The Role of Grassroots Action in An Era of Backroom Deals
Political elites want us to feel the Inflation Reduction Act has saved the day. While the bill will seemingly reduce emissions, it is still far from the radical transformation we need. The only answer is to organize.
Is Anyone Coming to Save Us?
Nobody saw the Inflation Reduction Act coming — not the political press, not the climate justice movement, not even 98% of the US Senate. It was announced by its authors as a fait accompli: a deal has been struck. For arguably the first time in history, the federal government will pass a law that will probably significantly lower American carbon emissions.
After the news broke, those of us who weren’t in the room were understandably surprised. Democratic Senators who weren’t invited offered objections or suggested revisions before getting in line; the fossil fuel industry scrambled to lobby the bill on its tight timeline; and those of us in the climate movement reeled from the shock that it was finally, actually happening.
But the moment was oddly deflating. The bill was not what we had marched for. How many of us put “tax breaks for big solar developers” on our protest signs? We also felt lingering disorientation stemming from the way it had happened behind closed doors, a deal between two wealthy elites. It happened without us.
For years, it seemed as if the only way we would win major climate legislation was through disruptive action: “nobody is coming to save us.” It is sometimes said that we cannot sit back and wait for the cavalry to charge in, because we are the cavalry.
Is that still true? Do we still need to be the cavalry? Or does this successful backroom deal show us that we should trust that our pragmatic party leaders in the Senate are looking out for our best interests, and we need do nothing but vote?
What’s the Deal?
The “Inflation Reduction Act” is Joe Manchin’s rebranded and trimmed down version of “Build Back Better,” itself a rebranded and trimmed down version of the Green New Deal. It is a package of tax breaks, incentives, and other “carrots” that would represent the first serious attempt by the American government to address the climate crisis.
Schumer’s press release estimated that the IRA will reduce emissions by 40% by 2030. The Rhodium Group estimates 31-44%. The REPEAT Project estimates 42%.
Just glancing at the numbers, it is tempting to say that we appear to be within reach of something big here. On rejoining the Paris Agreement, Biden pledged to cut American emissions by 50-52% by 2030, which, if accomplished, would put the country roughly in line with the numbers the IPCC reports say we need to avoid catastrophic societal breakdown.
We’ll break down these numbers soon, but for now, let’s take them at face value. If these numbers are correct, and American emissions were cut by 40% based on a backroom deal, that would represent a successful “Hail Mary” pass. But did it really happen without the movement?
Over the last two years, and for decades before, climate justice activists have pushed for a federal climate bill. Going backwards in time, let’s examine some of the more significant actions to see whether the public or the climate movement had a significant impact on the backroom deal.
Congressional staffers were arrested at a sit-in at Schumer’s office just days before the deal was announced; they demanded that Schumer reopen negotiations with Manchin. Unbeknownst to them, these negotiations were already occurring. However, their protest may have bolstered Schumer’s hand or sped up his timeline. We will probably never know.
West Virginian activists and national groups organized a series of protests at a coal mine associated with Manchin and at his yacht. In 2021, several also went on hunger strike. Manchin does not appear to have cared. In the oral histories of how the IRA deal happened, we hear that Sen. John Hickenlooper, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and big corporations started the conversations that brought Manchin to Yes. We can be skeptical of these narratives -- the heroes of the stories tend to be the people telling them and have their own agendas. But it seems clear that Manchin did not listen to protestors, whom he does not view as members of his peer group. (Disclosure: I proudly attended the Coal Baron Blockade).
To find an example of grassroots organizing that was inarguably essential to the deal, we have to go back to early 2021, when community organizers in Georgia delivered an astounding rebuke of the Republican Party in two runoff elections for US Senate, which had never before been done. It took backbreaking labor from local organizers to bring the Senate, a horrifically undemocratic institution, to a 50/50 split in party control. Without winning these runoffs, legislating would be impossible.
