To be more accurate, Build Back Better wouldn’t have moved the needle on climate change. Electric car subsidies? Car makers are already selling them as fast as they can, and the extra subsidy for union shops would have made wait lists worse by cutting off major EV makers like Tesla.
National charging network? That’s already being built out by multiple private entities without taxpayer dollars, and from what I understand BBB didn’t have money for level 3 chargers, which are much more expensive than level 2. But level 3 is what consumers will demand. The government could have been building an obsolete network.
The ‘climate corps’ going around weatherstripping houses? See how well that worked the first time when Obama tried it. They blew through over a hundred million dollars and I don’t think a single house was improved. They could 't find people willing to be trained to do the work, and they couldn’t find homeowners willing to pay for it, even with a huge subsidy.
The subsidies for rooftop solar are not necessary as states already have subsidies and rooftop solar is growing rapidly. A federal subsidy is a bad idea because states vary dramatically in solar feasibility. You don’t want to incentivize rooftop solar in Washington or Alaska, because it sucks there. And you don’t need to subsidize it in Arizona and Texas, because it’s already profitable.
Also, government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers The idea I thought everyone agreed with was to simply raise carbon taxes and let the market sort out the transition. Rooftop solar may be a bad national choice. Besides, it’s not the solution and will max out long before it makes a large contribution. Push it too hard and you wind up being like Germany, which makes more than 100% of their power from wind and solar on windy, sunny days, but has an increasing carbon footprint and needs a gas pipeline to Russia because the power just isn’t there when they need it.
These are just cash payouts to constituents and special interests under the guise of climate. And even if they all worked as promised they wouldn’t move the needle much. The U.S. in total only produces 11% of the world’s greenhouse gases. If you could somehow cut greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by 50%, it would amount to maybe a couple of years of growth in Chinese emissions. And this bill wouldn’t cut greenhouse emissions by anywhere near that much, if any at all.
China produces more greenhouse gases than all the rest of the planet combined, and they are building new coal plants at a furious rate. Everything that makes U.S. energy more expensive enables China to emit more, and gives them a comparative advantage in manufacturing, which will push more energy consumption to China.
The nuclear funding would have helped, but it’s not much. And the real problem facing nuclear is regulatory and the Biden administration has done nothing about that.
As for these giant omnibus bills - they are bad policy in general. They are too large for Congress to manage, so they wind up under the control of the unelected bureaucracy. They have too many special-interest derived programs and payouts. They allow politicians to duck on failed programs, because they will claim to have voted for the bill for reasons other than the failed stuff, so there is no accountability. That’s why they are popular with politicians, but should be opposed by the people. Make the clowns in Washington vote for every major program separately so they can’t hide behind the ‘good’ stuff when the bad stuff they voted for fails.
And since they behave like children (both parties), I’d love to make them have to pass an exam showing they understand what’s in a bill before they vote on it. And make the scores public. These bills are driven by lobbyists and signed by politicians who don’t even know what’s in them.