#inflation_reduction_act

Pipeline leak exposes carbon capture safety gaps, advocates say
▻https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/19/exxon-pipeline-leak-carbon-capture-safety-gaps
Les pipelines de CO2, ça fuit, et ça peut être dangereux.

About 5,000 miles [8000 km] of #CO2 #pipelines are currently operating in the US, which are predominantly for transporting the gas to oilfields where it is used to extract hard-to-reach oil – a process known as enhanced oil recovery. The pipeline running through Sulphur is part of a network stretching more than 900 miles [1500 km] through Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi, which #ExxonMobile acquired from Denbury last year.

In 2020, almost 50 residents required hospital treatment after the Denbury (now Exxon) pipeline ruptured in Satartia, Mississippi, releasing 31,000 barrels of CO2. The incident exposed major flaws in the existing health and safety regulations for CO2 pipelines, which as a result are currently being updated by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). The update is already facing delays, and could take years.

Yet the CO2 pipeline network is forecast to grow as much as tenfold thanks in part to billions of dollars of tax incentives in the 2022 #Inflation_Reduction_Act – as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in direct investment for CO2 transport and storage infrastructure. The Biden administration is counting on #CCS to meet its climate goals – despite compelling evidence that the technology is inefficient and will probably prolong the use of fossil fuels.

Grey Anderson, Strategies of Denial — Sidecar
▻https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/strategies-of-denial

https://newleftreview.org/blog-uploads/2023/06/grey-image.jpg

In the thinking of Elbridge Colby, its most influential theorist, a ‘strategy of denial’ answers to both criteria, husbanding resources while laying the groundwork to mobilize public opinion. In this context, the American left’s blinkered focus on the domestic impact of Bidenomics has echoes of the ‘social imperialism’ of the European belle époque, when the Webbs and Bernsteins celebrated an increased share of the cake for their native working class, as inter-imperial rivalries and colonial depredations accelerated towards catastrophe.

#gauche #états-unis

The Unfortunate, Unintended Consequence of the Inflation Reduction Act | Brett Christophers
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/inflation-reduction-act-global-asset-managers.html

A common belief about both the I.R.A. and 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, President Biden’s other key legislation for infrastructure investment, is that they represent a renewal of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal infrastructure programs of the 1930s. This is wrong. The signature feature of the New Deal was public ownership: Even as private firms carried out many of the tens of thousands of construction projects, almost all of the new infrastructure was funded and owned publicly. These were public works. Public ownership of major infrastructure has been an American mainstay ever since.

Mr. Biden’s laws will radically overhaul this culture. Informed by what Brian Alexander, a writer for The Atlantic, in 2017 described as a profound recent change in philosophy among U.S. policymakers about “how to build and maintain America’s stuff,” the modus operandi of both statutes is principally to subsidize and catalyze private-sector infrastructure investment. Such a subsidy was explicitly factored into the aforementioned Brookfield investment in solar and wind power.

So it would be truer to say that in political-economic terms, Mr. Biden, far from assuming Roosevelt’s mantle, has actually been dismantling the Rooseveltian legacy. The upshot will be a wholesale transformation of the national landscape of infrastructure ownership and associated service delivery.

#Inflation_Reduction_Act #infrastructure #asset_management

Europe accuses US of profiting from war
▻https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-war-europe-ukraine-gas-inflation-reduction-act-ira-joe-biden

Despite the energy disagreements, it wasn’t until Washington announced a $369 billion industrial subsidy scheme to support green industries under the Inflation Reduction Act that Brussels went into full-blown panic mode.

“The Inflation Reduction Act has changed everything," one EU diplomat said. "Is Washington still our ally or not?”

For Biden, the legislation is a historic climate achievement. “This is not a zero-sum game,” the U.S. official said. “The IRA will grow the pie for clean energy investments, not split it.”

But the EU sees that differently. An official from France’s foreign affairs ministry said the diagnosis is clear: These are "discriminatory subsidies that will distort competition.” French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire this week even accused the U.S. of going down China’s path of economic isolationism, urging Brussels to replicate such an approach. “Europe must not be the last of the Mohicans,” he said.