Agencies are too overstretched to ensure the IRA garners high-impact reductions

Gunn-Wright: Implementation is going to be huge and complex. We could end up with a clean-energy build-out that confers a lot of advantages to wealthier white people and then leaves people of color behind. When it comes to folks thinking about environmental justice and protecting frontline communities, those are often going to be groups that have multiple priorities and not a ton of staff pushing against lobbyists who can focus very narrowly on one or two provisions in the law. It’s going to be difficult for there to be enough presence and pressure everywhere to ensure that the rules governing programs bend in favor of everyday people. I also think the difficulty in implementation is that agencies are often, from no fault of their own, understaffed, and there is a gap where communities who might need these programs to work for them are not at the same table as the agency folks who are running these programs. One of the problems with the IRA’s focus on tax credits is that right now there’s very little oversight. Opportunity Zones are an example of something that ended up not being used to benefit communities, but instead helping to build parking garages and sports complexes, in large part because of the lack of oversight and accountability. That same thing can happen with clean-energy tax credits.