According to advocacy group Oil Change International, oil and gas consumption within the U.S. will fall by 16 percent by 2035 amid implementation of the clean energy stimulus Inflation Reduction Act.
But a report from the group released this week also predicted that the bill’s support for oil and gas would produce a corresponding rise in gas production — even as the U.S. economy goes electric — with the difference to be exported and burned overseas.
That’s something some of the bill’s policy architects are proud of. “Because of the Inflation Reduction Act, we are producing fossil fuels at record levels,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) wrote in September in The Wall Street Journal.
When Democrats passed the IRA, “the focus was on ‘let’s fund the good things,’” said Lorne Stockman of advocacy group Oil Change International, which used data from the Rhodium Group to assemble Monday’s report on the fossil fuel boost enabled by the IRA.
But the Biden administration, Stockman argued, failed to commit to what its own scientists were saying: that to ensure a safe climate, “the fossil fuel industry must go into decline.”
The advocacy group’s report comes on the heels of U.N. findings that steep additional emissions cuts were needed by 2030 to avoid barreling past the levels of planetary heating seen as safe.
This was a serious overshoot, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday. Guterres compared the gap to a “canyon littered with broken promises, broken lives, and broken records.”
Guterres emphasized that this “betrayal of the vulnerable” was also a “massive missed opportunity. Renewables have never been cheaper or more accessible.”
To be sure, the Rhodium model that projected IRA impacts — which Oil Change International used in preparing their report — suggests that the U.S. is moving “in the right direction,” and the administration is on track to reduce emissions levels by the end of the decade.
That tracks the broader global trajectory, with Monday’s U.N. report finding the world slowly bending the curve toward decreased emissions — increasing an estimated 3 percent by 2030 instead of the 16 percent estimated when the Paris climate accords were adopted.
But the UN emphasized that emissions need to fall by 42 percent to keep the global climate system stable.
And the U.S. currently isn’t keeping up with its own plans to make sure that national emissions in 2030 are half what they were in 2005 — the year the fracking boom kicked off a vast expansion in domestic oil and gas production, according to the original Rhodium report.
In a March follow-up, Rhodium found that meeting the Biden climate goal was still possible — if Congress, the presidency and cities and states all worked together.
But with the House controlled by the GOP, which has repeatedly passed bills seeking to defund the IRA, such unified action is currently unlikely. (Republicans also control a majority of state legislatures.)
And as the U.N. found on Monday, these numbers are just the beginning of the much deeper and more extensive economic transformation that will be needed.
Stockman, with Oil Change International, told The Hill that the problem is political — not technological: giant batteries are already outcompeting gas plants, as Reuters reported this week.
But in the arena of policy and regulation, battery companies “are struggling to compete against an incumbent [gas] industry that is peddling a myth,” Stockman said.
