U.S. President Joe Biden signed a sweeping set of climate change initiatives into law this week, and with it, reclaimed momentum for American climate action on a global stage. While the legislation is named the Inflation Reduction Act, it allocates about $370 billion specifically to address climate change, the largest investment in climate action in U.S. history. This massive influx of funding could position the United States to substantially reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, solidifying its return to a leadership role in the global struggle on climate change—a role that the Trump administration had relinquished through its withdrawal from the Paris agreement and rollbacks on climate regulations.
Until the surprise announcement in late July by Senate Democrats that an agreement had been reached on the bill, the prospects for the United States’ meeting its international climate obligations seemed dim. Chief among those obligations is a commitment to cut U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions to roughly half the 2005 level by 2030, a target announced in May by the Biden administration as the country’s new nationally determined contribution (NDC) under the Paris climate accord. A halving of emissions by the end of this decade is the speed of decarbonization necessary to put the United States on a path to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris agreement’s aim of holding increases in global average temperature to well below two degrees Celsius to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Until last week, the United States seemed likely to fall significantly short of this target, with estimates suggesting overall emissions reductions of less than 30 percent by 2030.
