Conventional wisdom holds that the federal legislative process is broken and that, no matter how urgent the need, the American people can no longer rely on the US Congress to pass legislation to promote the public interest. In the field of environmental protection, this characterization has some basis in reality.
Congress failed to update key environmental legislation decades. It has not succeeded in doing so despite significant changes in the nature of the problems posed by polluting activities, the scientific knowledge of the effects of pollution and the means available to reduce it and the enormous risks for public health that this action will entail .
Congress has never passed a comprehensive bill to address the adverse public health effects and disruption to the ecosystems we all depend on that stem from climate change. But in a development that has somehow largely escaped the public eye, Congress recently took an important step to fill that legislative void. In doing so, he may have created a plan to overcome some of the obstacles that have hampered past efforts to pass climate change legislation.
In August, with relatively little fanfare, President Biden signed the law into law. Inflation Reduction Act. While the law’s provisions do indeed have the potential to reduce inflation, they also represent the most significant measure Congress has ever passed to address climate change. The act’s measures to mitigate climate change have attracted some attention in the press, but what has largely been missed is an analysis of its potential to provide significant protections against the myriad of adverse public health consequences that scientists have linked to climate change. In an article published this week in the New England Journal of MedicineI describe these benefits and the new policy tools the Inflation Reduction Act relies on to achieve them.
Scientific studies have identified a long list of adverse health effects for which climate change is responsible. To name a few, these include increased incidence of asthma and other respiratory diseases, cardiovascular disease, heat-related illnesses, contamination of foodborne, mental health and stress-related disorders, neurological disorders and infectious diseases, as rising temperatures allow insects and other carriers to survive in previously inhospitable areas. Moreover, these health risks are not evenly distributed, hitting socially vulnerable populations – those with low household incomes and members of historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups – the hardest.
This long list of climate-related health issues is not new. Scientists have known them for a long time, as have government policymakers. Yet, so far, Congress has been unable to muster enough votes to enact legislation to remedy the situation. The Cut Inflation Act changed that dynamic, overcoming the inertia and opposition that thwarted efforts to pass climate change legislation dating back at least 2009. The law provided a more politically feasible basis for efforts to mitigate climate change and reduce its effects on public health than previous failed proposals.
Previous congressional efforts to mitigate climate change relied on mandatory emission limits for greenhouse gases, which are largely responsible for rising temperatures and associated climate change. They supplemented these traditional pollution reduction mandates with a market-based mechanism that emerged decades ago as a promising environmental policy tool – a cap and trade program.
This approach never attracted enough political support to be viable, and it would almost certainly not have succeeded this time either. Lawmakers who have understood the need to act to reduce the public health threats posed by climate change have understood this. So they chose to try something different in the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, the law relies on a combination of carrots, sticks and direct federal investments to shift the country’s industries from activities that generate greenhouse gases to those that are less polluting and dangerous to public health.
The new approach creates positive incentives to reduce emissions in the form of tax credits and federal grants for companies and individuals willing to help shift the country to cleaner forms of energy production. This approach has drawn support from some lawmakers who would likely have refused to vote for legislation that relied primarily on traditional regulatory controls, even if supplemented by flexible market mechanisms such as emissions trading.
In addition, the use of tax and financial incentives was attractive as federal courts became increasingly hostile to the use of regulation as an environmental protection device. This hostility was evidenced in the Supreme Court’s decision last summer in WestVirginiav. APE. In that case, a divided court limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s power under the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from one of its major source categories, power plants. The court’s analysis creates a landmine for any federal agency seeking to create new regulatory strategies to deal with developing crises such as climate change.
The use of financial incentives such as tax credits carries risks. The Inflation Reduction Act incentives may not produce all the desired results. It is difficult to predict how people will react to such prompts. In a few years, however, it should be possible to start measuring the impacts of the new law to see if it does what its sponsors hoped it would. It will be interesting to see how many companies claim the law’s tax credits, whether electric vehicle sales increase materially and whether reliance on clean energy sources such as solar and wind power rises. sharply.
The Reducing Inflation Act represents an encouraging legislative effort to mitigate the wide range of negative health consequences resulting from climate change without triggering the reflexive opposition that tends to be directed against traditional regulatory mechanisms.
It is important to understand that it is not only a question of slowing the melting of the ice to preserve Arctic ecosystems far from the daily concerns of most Americans. While it is well positioned to do so, it will also help reduce the extent to which the American people will experience the increasingly severe adverse health effects that stem from climate change and its consequences.
Robert L. Glicksman is the JB & Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at George Washington University School of Law.
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