By Jonathan Lacock-Nisly, IPL Federal Policy Associate

Members of Congress are back from their summer recess, and entering the home stretch on what has the potential to be the biggest climate bill ever passed into law.

A quick-ish review of the timeline 

The bipartisan infrastructure bill (H.R.3684, which includes some positive provisions, but is not a climate bill) passed the Senate in August. Progressive champions in the House, as well as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have held that bill and say they won’t bring it up for a vote until the rest of the President’s agenda is ready to pass at the same time through a budget reconciliation bill. 

That budget reconciliation bill, now called the Build Back Better Act, is the place we can make significant progress on climate change and environmental justice priorities. House committees finished work on their respective sections of the bill and passed those pieces out of committee on September 15th. (Many thanks to all of the IPL affiliates who did great work planning actions and driving calls ahead of that important deadline!)

Now, the House will look to pass their Build Back Better Act on the House floor and send it to the Senate, where there will be significant debate and revisions before the Senate passes their own version. That Senate version of the Build Back Better Act will go back to the House for what likely will be an up-or-down vote with no further chance for revision. At that point, the House will also pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill that they’ve been waiting to move. And all of this is supposed to happen before September 27th, based on a complicated set of promises between moderates and progressives, as well as the expiration of the current surface transportation law at the end of the month.

What’s in the House version of Build Back Better (No bill number yet)

There’s a lot of good news here, although all with a huge caveat. House committees have passed their sections of the bill, and it includes almost all of IPL’s priorities. However, disagreements remain over how the bill should be funded. And even once those questions are answered in the House, the bill faces a much tougher path in the Senate, with Democratic moderates (most notably Senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Krysten Sinema (AZ)) expressing doubt about the size and scope of the bill.

For today, however, let’s list the highlights. This bill, in combination with state-level action, would put the US on track to meet President Biden’s goal of cutting climate pollution 50% by 2030. House committees approved:

-Clean Electricity Performance Program: This is the latest name change for what started as the Clean Electricity Standard. Through a system of payments for clean electricity and penalties for dirty electricity, this program would put us on track for 80% carbon-free electricity by 2030—the intermediate target for 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035. 

We also have (the House’s) answer for what constitutes clean electricity. Unfortunately, their definition does include nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture. IPL will keep advocating for truly clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, but it is worth noting that advocates (including IPL) were successful in keeping methane gas from receiving partial credit as a “clean” source under the House proposal. A recent meta-analysis found that even with this less-than-desirable definition of clean electricity, the program would ensure that almost all new generation in the US in the coming decade is in the form of wind, solar, and batteries.

-Clean electricity tax credits: The tax credits that have helped fuel the boom in wind and solar electricity over the past decade were scheduled to start phasing out at the end of this year. Instead, they will be expanded and extended into the 2030s.

-Lead pipe removal: President Biden had listed removing every lead pipe across the country as a key environmental justice provision of his agenda. Yet the bipartisan infrastructure bill fell far short, funding only $15 billion of a needed $45 billion. The House’s version of Build Back Better closes the gap, with an additional $30 billion for lead pipe removal.

-Electric vehicles: The bill pushes the tax credit for electric vehicles up to $12,000 and eliminates the vehicle cap for manufacturers (which means that GM and Tesla vehicles will again qualify for the credit). It also includes $13.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, on top of funds provided in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

-More environmental justice provisions: The bill includes $2.5 billion for low-income solar projects, $5 billion in grants available to communities for environmental justice projects, and $10 billion for cleanup of Superfund sites. It also includes an additional $4 billion beyond funding in the bipartisan infrastructure bill for reconnecting communities divided by interstates, in recognition of the racist highway planning processes that have disproportionately harmed Black communities. It is disappointing, however, that the climate and environmental provisions of the bill do not uniformly meet the President’s promise that 40% of benefits would go to environmental justice communities. IPL will keep pushing for lawmakers to meet this minimum target.

-Civilian Climate Corps: It’s difficult to track the funding scattered across several different federal jobs programs, but it seems that a Civilian Climate Corps—intended to put Americans to work at jobs that help the country reduce climate pollution and adapt to a warming world—is included in this version of the bill. 

-Methane fee: One way the bill helps pay for itself is by putting a fee on methane pollution. This, in combination with EPA and Bureau of Land Management rules currently in the works to directly restrict methane emissions, can make a big dent in this climate super polluter.

Thanks again to all the IPL affiliates raising up the faith voice on this bill and keeping the pressure on our members of Congress! We wouldn’t have made it this far without the work of so many faithful advocates across the country, and we need you all in the coming weeks to get across the finish line.

