Better Planet

Innovators and communities all pushing to sustain hope for a healthier Earth.

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Two Years In, the Inflation Reduction Act Is the Most Important Climate Action Most People Haven’t Heard Of

Friday marked two years since President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, an ambitious bill authorizing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits, guaranteed loans and other government support for clean energy. Policy experts say the IRA is by far the nation’s strongest action on climate change, and government data shows that it has triggered billions in private investment and created hundreds of thousands of jobs.

However, public opinion surveys show the IRA remains poorly understood. Polling by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication showed that fewer than half of respondents have heard much about the IRA.

Newsweek’s Better Planet visited Middletown, Ohio, to see how IRA funding is playing out in the steel town where Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance grew up. In his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance said Middletown had been “hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.”

A $575 million IRA award to the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works will help pay for cleaner furnaces at the steel mill, the town’s biggest employer, cutting greenhouse gas emissions while allowing it to add more jobs, the company said.

In an interview with Newsweek’s Better Planet, White House Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said the IRA strategy to pair climate action with support for U.S. manufacturing is starting to have an impact at the community level. But he warned that the country’s clean-energy path was at a “fragile inflection point.”

In climate news elsewhere, even though the eye of Hurricane Ernesto is staying far from the U.S. Atlantic coast, the storm triggered coastal warnings from Florida to Boston Sunday and Monday, the AP reported. Parts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina are still cleaning up from flooding caused by Tropical Storm Debby just two weeks earlier, the Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Georgia, reported. (Note: Site may require email registration to read story.) Debby’s total damages are estimated at $1.4 billion, with about a third of that due to inland flooding.

Both storms were fueled by exceptionally high sea surface temperatures due, in part, to the effects of climate change, according to analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central. The group recently launched a new online tool called the Climate Shift Index: Ocean that shows the influence of climate change on sea surface temperatures along the course of a tropical storm. The Climate Central tool shows that climate change made the high ocean temperatures along Debby’s path hundreds of times more likely.

“Oceans are ground zero for climate change” Andrew Pershing, climate scientist at Climate Central, told the Ledger-Enquirer. “It’s hard to imagine getting these temperatures we’re getting without climate change.”