People are bombarded daily with bad news about climate change. There is the fact that the United States became the largest oil producer in the world in 2018 and will continue on that trajectory. Also, the American consumption of liquid fuels continues to grow and will do so at least through 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Oil is of particular interest to me as I grew up in Saudi Arabia, where my father worked for the Arabian American Oil Company. As a young child, I witnessed oil pollution and wanted it to stop. We swam at Ras Tanura, where oil would wash onto shore and stain our feet. Families in our oil town would read the local paper, Arabian Sun and Flare. The word flare came from the natural gas, comprised mostly of methane, that was burned off at the wellheads lighting up our night sky.

Now the good news: In August 2022, under the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. Treasury released the first round of new tax credits for green energy projects with an anticipated value at $370 billion. According to Matt Haskins, a PricewaterhouseCoopers principal, in October of 2023, when companies started making clean energy deals and the uptake was much greater than the policy makers anticipated, they decided the new valuation to be $650 billion. Haskins says the green energy transition is on! One hundred projects have been announced worth $100 million with 100,000 anticipated new jobs! According to the Clean Tech Investment Monitor, the IRA spurred $210 billion of clean energy investments in the US from July of 2022 to June of 2023, up 37% from the previous year.

And, a government shutdown would not stop this work as the IRA is not part of the appropriations process. Since many new green projects are being developed in Republican-led states, even if that party retakes power this November, these local job-producing projects would be hard to terminate. Lastly, the International Energy Agency projects that green energy will overtake coal worldwide by 2025.

Kimberlee Hammond

Frankfort