MEMO: Real-World Benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act’s Historic Climate Investments

The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 includes more than 100 programs that will invest about $369 billion in climate action, clean energy jobs, and environmental justice. Collectively, these unprecedented investments will put us on a path to cutting climate pollution by 40 percent by 2030 while creating over 9 million family-sustaining jobs over the next decade and advancing racial, economic, and environmental justice. The act also includes funding to track its labor, equity, and environmental standards and impacts to enable oversight and accountability. 

Though the Inflation Reduction Act does not get us all the way to President Biden’s goal of reducing emissions by half by the end of the decade, and its oil and gas leasing provisions place an unacceptable burden on frontline communities, it marks the single biggest investment in climate action by Congress to date. The Sierra Club will continue to defend against the harmful effects of fossil fuel development and work to ensure environmental justice in every community. 

Click here for a new factsheet (with citations) that offers specific examples of these real-world benefits, including the following:

Clean Transportation

• Replace tens of thousands of diesel heavy-duty vehicles with zero-emission trucks and buses, reducing harmful toxic emissions in communities and ensuring that schoolchildren, transit riders, logistics truck drivers, and port and warehouse workers can breathe cleaner air 

• Lower the purchase cost of new qualifying battery electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles by up to $7,500

• Lower the cost for lower- and middle-income households to buy used electric vehicles by up to $4,000, which is crucial because consumers are three times more likely to buy used cars than new cars

• Help individuals and businesses install more than 200,000 electric vehicle charging stations in communities nationwide 

• Convert 35% of U.S. Postal Service mail trucks to clean electric vehicles to reduce air and climate pollution 

• Help reconnect neighborhoods — primarily in Black and Latinx communities — that have been divided for decades by highways that reinforce systemic racism and expose residents to harmful pollution

Clean Electricity 

• Help the average family save hundreds of dollars annually on utility bills through clean energy, energy efficiency, and electrification incentives 

• Expand wind, solar, and battery deployment, bringing lower cost renewable energy to millions of additional homes each year

• Allow nonprofit rural electric and municipally owned utilities, serving nearly one-third of homes, to move away from fossil fuel power like coal and build solar, wind, and storage, lowering electric bills and reducing air and water pollution

• Make it $7,000 cheaper on average to install solar panels on your rooftop 

• Boost access to renewable energy in low-income and Indigenous communities by covering 40%-50% of the cost of solar, wind, and battery projects 

• Make the electric grid more reliable so that communities don’t experience disastrous grid failures like the one that killed over 100 people in Texas in 2021 when a cold snap knocked out power for over 4 million homes 

• Support clean energy, clean transportation, decarbonized buildings, and deployment of grid upgrades, especially in frontline communities 

Community Health & Resilience

• Support community-led efforts to monitor and clean up toxic pollution, adapt to climate change, and achieve healthier living standards in neighborhoods that have endured environmental injustice

• Boost water supplies for communities, including Tribal communities, experiencing increasing droughts 

• Provide support for coal miners and their families affected by black lung disease through full and permanent funding for the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund

• Ensure workers at qualified solar and wind facilities are paid prevailing wages

• Ensure Superfund cleanups have a guaranteed stream of funding by reinstating the Hazardous Substance Superfund financing rate tax rate on oil production

• Improve methane monitoring, fund environmental restoration, and help communities reduce the health effects of pollution and increase their climate resilience through a Methane Emissions Reduction Program 

Lands & Wildlife Protection

• Protect forests for people to enjoy, for ecosystems to thrive, and for a more livable climate

• Block the funding of temporary or new roads in wilderness areas 

• Cultivate urban green spaces to protect children and communities from extreme temperatures 

• Protect wetlands that shield coastal communities from hurricanes and storms 

• Create recovery plans to protect threatened and endangered species, battle invasive species, and restore habitat 

• Make critical reforms to the oil and gas industry that advance taxpayer fairness and hold the industry accountable

Healthy Buildings 

• Enable working- and middle-class families to save up to $8,000 while weatherizing their homes to reduce utility bills and pollution 

• Make it as much as $14,000 cheaper to convert your home from fossil fuel-based appliances to electricity-based appliances — including heating and cooling — to slash air and climate pollution while reducing home energy costs

• Upgrade living conditions for more than 12,000 people who live in affordable housing, while creating nearly 10,000 jobs

• Develop zero-emissions energy systems in homes on Tribal lands through the Tribal Electrification Program

Clean Manufacturing 

• Create more than 900,000 jobs over the next 10 years by helping to establish and retool factories to manufacture electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, and other clean energy goods 

• Reduce toxic air and climate pollution from factories that produce steel, cement, and other highly polluting industrial products 

Sustainable Agriculture 

• Enable nearly 37,000 farmers to switch to renewable energy and machinery that uses less energy 

• Support the efforts of more than 200,000 farmers to protect healthy soil so as to increase harvests, reduce the impacts of droughts, and trap more climate pollution; and support 380,000 jobs