infrastructure

This post is the 13th in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

As made clear by its name, the Biden Administration intends for its “infrastructure” plan to be a jobs plan.  As is also apparent from the Administration’s proposal, it views requirements to ensure that goods are actually made in America as critical to creating new American jobs.  According to the White House, “by ensuring that American taxpayers’ dollars benefit working families and their communities, and not multinational corporations or foreign governments, the plan will require that goods and materials are made in America.”  Such rules should also help give the United States a boost in its competition with other countries, particularly China.
Continue Reading Made in America: Spurring Domestic Job Creation and Production Through Buy America Rules and Beyond

This blog is the twelfth in our series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

Power lines, strung between high-voltage transmission towers, are etched across the American landscape. Yet the United States’ current transmission infrastructure is outdated and inefficient, plagued by bottlenecks and weak interconnections across regions, which limit the grid’s ability to integrate renewable generation and its overall resilience. Improving and expanding the Nation’s transmission infrastructure is therefore central to the American Jobs Plan’s (AJP) grid modernization, decarbonization and job-creation goals.
Continue Reading Lines, Labor and Leveraging Capital: How the AJP Would Upgrade Transmission Infrastructure

This is the eleventh in our series on the “ABCs of the AJP.”

America’s kids are the beneficiaries of many of the provisions of President Biden’s Jobs Plan, and several of the proposals would benefit them and their caretakers specifically.  Children have become a focus point of discussions about climate change, because absent intervention they are poised to inherit a world that suffers from its negative effects without having contributed meaningfully to the emissions that bring it about.  This has been a central narrative of the long-running Juliana litigation, for example.  The Biden Administration has also recognized the intergenerational inequity of climate change in other policy initiatives, for example in its ongoing efforts to revise the social cost of greenhouse gases.
Continue Reading Kids and a Sustainable Future

This is the tenth in our series on “The ABCs of the AJP.”

Jobs, unsurprisingly, are at the heart of the Biden Administration’s ambitious, multi-trillion dollar infrastructure plan.  After all, the plan also goes by the name The American Jobs Plan (“AJP”).  Each of the sweeping goals of the AJP—from addressing climate change, to developing a resilient electricity grid, to competing with China over clean energy supply chains—promises to create thousands of new jobs.
Continue Reading Jumpstarting A Cleaner, More Resilient Economy With Jobs

This post is the ninth in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

Virtually every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has pursued a national “infrastructure” project of some kind.  From the New Deal and the Federal-Aid Highway Acts, which created today’s interstate highway, to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the federal government has made significant investments toward a “system of public works,” a standard definition for the word “infrastructure.”  In this way, the AJP is just the latest major infrastructure initiative, even if the proposed amounts for modernizing surface transportation, airports, and waterways are unprecedented.
Continue Reading Infrastructure Reimagined: From Roads and Country to People and Planet

This blog is the seventh in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

Grid Modernization and Resiliency

Grid modernization and resiliency are critical and intertwined issues that only grow more important as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. As the Biden Administration notes in its American Jobs Plan fact sheet, recent power outages in Texas took a tremendous human and economic toll, and power outages generally cost the country $70 billion dollars a year in lost productivity. In light of that figure, the American Jobs Plan’s proposed $100 billion dollar investment in grid modernization may be too conservative. When factoring in health and environmental benefits, the return on investment for an improved grid looks to be extraordinarily robust.
Continue Reading Grid Modernization and Greenhouse Gases

This blog is the sixth in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

One of the key underpinnings of the case for climate legislation is the idea that natural and working lands will suffer without swift and meaningful action. President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) proposes to “protect and, where necessary, restore nature-based infrastructure – our lands, forests, wetlands, watersheds, and coastal and ocean resources.” But what should that look like? And how will the new administration find common ground with lawmakers who fear that forest conservation can only come at the expense of rural communities and the industries that rely on these resources?
Continue Reading Finding the Common Ground for Forests

This blog is the fifth in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) would mobilize $2.2 trillion in investment to address climate change and create jobs for Americans. According to the White House, “unlike past major investments, the plan prioritizes addressing long-standing and persistent racial injustice,” in part by “target[ing] 40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities.” These investments would give life to the President’s “Justice40 Initiative,” established by his January 27, 2021, Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad (EO).
Continue Reading Ending Environmental Injustice with Infrastructure Investment

This is the fourth in our series on “The ABCs of the AJP.”

The White House’s recent announcement of the American Jobs Plan (AJP) highlights the establishment of a “$27 billion Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator to mobilize private investment into distributed energy resources.”  While distributed energy resources (DERs) are only mentioned once in the announcement, they figure to play an important role in the Administration’s overall goals.
Continue Reading Distributed Energy Resources

This blog is the third in a series, “The ABCs of the AJP.”

An animating principle of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) is the urgency to address climate change.  But a cross-current is competition with China.  This comes through not as subtext, but as the stated purpose.  According to the White House, “the President’s plan will unify and mobilize the country to meet the great challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the ambitions of an autocratic China.”Continue Reading The Climate Crisis and China