Breaking Down the Build Back Better Act

A look at the climate provisions in the bill.

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Good Friday morning. We hope you didn’t spend your free time this week reading House Democrats’ Build Back Better Act, because we’ve done it for you.

The legislation is sweeping. We published a similar edition of Uphill earlier this year about the Democratic coronavirus relief package, but we’ll be breaking the details of this bill into multiple newsletters for readability (and our sanity). Today, we’re focusing on the package’s climate provisions. 

We’ve included larger outlays and items that stood out to us, but this isn’t comprehensive. We relied on the legislative text, as well as the House Budget Committee’s section-by-section analysis of the package. We hope your eyes don’t glaze over too much while reading this. Some of it is incredibly dry—you’ll begin to wonder how many grant programs the government can possibly carry out—but we know a lot of readers appreciated our earlier edition along these lines, and many of you like to have a more detailed grasp of legislation than you’ll get from most news stories about it. 

One more disclaimer: Some of this could change in the coming weeks. This is just the version of the bill expected to pass soon (maybe today??) in the House. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Boomer Bob

    Thanks for this :)

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  2. kate

    Are they joking?

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    Ethan Cordray

    I guess I still don't understand the structural reasons why each piece of this can't be a separate bill. I know it's somehow a product of congressional dysfunction, but what would actually happen if each one of these spending proposals were considered and voted on separately?

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    Ben Connelly

    “ The legislation also includes $50 million for the protection of older forests on National Forest System land,”

    I assumed this was a typo until I looked it up and the National Forest System refers to the system of national forests that the Forest Service manages. You learn something new every day. Especially if you read Uphill.

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  5. david rae

    One of the biggest issues we discuss annually is the vulnerability of our electrical grid. The only reference I see is "The Department of Energy would receive $500 million to distribute to states through the end of September 2031 for boosting resiliency, efficiency, the use of renewables, and grid integration at public and nonprofit buildings."

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      Ben Connelly

      One of the biggest problems with this bill is that it throw money at things that aren’t problems but fails to put money in some of the areas where we actually have problems.

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  6. Jim Thomas

    Thanks, Haley. I regret that you had to read all of the Build Back Blunder.

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    Burnham

    One thing I'm disappointed in is that there doesn't seem to be much attention paid to two of Project Drawdown's most impactful climate solutions: refrigerant management and reducing food waste. https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions

    Those should be two issues that can be tackled in a bipartisan manner and could probably benefit from some government intervention. Apparently the cost to keep refrigerants from escaping to become potent greenhouse gases at the end of their useful life is quite high and could use some R&D to bring costs down or grants to scale up the process. And the free market seems to be encouraging food waste in rich countries (such as throwing out perfectly good food for aesthetic reasons), so there might need to be some regulation there.

    Project Drawdown seems to have some of the most reasonable and firmly science-backed climate improvement plans out there, I wish more people were taking a look at their proposals. For those concerned that nuclear is being left off the table by some environmental groups, it's ranked #20 out of 100 proposals in the 2017 Project Drawdown book (although it looks like it's slipped down the list on their website, it's still there in the middle of the pack), with the caveat that nuclear waste is a serious concern that shouldn't be ignored either.

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  8. Andrew C.

    Thank you for the breakdown this actually made me more interested in the specifics. I’m generally in favor of federal R snd D funding. I am curious if the wildfire prevention funding is estimated to save money in the long run. Not really on board with rails or electric cars, rails are ineffective and electric cars already have a viable market I think market demands could solve infrastructure issues

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    Michael Berkowitz

    I think a lot of us here would be interested in an exploration of the reasoning behind many of these provisions -- or perhaps I should say, the plausible reasoning, since we don't know what's going on in anyone's head and political motivation would not be convincing.

    For example: What do we know about the effect of electric vehicles on the environment? That is, after taking into account that the electricity they run on has to come from somewhere (with losses in transmission) and the impacts of the vehicles' production (as opposed to producing combustion vehicles), charging stations, etc. I'm not making a case against them, but it's naive to simply equate no-internal-combustion with no-climate-impact.

    Another example is the whole method of donating money to specific companies involved in making specific products. If their products are better for the environment and otherwise equal to competing products, why would anyone need any other incentive to buy them and why would the government need to help the producers? If the problem is the negative externalities of competing products -- damage that they cause to the environment whose bill doesn't come to them -- is this the best way to account for that (as opposed to, say, EPA regulations and special taxes)?

    I'm also interested in the pros-and-cons of taxing oil companies rather than taxing gas at the pump (and oil at other points-of-purchase).

    This may not be the appropriate newsletter for these kinds of questions (which seem more appropriate to "Freakonomics"), but they'd certainly inform public thinking about these matters.

    Oh, and did they really use the word "Indian"?

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    Bill B

    Thanks for the summary. Don't know if I would have the energy or longevity to go through the text. Sounds expensive and complicated... and these are just the climate provisions.

    Well, my niece has a PhD in the environmental sciences so now I can assure her father that she will be taking care of him in his old age.

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