Biden Climate Goals at Risk Without Push for Public Awareness

Biden administration officials acknowledged this week they need to do more to translate the dense language of their hard-won tax credits, grants, consumer rebates, and training programs so the benefits flow toward the people for which they’re intended.

A failure to spread the word could minimize the effectiveness of a given program and hurt President Joe Biden at the polls in November, said Cary Coglianese, a regulatory law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“In presidential elections that can be decided on laser-thin margins in a handful of states, every little bit of public support can help,” he said.

“Voters are unlikely to reward Biden and the Democrats for a program most have never heard of, let alone benefited from,” agreed Anthony Leiserowitz, founder of Yale University’s program on climate change communication.

Both Biden and his Democratic allies in Congress worked to secure unprecedented sums in the infrastructure and climate bills to promote clean energy and commercialize technologies like carbon capture and electric vehicles, an effort to meet the president’s goals to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across the US economy by 2050.

But “most normal people, most business owners, do not know anything about these programs or what’s in them,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, speaking at a conference Tuesday hosted by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. “And that is particularly challenging now, given the raft of new programs that were authorized under the legislation of the previous Congress.”

Similarly, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said at the same event that he spends most of his time in town hall meetings in his state trying to explain to constituents what kinds of tax credits and programs they qualify for.

“We have a lot of explaining to do,” he said.

In a recent study, Yale University found that 40% of registered voters have heard “nothing at all” about the climate bill.

White House Efforts

The White House is aware of the disconnect.

The Environmental Protection Agency has been working to tell the public about the fuel economy benefits of electric vehicles in order to make the most of the $7.5 billion for charging infrastructure in the infrastructure bill and the $7,500 tax credit in the climate bill for consumers who buy an EV, according to Britney McCoy, director of the agency’s climate analysis and strategies branch within its Office of Transportation and Air Quality.

While those funding buckets are important levers to decarbonize transportation, “it’s really going to require just a little bit more than just putting EVs on the road and installing stations to be successful,” McCoy said. “Effective communication, as well as consumer education, is essential to that.”

Garrett Nilsen, deputy director of the Energy Department’s Solar Energy Technologies Office, said his team is trying to notify a broader swath of the population—including racial minorities and women—about the training programs that are now available for solar energy jobs.

But many of the small businesses in the clean energy economy “struggle with the access” to government programs, such as the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that was included in the climate bill, and “don’t always know what exists,” said Lynn Abramson, president of the Clean Energy Business Network.

“A lot of times it’s the information gap that is so significant,” she said.

A Long-standing Problem

Highly technical benefits like tax credits have always been hard for any administration to tell the public about, according to Holly Doremus, an environmental regulation professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

“In general, people are not aware of all that their government does for them, nor of all the resources and benefits available to them,” agreed Coglianese. “This is a general—indeed a perennial—challenge.”

One stumbling block is that consumers have little reason to learn about rebates or tax credits unless they’re already planning to make a major purchase or investment, he said.

Another is that many government documents are simply too dense for the average person to easily digest, according to Walsh.

“Even when I read Treasury guidance, I want to stick an ice pick in my ear,” he said. “It is so obscure.”

Most Americans “know little to nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Leiserowitz.

In his view, part of the problem is that the administration didn’t prioritize communications as a line item in the legislation.

“Policies do not sell themselves, especially in a media and societal environment where there are so many other stories, events, entertainment, and memes competing for our limited attention,” Leiserowitz said.

Hopeful Signs

Some of the Biden administration’s programs are getting significant attention from the public, however.

Mandy Mahoney, director of the Energy Department’s Building Technologies Office, said at the EESI conference that her office is swamped with many more applications for funding opportunities than it can fulfill.

Consumers also seem to be aware of rebates for certain types of consumer purchases, like heat pumps, in part because the sellers of the products “can, and have every incentive to, help get the word out,” Doremus said.

Some agencies, including the EPA, have promised to help local groups—including first-time grant recipients—get access for funding like the tens of billions of dollars in the climate bill for environmental justice. Some environmental justice advocates have said they haven’t seen many results, but Coglianese said that kind of hand-holding can be helpful if properly executed.

To illustrate, he recalled that, when the Obama administration first rolled out the Affordable Care Act, the federal government and states hired people to serve as “navigators” to help consumers learn about their options.

But those efforts haven’t “been at sufficient volume to cut through,” Leiserowitz said. “They certainly haven’t invested the communication resources any national company would put into marketing a new product.”

Trade groups, too, have a role to play. Walsh said one of his core jobs is to “translate all of this information into accessible, clear language” through user guides on topics like what types of organizations are eligible for clean energy tax credits.

For local governments, organizations like the League of Cities and National Association of Counties “can be very good aggregators of this kind of information,” Doremus said.