Will climate investments work — or open a door for fossil fuel defenders?

For the first time in its history, Congress has passed a comprehensive climate bill. The so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that was just signed into law will make gigantic investments in low-carbon energy, making access to lower emission energy cheaper for people all over the world. What’s more, modelers expect the bill to put the United States within striking distance of its Paris Agreement emissions-cutting target of 50 percent (on 2005 levels) by 2030.

The U.S. Congress finally acting to slow the climate crisis is a really big deal. And these investments will set up a new period of U.S. climate politics, centered not on whether financing climate action is worth doing, but whether it is working.

In order to explain, it’s worth reviewing the science of how greenhouse gases heat up the planet and when global warming might stop. Paris Agreement signatories pledged to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) — or ideally to the safer but now essentially unachievable target of 1.5 degrees Celsius. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), limiting warming to 2 Celsius requires global greenhouse gas emissions to reach net-zero in around 2100, with emissions peaking by 2025 and then declining steadily over the following seventy years.

Here is the crucial point: Global warming does not begin to stop until emissions reach net-zero. After that point, global temperatures should stabilize within a few years, as methane disappears from the atmosphere and the land and oceans absorb more carbon dioxide, although it would take several centuries for these natural processes alone to start cooling the Earth, as the scientist Zeke Hausfather has written in Carbon Brief. So, everything that people do on the way to net-zero — say, the United States cutting its emissions in half — merely slows down the rate at which the planet is warming. While temperature change can be stopped relatively quickly after emissions hit zero, other aspects of the climate system will unfortunately have suffered more committed or “baked-in” damage: after net-zero, melting glaciers would keep melting, and sea levels would keep rising, likely for centuries.

In short, there is a lag between cause and effect, which scientists call “hysteresis.” Think of the delay between turning down a thermostat and the room actually reaching your desired temperature. In U.S. climate politics, this lag will lead to some serious irritation — if not hysteria.

That’s partly because people overstate how important the U.S. is to the trajectory of the global climate: after the Senate passed the IRA on Aug. 7, the Financial Times editorial board wrote that “the planet might have a future after all,” while Paul Krugman’s New York Times op-ed asked whether Democrats had just “saved civilization”. The U.S., though, is responsible for only about 13 percent (and falling) of global greenhouse gas emissions.

But it’s also because even the most climate-conscious Americans underestimate the extent to which the effort to mitigate climate change is more of an Ironman triathlon than a marathon, let alone a sprint. The IRA contains about $400 billion in climate and energy spending over 10 years. Regardless of how effective those investments are, there is zero chance that the rate of global warming even slows down until the end of President Biden’s current term. Again, even in a best-case scenario where the climate bill helped jumpstart a global transition and put the world on track to miraculously hold warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, humans would not stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere before 2060. Until then, the fires and droughts that already have a majority of Americans worried about global warming are expected to keep getting worse.

While the climate bill gives us a running start, we know one climate package won’t be enough. What does this mean for the politics of climate change in the long term? In the U.S. debate, defenders of fossil fuels will probably switch to new rhetoric. Once denying the reality of human-caused climate change became passé, even gauche, these politicians started pointing out that other countries would simply catch a free ride on the American mitigation train. In criticizing the Green New Deal, for example, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued that the climate package would “tie America’s hands for no benefit, while China and our international competitors go roaring by.”

Now that the U.S. is taking action, and China’s incredible buildout of renewables has it on pace to peak emissions by 2025, climate obstructionists will have to take a new tack. “Sure, climate change made those floods worse,” they might say, “but all these expensive climate programs still aren’t worth it. It’s not just that other countries keep emitting more and more, it’s that all our emission cuts do nothing to stop floods,” floods like the ones that killed dozens in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky in early August. 

In countries like Germany that have long had a serious national climate policy, such deflection of responsibility on the grounds that domestic policy “affects only 2 percent of emissions” is a common rhetorical tactic. While the IRA does not contain some of the climate policies that might be most invidious to the average consumer, such as a carbon tax, it will still lead to noticeable changes in American life as new government-subsidized wind turbines and transmission lines go up around the country.

For those who support the climate bill and climate mitigation, it will be important to emphasize that things are getting better even when they don’t seem to be. That messaging needs to start now. The day that the U.S. keeps its Paris Agreement promise and cuts emissions by half will be momentous, but not because it immediately averts a heatwave the following summer. Rather, it will be momentous because it will avoid future emissions that could have damaged the planet for generations to come.

Supporters of climate action have to be prepared for the decades-long period where climate policy and green technology gets really good, but climate impacts stay bad. In the meantime, countries can adapt so that the impacts are less harmful, and look forward to a future where net-negative emissions allow humans to start trying to put the climate genie back in the bottle. 

Noah Gordon is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where his research focuses on climate change and energy policy.