Biden’s American Jobs Plan is promising both as stimulus and as a way forward environmentally: it’s the first plan with a reasonable chance of becoming law that recognizes the scale of spending necessary to stop climate change. However, much of the spending on transportation and buildings carries a risk of being ineffective at achieving green goals. And if the prime directive is to reduce the chance of catastrophic global warming to something negligible, the research spending is only a fraction of what’s required. I propose seven amendments that would dramatically boost the odds of making America clean by 2050.
TRANSPORTATION
1. Increase the clean school buses goal to 100%
The plan proposes $174 billion for electric vehicles. Some of this goes towards useful and necessary things, like a national charging network for electric cars and electrifying 20% of school buses, but reading between the lines, it seems the biggest component will be subsidies for consumer purchases of electric cars. This is a relatively poor use of money because a decent environment requires cutting personal car use in favor of public transportation, and in any case new gas cars need to be regulated out of existence very soon if we’re to have any hope of hitting 2 degrees. A far better use of funds would be to increase the clean school buses goal to 100%. There’s evidence that diesel buses harm children, and we might as well prioritize spending that both reduces carbon use and improves health.
2. Create a federal fund for high-speed rail, and don’t let Amtrak near it
The plan allocates $80 billion for inter-city rail. Amtrak’s response was to re-up a previous incredibly unambitious plan, where the goal after all improvements is for the U.S. to have less inter-city rail ridership than Italy has now, whereas given population density, the Northeast Corridor alone should be getting more ridership than that. As Italy and any number of countries have shown, the way to get people to take trains is with high-speed rail: travel between large cities in 4-5 hours or less. This is valuable environmentally because it displaces flights, which probably can’t be made truly carbon-neutral, and with good management should even be profitable by government standards. Given Amtrak’s poor performance, they can’t be trusted with a project of this importance. Instead, a dedicated high-speed rail fund should be created and get as much of the $80 billion as possible. Upgrading the Northeast Corridor to international standards (Boston to Washington in 3:30 or less) is a no-brainer. Then because networks are better than city pairs, lines connecting to the Northeast should be prioritized. With the remaining funds, at least one and probably two of New York-Toronto, Philadelphia-Chicago, and Washington-Atlanta should be built, depending on political economy.
3. Require strong cost controls for federal transit funding
Even electric cars are a long way from becoming carbon-neutral, since the materials used to make cars are currently strongly fossil fuel-intensive. The $85 billion investment in public transit is therefore applaudable. But it would be easy to burn through $85 billion very quickly: for example, the Bay Area’s projection for the cost of a second Transbay Tube is a wholly unreasonable $29 billion. The problem is construction costs in the U.S. can be two to ten times the cost in other developed countries, which might be why U.S. cities have from half to a tenth as much transit as comparable European cities (let alone Asian ones.) This seems to be a fixable problem, stemming from bad management and bad practices rather than anything fundamental to U.S. geography or political economy. Therefore federal funding should only go to projects that attempt to get costs down somewhere in the vicinity of those in other developed countries.
BUILDINGS AND UTILITIES
4. Make all green tax credits permanent
The Obama Administration introduced a bunch of green tax credits, which have done a great deal to stimulate renewable energy production and reduce fossil fuel demand. The only problem is that most of these have an expiry date, and it’s not like the need for them will suddenly vanish in a few years. The very useful household Renewable Energy Tax Credit, for example, is slated to phase out after 2023, and it’s highly likely that the Democrats will have lost at least one chamber by then and thus will be unable to extend them. The simplest fix is to make all of these tax credits permanent. Leave it to the Republicans to try to repeal them later; that’s their job.
5. Give all educational institutions clean heating, AC, and ventilation
The plan proposes “$100 billion to upgrade and build new public schools”, but is vague about what it means by this. Spending of this magnitude should be accompanied by concrete goals. A reasonable one would for all educational institutions electric or carbon-neutral heating, air conditioning, and ventilation, which should be achievable with the amount of money available. I suppose you could limit it to public institutions, but burning gas is bad regardless of whether it’s for rich kids or poor kids. Again, there will be non-environmental benefits: educational outcomes should improve on the margin, and schools should be safer than homes during the next pandemic.
6. De-lead paint, de-lead pipes, de-lead soil
Next to climate change, lead is the most pressing environmental problem: the cognitive effects are well-established, and all kinds of knock-on effects seem likely. $45 billion is allotted for replacing lead pipes, which is long overdue. But then why not clean up lead in paint and soil as well? De-leading is a huge project, but providing an additional $100 billion for removal will put us on track to solve the problem within a generation.
JOBS AND INNOVATION
7. Up the green R&D spending by a factor of five
The sections on industry are the least satisfying parts of the plan from a climate point of view. Unlike the power, transportation, and buildings sectors, where the pathways to near net-zero by 2050 are clear, the industrial sector still requires much technological innovation before carbon neutrality becomes feasible. While there’s a decent case for subsidizing emerging technologies like hydrogen steel, at the moment the highest value for the marginal U.S. dollar is for research—particularly because climate change is a global problem, and U.S. research spending helps to decarbonize industry worldwide. Remarkably, however, only $35 billion, or less than 2% of the proposed spending, is explicitly allocated to climate R&D. Each of the following sub-sectors is vital and could absorb $34 billion in additional research funding on its own:
Further electrification (e.g. of ethylene production for plastics) and energy storage technology
Green and blue hydrogen, especially for steel and ammonia
Greener building materials, i.e. cement and alternatives like cross-laminated timber
Carbon capture and storage
Bioenergy (including BECCS) and synfuels
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In total the changes proposed here would require around $350 billion in additional spending, of which perhaps $100 billion in tax credits should be “paid for” by increasing axes elsewhere rather than financed by borrowing. In return, the path to limiting global warming becomes much more robust, and is in far less danger of being rendered unachievable by the next unfriendly administration. On a nationalist level, reduced pollution would save tens of thousands of American lives a year, and the proposals I suggest here would have a particularly large positive effect on children. This is one of the rare moments when better things are very possible, and we should make the most of it.