19
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Joe Biden administration commits $6B to cut US emissions from high-carbon industries
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- Title
- Biden-Harris Administration Announces $6 Billion to Transform America's Industrial Sector, Strengthen Domestic Manufacturing, and Slash Planet-warming Emissions
- Word count
- 986 words
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I'm excited to share some decarbonization news about American industry! Folks these days tend to have a particularly bleak outlook on the environment, but I am convinced that environmental nihilism and defeatism is a direct result of not knowing about the MANY excellent decarbonization projects happening right now. It's critical to understand what's being done to solve modern-day problems both so that you can make informed decisions about your lifestyle and political candidates, but also so that you can have some peace of mind.
Many people seem to think that, other than the burning of fossil fuels for electricity itself, the emissions from cars, trucks, and planes constitute the majority of modern-day emissions because of all the fossil fuels they use for propulsion. Transportation is indeed a big area for improvement, but it's far from the only one. The media puts out a lot of articles about the latest EV battery tech, but almost nothing about emissions from heavy industrial processes which are necessary for modern life and also contribute an enormous amount to climate change. Many industrial emissions are literally, chemically part of material production, or otherwise rely on extremely consistent and high-temperature heat sources which renewable-generated electricity is unsuited for.
The solution is therefore to change industrial processes themselves, not just energy sources. This includes physical innovations in materials and construction techniques as well as new ways to generate heat that can better utilize renewables. The challenge is that decarbonizing industry in this way presents a range of domain-specific problems and is expensive to solve. Every sector has different needs. The federal government is allocating $6,000,000,000 ($6 billion) from Joe Biden's 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) and 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to decarbonize the sector, as well as matching funds from other sources (apparently totaling $20,000,000,000 [$20 billion]). This funding allows industry to kickstart decarbonized processes (a process which has high upfront costs) which they can cost-effectively build upon in the future to dramatically reduce emissions iteratively over time.
Industrial stakeholders (including the Big Evil Corporations) are interested in improving their processes because it could ultimately save them a lot of money in overhead in the long run, which in turn means cost savings could be passed onto consumers. The less energy they have to spend (waste) making a hunk of steel, the more steel they can make with the same workforce, and the more our society benefits. I think it's important to recognize that industrial players are not automatically the enemy here!
I stole this headline from a summary article from The Hill, but I've linked this post to the actual press release from the Department of Energy. If you're interested in more details, please read it! But here are some highlights (emphasis mine):
Here are a list of (some) industrial sectors that this funding will go toward decarbonizing:
You can see a full list of projects being funded from the DOE award negotiations document.
The government writes that a lot of these projects are in historically underfunded areas of the country. So in addition to improving the quality of life for everyone (in terms of emitting fewer greenhouse gases), they are also addressing systemic instances of economic inequality.