NOTUS: “Why Greenwich, Connecticut, Is Being Treated Like a Community Left Behind”
RFF Fellow Daniel Raimi is quoted extensively in a story about the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy community tax credit bonus—the subject of his recent blog post.
But there’s a limit on how much money will be invested in clean energy, so any poorly targeted incentive programs dilute the transformative potential of the investments that are actually underway, argues Daniel Raimi, the director of the equity in the energy transition initiative at Resources for the Future. Raimi is the lead author of an August RFF report questioning the broad nature of several tax credit bonuses administered by the Biden administration.
“When you incentivize investment across a huge area of land, there’s only so much investment that’s going to happen out there in the world,” Raimi said...
The problems Raimi has identified with the credit are far deeper than just administrative guidance — and much harder to fix. The key number that appears responsible for expanding the credit so widely is the bar for fossil fuel employment: 0.17 percent of an area’s population. That number is much lower than the average fossil fuel employment rate in the United States, which probably hovers between half a percent and 1 percent nationally, depending on the year, according to Raimi.
Raimi estimates that an actually effective, tailored bar for fossil fuel employment should probably be around 1% or higher in order to eliminate the many communities that have no ties to the industry.
