Every climate scientist I know reacted to this bill like it was Christmas and Mardi Gras rolled into one, and hardly anybody has any idea it happened at all.
It's so wild, everyone in my field (public land management) has been talking about how this is once in a lifetime levels of funding for us. I've been scrambling like crazy to allocate project funding and hire crews to do the work
I have spent the last TWO YEARS OF MY WORK LIFE reacting to good stuff this bill has done, every day, over and over and over and over, trying to move fast enough to catch the wave of implementation.
It's SO big. And so important.
I view this as another example in the long list of "Biden gets stuff done by weaponizing being extremely boring"
I suspect his personal politics are rather centrist (with the glaring exception of the handling of this war), but what he's passed has been more progressive than recent decades.
The Dems are walking a tenuous line between “do awesome stuff under the GOP’s nose so they won’t block it” and “do so little self promotion that the general public thinks you’re doing nothing at all”.
"why is it so quiet"
Because if the dumb-fucks-and-evil-bastards party figures out it actually helps people, they'll whip up their voter base to commit acts of terrorism. Well, more than they normally do, I mean.
I think part of it was naming it something totally unrelated so Joe Manchin didn't notice (which, fair) but yeah, I certainly didn't appreciate what a big deal it was at the time.
Feels like both the Biden administration & most news outlets focused on other stories. Had to follow individual climate scientists or reporters on social media to learn about it.
Between the weirdos who stan a Russia whose entire existence is predicated on resource extraction in the most destructive way and a racehorse media that benefits when Trump wins I could guess why.
No for real, I teach Internet Things and not one of my students has any idea this happened or how it's already impacted tech hiring and Good Future Industries
Wait, the inflation reduction act isn't well known in the US? I am a solar cell researcher in Europe. When I talk to companies about the political environment they operate in this is mentioned a lot. For example by European machine manufacturers who are selling equipment for the US solar factories.
