![]() From its founding to the 1970s, the country had an economic doctrine that was defined by its pragmatism and the willingness of its government to find new areas of growth. This reflects a homecoming of sorts for the United States. Democrats hope to create an economy where the government doesn’t just help Americans buy green technologies it also helps nurture the industries that produce that technology. The approach is at the core of how the IRA seeks to resolve climate change. ![]() And if the country believes that certain industries bestow a strategic advantage, then it needs to protect them against foreign interference. If “this country used to make things,” as the saying goes, and if it wants to make things again, then the government needs to help it. The laws embrace an approach to governing the economy that scholars call “industrial policy,” a catch-all name for a wide array of tools and tactics that all assume the government can help new domestic industries get started, grow, and reach massive scale. ![]() The idea is this: The era of passive, hands-off government is over. Read: Not even a single Republican voted for the climate bill And although not a single Republican voted for the IRA, its wager is not especially partisan or even ideological. in the next decade, or who plans to trade with an American company, or who relies on American military power. Yet even by the standards of landmark legislation, the IRA makes a particularly interesting and all-encompassing wager-a bet relevant to anyone who plans to buy or sell something in the U.S. Every law embodies a particular hypothesis about how the world works, a hope that if you pull on levers A and B, then outcomes C and D will result. Far less attention has been paid to the ideas that animate the IRA. Since the law emerged from a surprise compromise between Senator Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last month, most attention has been paid to the fact of the bill itself: that it is a climate bill, that America’s sorry environmental record has begun to reverse. The bill is estimated to reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by about 40 percent below their all-time high, getting the country two-thirds of the way to meeting its 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement. After it, the federal government will spend $374 billion on clean energy and climate resilience over the next 10 years. Before the IRA, climate campaigners spent decades trying and failing to get a climate bill through the Senate. It is no exaggeration to say that his signature immediately severed the history of climate change in America into two eras. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law.
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