Biden’s Climate Bill Was Too Tame. Here Are Four Fixes.
The US adopted a landmark environmental law 12 months ago, but there is much more to do to reduce emissions and protect against future catastrophes.
The climate bill President Biden signed into law a year ago contained plenty of carrots, but not enough sticks.
Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
In a perfect world, America’s major political parties would argue not about whether to fight the climate change fueling devastating heat waves across the country, but how to fight it. In our imperfect world, one party has vowed to do more on climate. The other party has vowed to do … the opposite of that.
A year ago this week, President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats in Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest US climate bill in history. But it was far from perfect. It left the US with no realistic path toward meeting its stated goal of zeroing carbon emissions by 2050. At the rate we’re still pumping planet-heating carbon into the atmosphere, today’s heat waves could come to seem downright pleasant.