Biden's climate agenda: The most ambitious ever, or overlooking key technological bottlenecks?

Abstract

The White House claims that Biden's Climate Agenda is “the most ambitious ever.” While the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Jobs Act (IJA) indeed do earmark billions of dollars for clean energy technologies, they also direct substantial sums of public money to conventional energy and fossil fuels. In comparison, energy storage technologies and projects—which are critical to renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles—are set to receive a much smaller amount. This marks a potentially substantial bottleneck that could eventually derail the administration's climate ambitions. By triangulating three sources of data: policy documents and funding commitments, trends in emissions reductions, and innovation, this article finds that Biden's Climate Agenda might not be as ambitious as the White House claims.

Keywords

• Energy storage
• Inflation reduction act
• Infrastructure jobs act
• Carbon capture