over whether and how the United States will join the battle against climate change.
Unlike America’s longstanding partisan stalemate — not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act that President Biden signed into law — the new conflict over climate policy will pit many environmental groups that have pushed hardest for the US to decarbonise against the administration’s efforts to do so. The new tussle will inevitably trip up the strategy to overhaul the nation’s energy infrastructure, as environmental organisations stand in the way of the most straightforward paths to take carbon out of the American economy over the next 30 years.
“Maybe it was the best they could get, but let’s not be disingenuous about the tradeoffs,” Brett Hartl, the government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity — an environmental advocacy group — said.
At the moment, what sticks in the craw of green activists are the demands by Senator Joe Manchin in exchange for his vote for the IRA: to clear the path for the completion of a natural gas pipeline across West Virginia, plus a slew of reforms to relax other regulatory hurdles facing energy infrastructure projects, including environmental reviews. “There is no reason to give Senator Manchin any more concessions than he already got,” Sorour said. “The IRA is going to be transformative,” she acknowledged. “Congress approved a massive investment to scale up renewable energy.” But as far as Sorour is concerned, giving West Virginia’s natural gas a pass is way over the line.
She has a point. Conscripting Congress to approve a favoured pipeline is a little unseemly. One hopes America won’t go about overhauling its energy infrastructure one pipeline bill at a time. Moreover, it is not unreasonable to demand that pipelines abide by standards to protect the ecosystems and communities they traverse.
But let’s face it: Natural gas, which produces just half the carbon emissions of coal, will continue to play a critical role in the decarbonisation of the energy grid. “Gas is not a bridge fuel to the clean energy future that we need,” Sorour insisted. In fact, it has been the main fuel to replace coal. And it will continue to for some time. Pipelines will be needed to move it around.
Consider North Carolina, one of 16 states that have imposed a schedule of carbon mitigation, committing to slash CO2 emissions by 70% from 2005 to 2030. An analysis by the Brattle Group for the Clean Power Suppliers Association concluded that the cheapest path to the goal included adding 2,000–3,500 megawatts of natural gas-powered generation by then.
Natural gas features in national decarbonisation strategies too. The modeling in Princeton’s Repeat Project, which calculates the IRA could cut the nation’s carbon emissions 42% by 2030, compared to 2005, assumes multibillion dollar investments in additional generation capacity powered by natural gas. The Rhodium Group, which assesses that the legislation could cut emissions from 32% to 42%, also acknowledges that gas-fueled generation will grow. Getting in the way of natural gas generation, at this stage, will probably just mean burning more coal. “At some point we will approach the end of the ‘coal-to-gas’ bridge,” said Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, which promotes the deployment of technology to confront environmental problems. “But we’re not there yet.”

—Bloomberg