If it had to be done again, he would choose another name… A year later, Joe Biden is struggling to convince Americans of the benefits of his “Inflation Reduction Act”, this pharaonic project of energy transition, industrial power and social justice .
On August 16, 2022, when the American president signed this 750 billion dollar text, the United States was in the grip of a price spike which sent the Democrat’s popularity rating to the bottom.
Hence this title, the “Inflation Reduction Act”, for a project which aims above all to encourage, through subsidies and tax credits amounting to more than 350 billion dollars, investments in green energy.
“I regret giving it that name because it’s less about inflation than about generating economic growth,” Joe Biden said Thursday during a meeting with donors in Utah (west).
The day before, the 80-year-old Democrat, who will seek a second term in 2024, had inaugurated an industrial project emblematic, according to him, of this text.
It is a wind tower factory, located on a site that previously produced plastic tableware, and in a state, New Mexico, which is suffering the consequences of climate change through fires and extreme temperatures.
The White House assures that some 110 billion dollars of investments in clean energies have been announced in the United States since the signing of the text, which has jostled the Europeans and other allies with its stated ambition of industrial sovereignty.
It is “the most significant climate and clean energy law in American history”, applauds Lori Bird, of the World Resources Institute, a non-governmental organization for the defense of the environment.
The incentives provided for in the text “are designed to last a decade” and the effects will be felt “even beyond”, she predicts.
According to a study by nine US research teams, the “IRA” is expected to reduce US emissions by 43-48% by 2035 and compared to 2005.
This is less than the official objective, which is to halve them by 2030.
To achieve it, argue many activists, it is not enough to be satisfied with financial “carrots” but also to wield “sticks”, binding regulations – which could however be shattered on the very conservative Supreme Court.
In the immediate future, Joe Biden’s concern is above all to capitalize, before the fall 2024 ballot, on what he calls “Bidenomics”. The term is meant to describe the current strength of the US economy as well as the bright prospects promised by the IRA and two other major investment laws, in technology and in infrastructure.
Americans are unfamiliar with these texts which are full of heterogeneous promises – to support quantum computing and stand up to China, to build electric cars and create jobs, to lower the price of insulin and to democratize access to the internet…
“It’s going to take time because people don’t understand that the changes that are happening are a consequence of what we’ve done,” the Democrat admitted Thursday, facing donors.
The Republican Party attacked, in a press release published on Tuesday, the president’s “desperate attempts” to “sell his alleged inflation reduction law”, described as a “scam”.
Joe Biden replies that right-wing elected officials nevertheless welcome investments linked to his text.
On Wednesday, he attacked a particularly virulent Trumpist parliamentarian, Lauren Boebert. The president joked about the fact that a gigantic wind turbine factory was going to see the light of day in the constituency of this “very discreet Republican lady”, who, like all those in her camp, voted against the “Inflation Reduction Act”.
“But now everything is fine, she is happy,” Joe Biden said.
13/08/2023 11:02:39 – Washington (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
