In August, President Joe Biden signed into law the Cut Inflation Act, the most significant measure ever passed by the US Congress to address climate change. While the law’s measures to mitigate climate change have received widespread attention, an analysis published today in New England Journal of Medicine describes the significant benefits it offers to improve public health through tax credits and other financial incentives provided by law.
This law offers the United States a new roadmap to mitigate climate change and improve public health. At this point, the Cut Inflation Act provides a more politically feasible basis for efforts to mitigate climate change and reduce its public health effects than a cap and trade program or approaches traditional regulations. »
Robert Glicksman, JB and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at George Washington University School of Law
The analysis, “Protecting Public Health with the Inflation Reduction Act – Provisions Affecting Climate Change and its Effects on Health,” was published Dec. 21 in the journal New England Journal of Medicine.
“Greenhouse gases — such as carbon dioxide and methane — endanger public health and welfare,” Glicksman said. Yet these health risks are not evenly distributed, affecting socially vulnerable populations –; people with low household incomes and members of historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups: the most difficult. The same is true of the adverse health effects of other forms of pollution, including conventional air pollutants such as particulate matter and carcinogenic chemical contaminants. The law also targets these forms of air pollution with the aim of reducing the adverse health effects they cause.
Previous congressional efforts to mitigate climate change have allegedly relied on a combination of mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions and the use of a cap and trade program. These efforts never attracted enough political support to be feasible, and they certainly wouldn’t now. So Congress chose to try something different in the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, it relied on a combination of carrots and sticks and direct federal investment to shift the country’s industries from greenhouse gas-producing activities to less polluting and dangerous ones. . »
Glicksman said he believes using the Internal Revenue Code and federal cash injections to transition the country to cleaner energy would likely be less vulnerable to legal challenges than more traditional forms of regulation. He pointed to this year’s Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which limited EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from one of its largest source categories, power plants.
“It is possible that not all mechanisms of the law produce all the desired results, but in a few years it should be possible to start measuring the impacts of the new law to see if it does what its promoters hoped. says Glickman. “The Inflation Reduction Act represents an encouraging effort by Congress to mitigate the wide range of negative consequences stemming from climate change without triggering the reflexive opposition that tends to be directed against regulatory mechanisms. This bill isn’t just about slowing the melting of ice to preserve Arctic ecosystems that are far from the day-to-day concerns of most Americans. The Inflation Reduction Act will also help reduce the extent to which the American people experience the increasingly serious adverse health effects resulting from climate change and its consequences, such as worsening ozone pollution and the spread of viral and other diseases communicable diseases”.
