1. SQ Solves climate leadership- IRA, BIL, Chip act

Plug Power, a pioneer in energy technology, provides warehouses operated by Walmart and Amazon with forklifts run on hydrogen. Plug is building one of the world’s largest plants to make liquid hydrogen. When your correspondent visited, workers were removing tarps from giant electrolysers, which will use clean energy to crack water into its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. Sanjay Shrestha, Plug’s chief strategy officer, says the output will be able to power 10,000 of those forklifts a day. Local officials helped with site selection and permitting, he explains, but the Inflation Reduction Act (ira), a climate-focused law passed by Congress last August, has had “a transformational impact” on the prospects for clean hydrogen. Mention of that project gets Ali Zaidi, the White House’s national climate adviser, leaping to his feet in his West Wing office. Pointing to a chart showing clean-investment trends outperforming forecasts, he says: “We’re seeing people make bets on America even ahead of where our ambition might have been.” Since President Joe Biden took office, thanks to three recent laws, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (bil), the chips Act and the ira, firms have announced about $200bn in investments into everything from batteries and electric vehicles (evs) to renewables and hydrogen. Some $65bn of that has come just since the ira was signed into law last August. Jennifer Granholm, America’s secretary of energy, argues that the country is well on its way to becoming “a global energy superpower”. America’s oil exports, which hit a record high last year, have kept world markets supplied, and its exports of liquefied natural gas helped rescue Europe during the Russia-induced energy shock of the past year. Mr Biden came into office with an anti-fossil-fuel stance, but concerns about energy security have led to a more open posture towards Big Oil. Witness his approval last month of Willow, an Alaskan oil project that became a cause célèbre of anti-fossil-fuel activists. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from that state, credits his “much more pragmatic” approach to the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on energy markets. That pragmatism is enshrined in the fine print of the bil and ira. The laws offer subsidies for decarbonisation technologies well beyond wind and solar to include carbon capture and sequestration (ccs) and hydrogen made from fossil fuels. They are specifically designed to persuade the oil and gas industry to clean up its act.