$20 Billion in Green Bank Grants Is a Start Toward the Needed Climate Building Boom
Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $20 billion in grants from its Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, created as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, to help electrify homes and build green infrastructure across thousands of individual projects. It’s a big enough number to be a bit more than a drop in the bucket when it comes to the country’s climate ambitions, which will require building an absurd amount of stuff — solar panels and wind turbines and transmission lines and charging stations and heat pumps and so on.
The need to build is one of many things setting climate change off from the more traditional set of environmental problems and the activism and advocacy that confronts them. In general, cleaning up our messes would be achieved by doing less of something — less dumping of pollution into rivers, belching less sulfur dioxide from smokestacks into the sky to limit acid rain, cutting HFCs out to fix the ozone hole. And while the fundamental solution to climate change is “stop burning fossil fuels” the reality is that we need to replace them with something, and those somethings all need to get made, very rapidly.