Nearly two years ago, the U.S. secured historic investments from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and CHIPS and Science Act. This clean energy plan – nearly $550 billion for climate investments – is positioning our country to drive transformational progress on pollution, energy security and jobs in clean energy and manufacturing. It also provides household consumer tax credits and incentives to slash utility bills, upgrade appliances, help lower the purchase price of an electric vehicle and much more. Getting those laws through Congress to President Biden’s desk was no easy feat — they were decades in the making — and this next chapter may be just as challenging: implementing and protecting these clean energy investments swiftly and fairly across the nation.
These historic government investments give us the tools we need to cut pollution from smokestacks to tailpipes and move to clean energy that will reduce harmful pollution, improve our health and create jobs. The plan supports all the hard work being done to strengthen technology and pollution standards to advance environmental justice and health equity at all levels. It takes everyone, individuals, our elected leaders, industry and all levers of government protections to address these challenges meaningfully. Our clean energy future is now.
Solutions for Pollution
The Biden Administration has been hard at work updating federal regulations to protect our health, environment, and communities. For the past two years, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced several updated standards that will help us meet our most ambitious climate goals while supporting a thriving economy.
In December, EPA finalized tougher clean air standards that, for the first time, establish protective limits on methane pollution from both new and existing oil and gas sources. The standards address two of the largest sources of U.S. oil and gas methane pollution, requiring regular leak monitoring at existing and new well sites and a phase-out of intentionally emitting devices widely used across industry. The rules also include a program to quickly address the largest leaks and malfunctions – known as super-emitters – and improved steps to curtail wasteful flaring (burning off excess gas).
In February, EPA announced a stronger soot standard of 9 micrograms per cubic meter, down from 12, a move that will protect the health of millions of Americans and save thousands of lives each year. Soot is closely linked to reduced lung development in children, higher rates of asthma, bronchitis, heart disease, cancer, and early deaths. A 2023 analysis by Industrial Economics for EDF found that soot is responsible for more than 100,000 premature deaths each year.
The more protective soot standards are especially vital for communities that have long borne the heaviest burden from air pollution. Black Americans 65 and older are three times more likely to die from exposure to soot than white Americans over 65, and people experiencing poverty are 49% more likely to live in areas that exceed the 12 micrograms per cubic meter soot standard.
Just this past month, EPA also finalized stronger limits on tailpipe pollution from cars, light and heavy duty trucks and buses that will lead to dramatically cleaner air and slash planet-warming pollution. These standards will slash climate and smog-forming pollution from new cars, SUVs and passenger trucks, and from heavy-duty vehicles like freight trucks, garbage trucks, and school buses in model years 2027 through 2032.
Transportation is the biggest source of planet-warming pollution in the United States. Tailpipe pollution is also harmful to your health — exposure is linked to asthma, heart disease and cancer. The clean car standards are expected to prevent more than 32,000 premature deaths and more than 16 million asthma attacks by 2055. They’ll help provide more choices for anyone who wants to buy a clean car, including electric vehicles that will save their owners money on gas and maintenance.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
Developing and producing clean energy and transportation in the U.S. is creating family-sustaining jobs in big cities and small towns—jobs for geologists, engineers, scientists, construction workers and more. These new clean energy and infrastructure jobs are American jobs that solve American challenges. In the last nine years manufacturers have announced $188 billion in investments in electric vehicle and EV battery manufacturing in the U.S. and 195,000 direct EV-related U.S. jobs. Most of those announcements occurred in the last 18 months since passage of the IRA.
Meanwhile, jobs in oil, gas and coal have not recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. Fossil fuel companies have spent decades creating barriers to entry for renewables: tax policy that favors dirty energy, special rules for oil, gas, and coal, and sweetheart deals that protect them from real financial competition with clean energy. Our communities do not have to be “sacrifice zones,” and these new standards coming from EPA put limits on this pollution through the legal and regulatory process.
The industrial and manufacturing sector itself is also responsible for a quarter of U.S. climate pollution. This includes investments for clean energy technology manufacturing that will help maximize jobs building electric vehicles, solar, wind and more, while minimizing supply chain disruptions and driving down pollution from the industrial sector that disproportionately impacts Black and Latin Americans.
Environmental Justice for All
The clean energy plan gives us the opportunity to build out the infrastructure of the future and EPA’s new standards also set guardrails to protect the places and communities most impacted by this development.
Black, Hispanic and Indigenous communities and low-income areas face an enormous and unjust burden of pollution because fossil fuel industries are more likely to be located near them. They also face the greatest hazards from climate change while contributing the least, and they have the fewest resources to recover from its harm.
The Donald McEachin Environmental Justice for All Act is an important piece of legislation that stands to strengthen the Civil Rights Act of 1964, fund research grant programs to investigate personal and childcare products that contain health harming chemicals and authorizes millions of annual funding dollars to support education, outreach, development and implementation of projects to address environmental and public health issues in communities most in need. We must ensure that federal and state governments implement the clean energy plan’s investments in an equitable and just way while opposing any effort that adds pollution to overburdened communities.
We All Play a Role
We can and must heal our world for us and for future generations. Every action our leaders take should move us toward abundant clean energy. By protecting these innovative technologies and standards, tax incentives and rebates, modernizing our electrical grid, making ourselves less dependent on the global market for fossil fuels and driving down the cost of clean sources of energy, everyone will benefit.