During the 2020 presidential campaigns, the climate movement exerted pressure on the candidates running to make climate the top issue. Every major candidate released a plan; some, including Biden, were forced to revise theirs over time to be more aggressive. This feels now like it was busywork, since the plan that got passed was Joe Manchin’s, not Joe Biden’s. However, the most likely outcome without laying this foundation first would have been a failure like Waxman-Markey in 2010, when Senate leadership gave up on a climate bill without bringing it to a vote. The political pressure on Schumer to pass a climate bill in 2022 was considerably greater.
So, while the climate movement wasn’t directly involved in writing this bill, it seems unlikely that a bill of any kind would have passed if there wasn’t such a movement.
Did the Cavalry Charge? Is It Over?
In the happy stories being told by elites like Hickenlooper and Summers, the hero’s journey has come to an end. American democracy, ever resilient, produced a bill to address the crisis, and the crisis will now be averted. If we have been saved, then there is no further need for the movement, so: was that it? Are we done?
Unstated in the Schumer/Manchin press release is that many of the projected emissions reductions come from other sources than the IRA. Rhodium’s analysis estimates that existing policies at the local, state, and federal levels would bring about 24 to 35% of reductions by 2030. Those policies, particularly the city-level ones, were largely won by grassroots action and engagement in local politics. That means the backroom deal didn’t cut all 40%, but 7 to 9%.
This is not to say we didn’t need this Hail Mary -- no single bill has ever cut 7 to 9% of American emissions in one swoop -- but this bill is not sufficient. No backroom deal alone would ever have been sufficient. And an additional 6 to 19% of reductions will need to come from future executive, state, and local actions by 2030 to meet Biden’s Paris commitment, not to mention the remaining 50% of emissions that will need to be cut by 2050.
To make matters worse, the IRA might not actually cut as much as the analysts say. These reports are too credulous of the alleged potential of carbon capture, with significant reductions attributed to a technology that simply does not work.
Here’s the kicker: All of this assumes that the Paris Agreement numbers are accurate. That would be a charitable assumption. Data about the speed and severity of the climate crisis consistently indicates that Paris’s numbers, and even the IPCC’s, have always been too optimistic.
Is the IRA really capable of mitigating a crisis of this scale?
The bill used to be much stronger. Bernie Sanders released a $16 trillion climate plan during the 2020 election. Biden’s was $2 trillion. Build Back Better, which was largely based on Biden’s plan, trimmed the climate investment to $555 billion. Then it was killed, then resurrected as the IRA, with a climate share of $370 billion.
If we consider the Sanders Green New Deal policy proposal a baseline for how much money it would take to build a sustainable economy in America, which seems reasonable since the power sector alone would cost $4.5 trillion, then the IRA would amount to less than 4% of the investment needed.
And all dollars are not spent equally. Spending money on carbon capture, as the IRA does, literally causes more CO2 emissions than doing nothing, and spending money in a way that increases social inequities is worse than spending in a way that does not.
While a Green New Deal would have made ordinary working people the primary beneficiaries of climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act saves its largest benefits for the big corporations that build power facilities. Its authors say they hope the effect will “trickle down” to families via energy prices -- which, we are told, the corporations will magnanimously lower. There’s nothing in the bill to prevent utilities from using new solar and wind construction as a pretext to raise rates, but they would like us to believe they will not do this.
The IRA does contain some promising benefits to homeowners, with incentives for installing heat pumps and energy efficiency improvements. But it is difficult to see how some of these incentives would “trickle down” to tenants, who pay the energy bills while landlords decide what gets installed in the property.
Despite only spending 4% of the estimated total money that must be spent on the green transition, the bill would manage to cut more than 4% of emissions because it is laser focused on the electric sector, which is the easiest economic sector to decarbonize. Other sectors of the economy like transit, housing, heavy industry, and agriculture will be much more challenging and will require proportionally more investment. While the IRA takes halfhearted stabs at some of these issues, with EV credits and grants for sustainable farming, it misses opportunities for easy reductions, like funding public transit. The bill does nothing to challenge big auto and agricultural interests. That means these issues will either go unaddressed, or they will have to be tackled at the state and local level, which is going to be messy, incomplete, and inequitable.
