Save the Climate, Save You Money, Reduce Inflation: Our Look at the Build Back Better Act

The Build Back Better Act, which is on its way to the Senate, will be the most significant climate action ever taken by the US. But it is also something else: a bill that can save consumers serious money and may even beat back inflation in the long term.

Clean energy incentives included in the Build Back Better Act are expected to help save U.S. families on their energy bills – growing to an average of $500 per year -- via greater energy efficiency and lowered energy costs. That is more than a third of what the typical family spends today.

How will it help with inflation? According to Moody’s Analytics, the Build Back Better Act will help bring the economy back to full employment while easing inflationary pressures in the long term by investing in low-income housing and lowering costs of childcare, eldercare, education, and healthcare.

But there’s so much more to get excited about.

The bill will:

• Make clean energy and EVs more affordable and available by making it $7,000 cheaper to install solar panels on your home, up to $8,000 cheaper to weatherize your home, and up to $12,500 cheaper to buy an electric vehicle.
• Provide support for workers impacted by the energy transition by providing more than $20 billion to help give a fair shake to workers and communities historically reliant on fossil fuels, including through economic development funding, dislocated worker programs, and more.
• Create good-paying jobs in all 50 states: The clean energy provisions in the Build Back Better Act will directly create and support millions of jobs in all sectors of the economy, from manufacturing and construction to finance and sales, and across all 50 states.
• Invest billions of dollars to help build or retool factories and manufacturing facilities to produce the clean energy technologies of the future– from solar panels and wind turbines to electric vehicles and clean steel and cement.
• Fund a new Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator program that will invest in clean energy projects around the country and will deliver 40% of the benefits of those investments to systematically disadvantaged communities as part of the President’s Justice40 initiative.
• Make U.S. industries more competitive: As the rest of the world moves to drive down climate pollution, the market for clean technologies is poised to grow rapidly. The global market for renewable energy alone is expected to reach a value of $1.5 trillion by 2025.

One program alone–the Civilian Climate Corps–will create over 300,000 new jobs and put a new generation of Americans to work conserving, restoring, and bolstering our public lands and water against the impacts of climate change.

And to say it again, the Build Back Better Act will put us on a path towards a safer climate, with over half a trillion dedicated towards addressing the climate crisis.

Keep track of the latest developments of this bill by reading our blog:

https://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2021/11/09/what-were-watching-in-reconciliation-regular-updates-from-edf/