Today is the IRA's 2-Year Anniversary - What Has it Wrought?

In a recent interview, World Energy Council Secretary General and CEO Dr. Angela Wilkinson told me that one of the main impediments to the energy transition today is a lack of what she calls “systems thinking.”

“Energy transitions are a change in the organization of society,” she points out. “They’re not a simple case of swapping out one technology for another and everything else stays the same. Yet, we have this very simplistic narrative that we can take the oil system, we can put renewables in, it’s going to happen immediately, and nothing else will change. It’s like saying we’re going to take your thighbone out, but we’d like you to run a marathon.”

But that simplistic narrative is essentially what President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats used to sell the public and reluctant Democrat senators like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin on the glories of the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act during the course of 2021 and the first 8 months of 2022. Given that Friday marked the 2-year anniversary of the day Sen. Manchin surrendered his political future by serving as the deciding vote in the passage of that landmark bill, now is a good time to take a look at where it has brought the country since August 16, 2022.