By Bill Bradlee, IPL Organizing Director and Affiliate Liaison

Transportation is the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States. One of the most important climate change policies we have on the books is vehicle fuel efficiency, because it determines how much carbon pollution our vehicles will put into our air. We refer to this as the clean car standards and they are up for revision right now. This rule, along with the reconciliation bill being debated in Congress this month, are two of the most important pieces of climate policy in a decade.

President Biden promised bold action on climate. With the reconsideration of the previous administration’s attack and rollback of clean car standards, President Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Transportation (DOT) have the opportunity to make good on that promise by establishing the strongest possible clean car standards.  

More than 1,500 clergy and faith leaders from across the United States are calling on President Biden and EPA Administrator Michael Regan to enact those strong standards. The religious leaders stated, in part, that “the climate crisis is a challenge of racial, economic, and generational justice, and we call on the Biden administration to meet it with an eye towards the most vulnerable in our communities. Choosing to make less efficient vehicles isn’t just wasteful—it is a moral travesty. Children, our elders, low wealth and Black and Brown communities are all suffering disproportionately due to increased pollution and climate-fueled disasters.” 

The last line of the letter reads: “We urge you to consider this moral opportunity to enact bold new standards that truly envision the best for our communities, our nation, and our world.” Indeed, this is a critical opportunity. We have to be bold in addressing climate solutions and showing the rest of the world that we are again willing to lead. We have no time left for inadequate half-measures. 

IPL President and IPL-DMV director Joelle Novey met with EPA officials and dropped this letter off in person (outside and socially distanced). 

Please join with IPL and the religious leaders in asking the Biden EPA to:

• Restore national standards gutted under Trump administration and revise them beyond levels set during the Obama-Biden administration;
• Establish a 2030 standard for cars and light-duty trucks that achieves fleet average greenhouse gas emissions 60 percent or more below today’s average;
• Put the nation on a trajectory to make all new cars and light-duty trucks zero-emission vehicles no later than 2035;
• Ensure all new trucks and buses are zero-emission no later than 2040.

 See the full letter and signatories here. 

 We’re asking three things from everyone at this critical time: 

1. Send a comment to the EPA is support of strong clean car standards 
2. Share this alert with your family, friends and colleagues
3. Keep an eye out for future opportunities to speak up on this issue

By Tiffany Hartung, Field Director

IPL’s 2020 Faith Climate Justice Voter Campaign inspired and mobilized people of faith to take a critical climate action: voting.

Congregations, faith communities, and volunteers around the country helped mobilize faith voters to vote their values of caring for Creation and loving their neighbors.

While 2020 was IPL’s first civic engagement campaign at such scale, we were able to build a multi-faith, multiracial coalition. The campaign worked nationally with a focus on seven states where IPL state affiliates organized by collecting voter pledges, recruiting faith leaders to give sermons, distributing a voter guide through congregations, and commissioning a poll of religious voters. Our work grew into a multi-faith coalition of groups also doing their first-time civic engagement work at scale.

A couple months into the pandemic, people were attending worship services by Zoom, which made organizing congregants extremely challenging. IPL made the decision to reach out to faith voters beyond our base, given our base supporters were already good voters. With the help of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC), we crafted a campaign to reach out to infrequent faith voters likely to be receptive to climate messages. For four states, we created an experiment to measure the impact of that voter outreach. 

The Experiment

We knew we wanted to reach infrequent voters, people of faith, and people with whom a climate message would resonate.

We crafted an experiment with this research question: Does the text campaign increase voter turnout among the treated group who received messages from IPL volunteers?

We created a list of 235,847 infrequent (low-propensity), likely to be climate alarmed, religious voters in North Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, and New Hampshire.

Voters were randomly assigned to a treatment or control group. The order of the lists were randomized, so that anybody who wasn’t texted because volunteers didn’t make it all the way through the list was considered randomly assigned to the control group. Roughly half of the list was held as a control group and did not receive any communication from IPL.

Voters in the treatment group received text messages from IPL volunteers working on the campaign. 

Our campaign incorporated voter outreach best practices of a voter pledge, sharing our non-partisan multi-issue faith voter discussion guide, asking them to get three friends to vote, and get out the vote.

Experiment Results

The analysis shows that IPL’s voter outreach program increased voter turnout by 1.7 percentage points. The model suggests that 1,455 additional people voted because of the campaign.

These results show that this portion of IPL’s voter outreach program had a measurable impact- three times more effective than benchmark campaigns.

While this experiment did not encompass the full breadth of our campaign work, it does provide a snapshot of our campaign impact. IPL will apply this learning to our future voter outreach and civic engagement. Stay tuned for our 2022 Faith Climate Justice Voter campaign.