"The federal government released its first official analysis of the Inflation Reduction Act on Thursday, projecting that the new law will help the United States slash emissions roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels over the next eight years. It’s at least the fourth analysis to come to such a conclusion, which many experts say is a good sign those estimates could be more accurate than not.
The legislation, which dedicates roughly $370 billion to addressing climate change and was signed into law by President Joe Biden earlier this week, marks the most substantial federal investment into reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. That money will be used for tax credits, rebates and other financial incentives to rapidly boost the nation’s development and adoption of clean energy, electric vehicles and other strategies to address global warming.
But major questions remain over the models’ calculations, particularly when it comes to their assumptions about the outsized role carbon capture and storage technologies—or CCS—will play in the coming years. At least two of those models attribute between 10 and 20 percent of the additional emissions reductions they project through 2030 to the rapid scaling up and implementation of those technologies, according to a review of models’ data by Inside Climate News.
In other words, at least 100 million metric tons—and potentially as much as 200 million metric tons—of carbon dioxide are expected to be removed from the operations of power plants and industrial facilities by the end of the decade, according to two separate analyses conducted by Princeton University and the think tank Rhodium Group. The Princeton analysis predicts 20 percent of the nation’s emissions reductions through 2030 will come from carbon capture technologies. Rhodium attributes about 10 percent to those efforts. The new federal analysis doesn’t publicly break down its calculations, but alludes to some of its projections coming from carbon capture and removal technologies."
Inside Climate News had the story August 19, 2022.
SEE ALSO:
"The U.S. Finally Has A Real Climate Law. Get Ready For More Pipelines." (HuffPost)
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