The US Congress Passes Coronavirus Relief Bill Waiting for Trump's Signature - includes Significant Climate Provisions : NY Magazine / Baquer Namazi

Lake Powell on the Colorado River
along the Arizona-Utah border amid severe drought in Western US

The Coronavirus Bill is Also ‘The Most Significant Climate Legislation’ Ever

By
Jonathan Chait
nymag.com
3 min
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Note: This is a short excerpt. Please read the full article by clicking the link above.

How big a deal are the climate provisions? The World Resources Institute has called the bill “one of the most significant pieces of climate legislation that Congress has passed in its history.” Grant Carlisle, a senior policy adviser at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, “This is perhaps the most significant climate legislation Congress has ever passed.”

The climate provisions in the coronavirus-relief bill might add up to more than President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, which included $90 billion in green-energy subsidies and helped seed the boom in wind, solar, batteries, and other tech over the past decade. They likely won’t be as significant as the 1970 Clean Air Act, which created the regulatory authority that does most of the heavy lifting in reducing carbon pollution.

But the amount of good climate policy in this bill is shocking, especially given the fact that it is about to be signed by Donald J. Trump. The major provisions include: a $35 billion investment in new zero-emission energy technology (including solar, wind, nuclear, and carbon-capture storage); an extension of tax credits for wind and solar energy, which were set to expire; and, most significantly, a plan for phasing out hydrofluorocarbons, a small but extremely potent greenhouse gas used as a coolant.

The last item is perhaps the most unexpected. In 2016, the Obama administration committed to an international agreement to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. The Trump administration, as you’d expect, renounced the agreement and then proposed rolling back regulations on HFCs. Instead, the president will sign a bill that would allow the United States to fulfill the terms of the treaty he renounced. A full international HFC phaseout will reduce global warming by nearly one degree Fahrenheit.

How did this remarkable triumph come about? Coral Davenport reports that heating and cooling manufacturers in the United States are already at the front end of switching to efficient new technologies. 

Trump’s opposition made sense from the standpoint of right-wing ideology and the partisan glory of negating an Obama-legacy achievement, but it actually harmed the profitability of American businesses.