The House passed a roughly $2 trillion social policy and climate bill on Friday, including $555 billion for cleaner energy, though the Senate is almost certain to change the legislation. What ultimately emerges from the bill's climate section will have a long-term impact on America and all of its neighbors on Earth, and will help determine whether the United States does its promised share to keep climate damage from becoming catastrophically worse than it is now.
“The problem is that when you have these storms that are coming with such frequency, just as soon as you deal with one, you’re dealing with the next one,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who has struggled with five federally declared disasters in his six years leading the global oil hub on Texas’ Gulf Coast.
Turner spoke on the sidelines of a United Nations conference in Glasgow, where he was one of dozens of mayors advocating for climate investment. After years of storm deaths from intensifying deluges and hurricanes from the tropics, Houston residents died in record numbers this year in a swaying polar vortex.
“And so for our vulnerable communities ... where people are already on the margins, it keeps getting a little bit further down,” Turner said.
Cost-cutting demands by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, as well as the Senate's strict rules, appear certain to force significant changes to the bill. This would spark new squabbles between party centrists and moderates, which would likely take weeks to resolve.
If Biden's package is approved, the impact on clean energy sources and technologies will mean that the United States will likely fall short of Biden's target of halving fossil fuel emissions by the end of this decade — or, more precisely and wonkily, of halving the amount of carbon dioxide that the United States emits by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.
According to climate scientist and energy analyst Zeke Hausfeather, this is based on modeling by researchers at Princeton University and elsewhere.
However, if Biden's bill fails in Congress, the United States will likely fall far short of its emission-cutting promise by a much larger margin, by 20%, according to academic modeling.
Market forces driving down the cost of renewable energy would help carry the US a long way regardless, according to Hausfeather.
However, with that broken promise in the rearview mirror, the United States would find it more difficult "to persuade countries like China and India to follow through on their climate commitments... if we are unable to follow through on our own promises," according to Hausfeather, a director at the Breakthrough Institute research center.
Over time, the United States has been the world's largest emitter of coal, natural gas, and oil fumes, which are altering the atmosphere and heating the Earth. With its reliance on coal-fired power plants, China is currently the largest emitter, with the United States ranking second. India, with its burgeoning population and reliance on coal, is poised to overtake both in the coming decades.
Quamrul Chowdhury, Bangladesh's climate negotiator, fought in Glasgow, as he has for years, for the United States and other big polluters to make the quick, big cuts required to keep his and other low-lying nations above water.
Chowdhury was eager for Congress to seal the deal after decades of US climate policies flip-flopping with the political parties of incoming administrations.
“In your domestic legislation, if it is enshrined, that will help,” Chowdhury said. At climate conferences, leaders “make promises, make commitments, but those are not met. Promises are made, only to be broken.”
The Trump administration was responsible for the most dramatic shift in US climate policy. It withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, slowed offshore wind projects, and encouraged oil and gas exploration and drilling. It canceled Obama administration projects aimed at promoting clean energy and discouraging coal use.
Hundreds of Republican lawmakers in Congress are now stepping forward to claim a climate-change middle ground between Trump and Biden, whose dwindling popularity is casting doubt on the Democratic Party's ability to maintain power in Washington.
Republicans in a conservative caucus founded by Republican Rep. John Curtis of Utah say they know how to wean voters off fossil fuels and argue for a climate policy that preserves the use of natural gas in particular.
To capture climate-damaging emissions, they emphasize trees as well as carbon capture technology that has yet to be scaled up.
“We know we must reduce emissions. Now let’s have a thoughtful conversation about how we go about it,” Curtis said in a panel with other U.S. lawmakers at Glasgow. “And that’s, that’s a new place, I think, for us.”
Depending on whether the next Republican administration, like Trump's, actively opposes efforts to reduce fossil fuel use, another U.S. retreat on climate efforts could set the country back a few percentage points from meeting Biden's emission-cutting target, according to Featherhaus.
But “I think the larger effect ... would be from the lack of global leadership on the issue, and creating the (quite justified) impression that U.S. pledges are not to be trusted,” he said in an email.