This Article argues that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were less likely to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions than believed when enacted, and that a misconceived narrative of spending effectiveness undercut the perceived urgency of further legislative action on climate change in the United States.
With the passage of BIL and IRA, the United States committed to a climate law strategy predominated by public spending instead of regulatory mandates. Prominent studies of the laws’ impacts, including studies produced by the U.S. federal government, predicted that this spending would push U.S. annual greenhouse gas emissions down to as much as 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, which would have been extraordinary progress if true. But these predictions were based on modeling that has a very poor predictive track record and assumes away many of the real-world constraints that BIL and IRA’s spending programs faced. This Article undertakes an in-depth examination of one such model, explores how modeling influenced discourse around BIL and IRA, demonstrates that this discourse failed to acknowledge known barriers to BIL and IRA’s effectiveness, and posits that the resulting narrative of effectiveness impacted the outlook of further climate legislation in the United States. This Article proposes that greater care be taken in the communication of energy-economic modeling results, that BIL and IRA should be evaluated as elements of a larger climate policy portfolio encompassing both constraining and spending policies, and that BIL and IRA did not obviate the need to continue pushing for further national climate legislation in the United States.
