Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore believes President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is the most impactful climate change law that any country has ever passed—but it has some notable flaws.
“There are some warts on it from my point of view, some things in it I don’t like,” Gore said Monday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Deer Valley, Utah.
Gore, the cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a sustainability-focused investment firm, was speaking almost a year after President Biden signed the IRA—a milestone climate change and health care bill—into law. Among other measures, the bill invests some $369 billion over the next decade in low-emission forms of energy, making it the most substantial federal investment ever dedicated to the fight against climate change. The bill, which is funded by new taxes on large companies and a crackdown on tax evasion, provides direct subsidies for clean tech development as well as consumer tax credits for electric vehicles.
Advances in technology, from batteries to A.I., are creating a sustainability revolution, Gore said.
But one technology the IRA backs that Gore is less bullish about is carbon capture and sequestration—the practice of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in natural locations such as underground geological formations. "I hope it eventually comes to work, but it's kind of silly now," he said. "To bolt one of these things on top of a coal-burning power plant, it's ridiculous," he said, in citing carbon capture as the law's primary "wart."
By creating "the impression that this is going to make it possible to keep on burning more and more fossil fuels, and just capture the emissions," the subsidies for carbon capture presented a dangerous "moral hazard" that Gore suggested was not accidental in a law whose passage required great compromise even within the Democratic Party. "The moral hazard is a feature, not a bug," he said.
Despite this, Gore agreed with President Biden’s comment, delivered last month in California, that the Biden administration has taken “the most aggressive climate action” of any U.S. administration in history in passing a bill that aims to reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2030. “It is indeed, by far and away, the largest and most effective, best-designed climate law that any nation has ever passed,” he said.
A Goldman Sachs report released earlier this year predicts that the green subsidies in the bill will cost $1.2 trillion—more than three times the figure that Democrats initially stated. However, the same report estimated that the IRA will trigger about $3 trillion of investment in renewable energy technology.
“President Biden and his team deserve a tremendous amount of credit for getting this through,” Gore said.