The bill is almost all carrots, with a few sticks, and nothing transformative: No public ownership, no breaking up of fossil fuel corporations and spinning down their assets, no guaranteed jobs to industry workers, no direct payments to families, no new public housing, no high speed rail. Just some tweaks on the knobs of the federal tax dials.
And all of this number-crunching is carbon reductionism; the bill does not attempt to address biodiversity loss, wealth inequality, racial injustice, or any other crisis.
There are even portions of the bill that would increase oil and gas drilling, despite dire warnings from scientists that no new fossil fuel projects can be completed. The bill would have America producing and exporting more fossil fuels to other countries, but the analyses showing 40% reductions in American emissions don’t count our fossil fuel exports toward our total emissions. This is an old accounting trick. While the IRA pushes emissions down in the US, it may push emissions up in other countries.
Though the bill includes $60 billion for environmental justice, this is nowhere near enough to mitigate the impacts of centuries of environmental racism, and the bill’s drilling provisions ensure that Indigenous communities will continue to face escalating fossil fuel extraction. Many Indigenous people do not consider the bill to be an improvement over the status quo.
The IRA is a watered down version of a watered down version of a bill that would have met the Paris target, and its authors watered it down with fracking runoff fluid.
Despite all of this, it does seem that the IRA will result in a cooler world with fewer disasters fueled by extreme weather. It will probably save millions of lives. While we can, and should, debate the exact scale of the emissions cuts that will result from the bill, it is likely that they will be meaningful. Even if this is not justified in environmental justice language by the bill’s authors, there is an environmental justice component to any cuts in American emissions: it will mean fewer floods and heatwaves in the Global South.
We should allow ourselves to feel some relief about this bill passing. But the fact that this bill represents the largest investment in climate mitigation in American history is damning it with faint praise. The bar is excruciatingly low.
The IRA leaves so much work undone.
We Are Still the Cavalry
Clearly, the work of building a just and sustainable future is not completed. Yet the Senate has gone home. We are not likely to get any more help from them.
But the Biden Administration has not exhausted all of its options. It could declare a climate emergency, which would allow it to siphon funds from our bloated military budget to attack the climate crisis. It could even block oil exports. Right now, the Administration is watching the grassroots and wondering if we will sit back and accept the IRA as good enough. They would rather not spend the political capital necessary to declare a climate emergency. We need to keep up the pressure until they do.
States, counties, and cities can also still pass laws. Remember the 24-35% of emissions reductions that were already baked in before the IRA passed? The policies that got us that far were the low-hanging fruit in blue states. The easy part is over. We cannot count on the limited courage of state legislators to get us much further. The path to meaningful future reductions will come from radical policies like the proposed Build Public Renewables Act in NY, and winning radical policies will require a mass movement.
There are now economy-wide decarbonization laws that have passed in some states that can be used as a template and passed elsewhere. Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington all have such laws. While none of these laws are flawless, some of them have strong labor and environmental justice provisions, which further distinguishes them from the IRA. But getting serious climate reforms passed at the state level takes years of organizing: first to take state legislatures back from fossil fuel interests, and then to actually pass the laws.
At the county and city level, activists can fight to municipalize their local utilities, which would give the public more leverage over how their utilities operate. Public transit routes and funding are also decided locally. A city, alone, may not be able to decide whether the fossil fuel industry exists, but it can decide whether it funds the industry or funds projects in the community instead. Land use is important as well, with local governments in charge of zoning rules for housing, and sometimes even energy projects. But local governments are largely beholden to the real estate industry, so again, winning meaningful reforms is a two-step process where the Left must first win some power electorally. We must do this, because the low-hanging fruit has been picked.
