Coffel Quoted in Bloomberg Article on Biden’s Climate Bill

August 30, 2023

Bloomberg

Ethan Coffel

Geography & the Environment Department

Climate Change

Congress

Energy

Federal

United States

Bloomberg

Ethan Coffel

A year ago, President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats in Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the biggest U.S. climate bill in history. But it was far from perfect. It left the U.S. with no realistic path toward meeting its stated goal of zeroing carbon emissions by 2050.

Clean energy is cheap and getting cheaper. It costs less to install and run new solar and wind power equipment than it does to start up new fossil-fuel plants. But, getting government permission to build clean-energy facilities and connect them to the power grid is needlessly difficult.

A second IRA would include the permitting reform necessary to get these projects built and providing juice much more quickly. Such measures were dropped from the first IRA and a revival is overdue.

"If we want to meet timelines to reduce emissions, we have to build wind and solar at a totally unprecedented rate,” says Ethan Coffel, assistant professor of geography and the environment.

Read more in the Bloomberg article, "Biden’s climate bill was too tame.”