“The world is still trapped in the same cycle where rising growth means rising use of fossil fuels. Rhodium’s new data shows how easy it is for the economy to become more polluting even if there’s still growth in renewables. What the US needs to do to address climate change is break this pattern: “The best way to solve our climate problems is continue our economic growth, but to have emissions decline,” Larsen said.
The promise of the $555 billion in climate spending in the pending Build Back Better legislation is that the US can still build an offramp. Its investments in renewables and utilities would accelerate a clean power sector and the closure of coal-fired plants, and expand access to electric vehicles. It would also encourage electric vehicles for last-mile deliveries that are needlessly polluting. The bill’s climate provisions are historic, in that they invest in “off-the-shelf, ready-to-go technologies that are commercially available and easy to build up in America today,” said Jesse Jenkins, an environmental engineering professor at Princeton University who is advising lawmakers on the bill.
In December, the House passed the Build Back Better bill, which would inject funding into deploying these readily available solutions and incentivizing research into the harder-to-tackle emissions. One important part of the bill incentivizes renewable electricity and transmission that will help finally close the remaining 183 aging coal-fired power plants in the country.
For rising freight emissions, the bill helps electrify more vans and vehicles that deliver packages to your door, and run equipment used at airports and ports on renewables. Some of its other provisions include $3 billion in direct loans for manufacturing zero-emissions trucks and aircraft, and another $2.5 billion for using offshore wind to power equipment at ports. For heavy-duty trucks, there’s $5 billion to replace polluting trucks with cleaner vehicles. The infrastructure bill that Biden signed into law last year also helps make a dent in transportation emissions by paying for more electric vehicle charging stations and cutting pollution at ports.
Without Build Back Better and other economic and political interventions, domestic emissions could actually be on the rise again above 2019 levels. (This comes from separate Rhodium modeling that’s based on the pessimistic assumption that there will be no federal legislation, no new EPA regulation, and no further state action.) In this world, pollution levels in 2030 would remain just 15 to 25 percent below the US peak in 2005.
The US doesn’t have to be headed down this path. Larsen explained that it is important for this transition “to happen very quickly if we’re going to be able to begin to see a reduction in emissions by the end of this decade.””
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22876360/climate-emissions-2021-coal-transportation