A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

As news of the climate compromise broke last week, a lot of people experienced a sense of relief and hope for the first time in a long while. Several TNR contributors wrote to me that evening, delighted that they’d have to rewrite the gloomier essays I’d assigned to them. 

The bill, cannily marketed as the Inflation Reduction Act, is the culmination of over a year of frustrating negotiations between Democratic leaders and the noted coal baron and climate policy holdout Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The top-line summary is that it contains $369 billion of climate spending, with the bulk of that going to various programs to jump-start the energy transition—like clean energy tax credits and renewables investment. After months of hearing that U.S. leaders couldn’t even manage to agree on legislation to incentivize heat pumps and solar power, it’s easy to see why this is welcome news.

There is, however, another side to this compromise. As TNR’s Kate Aronoff points out this morning, Manchin’s price for supporting this climate package has been steep: expedited environmental review processes for fossil fuel infrastructure, a go-ahead for the Mountain Valley Pipeline in his state, and the devastating requirement that any new leases for wind and solar in the next decade can only proceed if the Department of the Interior is also offering leases for oil and gas drilling.

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Understanding this bill, in short, requires that we hold two contradictory concepts in our heads at the same time: Congress passing this climate package is a huge win for the security of life on this planet. But also, this package contains stuff that is unambiguously dangerous.

Thus far, as Kate points out, “those who have criticized the bill for boosting, rather than curtailing, fossil fuels have been smeared as wreckers, or ignored.” At the very least, though, it’s worth honestly acknowledging the bill’s drawbacks. 

Pipelines—both the Mountain Valley Pipeline and others that could be approved under the expedited review process—affect the communities and ecosystems they cut through in multiple ways, in addition to increasing global emissions. “When it comes to pipelines,” Nick Martin wrote for TNR back in 2019, “the simple fact is that it is a matter of when, not if, a series of micro-fractures or a loose bolt or a lightning strike will send the pipe’s contents into the ground and potentially into the drinking water or farmland of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of citizens and wildlife. The maps and the data are all widely available to peruse for one’s own horror: As of 2016, the United States was averaging one crude oil spill every other day, or 200 barrels every 24 hours.” Fossil fuel companies are notoriously bad at not just stopping those spills, but even at reporting them accurately.

We’ll have more coverage of the implications of the compressed environmental review process. But as Kate argued in her latest, that’s not the only issue here. “If the modeling on the carbon cost-benefit analysis [of this bill] is to be believed—that every additional ton of greenhouse gas emissions generated by the bill’s fossil fuel provisions would correspond to 24 tons of emissions saved—then this deal looks much better than nothing.” But with economic troubles looming, some of those benefits might disappear. Simply put, “fossil fuels stand on a stronger footing entering the uncertainty ahead,” and “this could drive a perverse trajectory: Rising energy costs and new subsidies for the fossil fuel industry could punt an energy transition further and further into the future, all while the clean energy ventures the IRA would spur along stand to simultaneously pad already high energy company profits. Actual clean energy companies, meanwhile, could face a reckoning in an economic downturn.”

None of this is reason for despair or for not “taking the win,” as the saying goes. As several TNR contributors have pointed out over the past month, the fight to save lives from global warming needs joy and good news and optimism. But there’s reason for caution—and for remembering that this fight is certainly not over.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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