So far, I have assumed that the Biden Administration’s implementation of this law will meet the projected 7-9% in emissions cuts. But there’s no reason to expect it will actually do that. Regulatory capture is a real problem, and the good parts of this bill could be held up or watered down in implementation. Even this baseline of progress is not guaranteed. We will have to agitate to make sure the good parts of the bill actually become reality.
We must also remember that Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi have agreed to pass a “permitting reform” bill later this year in exchange for Manchin’s support of the IRA. Though there are major issues with the way green energy is held up in the permitting process, the permitting bill is not likely to fix them; it is likely to greenlight dozens of pipelines and drilling projects. Though often confused with the IRA, this is a separate bill that has not yet been written. The permitting bill would have to pass a 60-vote threshold in the Senate, so it will probably get tacked on to “must-pass” legislation that keeps the government operating.
We were not in the room when the deal was struck. We did not agree to this compromise.
If the permitting bill turns out to be, as expected, a fossil fuel giveaway that will bulldoze whole communities, we can and must fight to kill it. Democratic margins are too thin to lose many votes. Manchin and Sinema have leverage in the Senate because everyone knows that they are willing to tank legislation. Time for us to remind the few leftists in Congress that they can do the same.
The huge gap between where we are and where we need to be by 2030 also necessitates some actions beyond legislating. Valve-turning was the only action that meaningfully reduced the profits of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The emissions reduction potential of mass nonviolent civil disobedience has yet to be fully realized.
Malicious Compliance
There is also the question of what anyone can do about the fossil fuel provisions of the IRA, in particular, the requirement that the federal government lease large plots for oil and gas every time it approves a clean energy project on federal lands.
The executive branch is unlikely to be able or willing to prevent the implementation of the fossil fuel provisions of the bill, but the grassroots could, with the right combination of pressure and mischievousness.
For example, green groups could set up shell “oil companies,” pitch the feds on a “greenwashed” oil extraction operation that is powered by solar, buy the leases, build the solar, and then tactically “go bankrupt” without ever starting oil extraction. Depending on the location, bat boxes could be permanently fixed to the solar panels so that endangered species laws would prevent their removal. If this were done, it would take public pressure on the Biden Administration to prevent them from prosecuting.
Malicious compliance with the fossil fuel-boosting aspects of this law could bring us the Inflation Reduction Act’s benefits while minimizing its costs.
Fighting as If Victory Is Possible -- Even When We Believe It Is Not
In the two-week window where federal climate action in America looked dead, I took part in the final actions of a years-long local campaign to ban fracking in public parks in Allegheny County, PA. The campaign was so hard-fought that I believe we would have lost if we’d shed even one or two core activists during the final stretch. But we overrode the pro-fracking Allegheny County Executive’s veto for the first time in 18 years and won.
What if we had lost our courage when hope seemed lost? Our local campaign’s modest contributions to the necessary 6 to 19% would have vanished. We're going to need every one of these local political organizing projects. When we won, we didn’t know whether the victory would add up to anything. But when we got the news that the IRA would, in fact, pass, suddenly our little action retroactively became a part of a bigger project to decarbonize America.
Doomism, whether rational or not, whether supported by evidence or not, is not useful. Hope, likewise, is not useful. We will not close the gap between 40% and 100% by hoping that the crisis will solve itself. What we need instead of either fatalistic ideology is courage.
The Inflation Reduction Act has improved the survival chances of human society. But it will fall far short if we step back from the struggle. This is the beginning, not the end.
The coal baron who cut this backroom deal thinks the work is done, so clearly, the Senate will not be passing another bill anytime soon. They will not be giving us another Hail Mary.
We have to organize.
Tom Pike is an activist with the Pittsburgh chapters of DSA and the Sunrise Movement. You will find him knocking on doors this fall to let residents know about Pennsylvania’s new Whole Home Repairs money, and how they can get it. He tweets at @StoryTom.