Inflation Reduction Act at 2: The Most Important Law Most Haven't Heard Of

Middletown, Ohio, is one of the many struggling communities around the country that stand to benefit from the nation's biggest investment in clean energy, the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, signed into law by President Joe Biden two years ago this week.

A city of about 51,000 people midway between Cincinnati and Dayton in Ohio's southwestern corner, Middletown is a steel town. The town's sprawling steel mill, now operated by Cleveland-Cliffs, changed ownership several times over the years as the U.S. steel industry rose and fell, and the town's fortunes rose and fell with it.

"It's like our lifeblood," Middletown Mayor Elizabeth Slamka told Newsweek. Slamka's father worked for the steel company until rounds of layoffs decades ago, and she said most people in the town have family members who worked there. "It has been what has really given us an identity."

Country singer Tom T. Hall wrote a tragic ballad about the "Rolling Mills of Middletown." More recently, Middletown has been in the spotlight thanks to the political rise of one of its native sons, Ohio's Republican senator and now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

In his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance described Middletown as "an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember." When he addressed the audience of delegates at the Republican National Convention last month, Vance said the town was "a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America's ruling class in Washington."

But on a Monday morning in March, some Washington officials were in Middletown to show that they had not forgotten about it.

"We're making the largest single industrial decarbonization investment in American history right here," U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told a group of steelworkers.

Granholm visited the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works to announce that $6 billion in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act would soon flow to more than 30 manufacturing companies, including Cleveland-Cliffs. Company officials said the $575 million DOE award will help them install cleaner-burning electric furnaces to melt steel, lowering the plant's carbon dioxide emissions while creating 170 new jobs.

The IRA funding is part of the Biden administration's industrial strategy that links climate action with cleaner manufacturing, aiming to lower greenhouse gas emissions while growing well-paying jobs.

A recent analysis by the clean-energy advocacy group Climate Power identified nearly 14,000 new clean-energy jobs that had been created in Ohio due to projects that benefitted from the IRA.

Those included 28 projects around the state such as renewable energy installations, automakers switching to make electric vehicles and companies making batteries and solar power equipment.

Nationwide, according to the White House, the IRA's tax incentives have triggered a wave of private sector investment, with more than $265 billion in clean-energy projects announced since the law went into effect. The White House says more than 300,000 jobs have been created and about 3.4 million households have taken advantage of tax credits to help offset costs of things like rooftop solar and more efficient appliances.

It's no surprise, then, that opinion pollsters find strong public support for those programs—once people know about them, that is.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication discovered a striking gap between voters' support for the IRA's clean-energy goals and their awareness of the law. Only 35 percent of voters said they have heard "some" or "a lot" about the IRA. Once respondents read a short description of its climate action, more than 70 percent said they support it.

"That strongly indicates there's a massive communications failure here," Anthony Leiserowitz, the program's director, told Newsweek.

Two years into the IRA's rollout, the economic data shows that it is having a sizable impact on clean-energy investment, jobs and the nation's greenhouse gas emissions. But the survey data shows that the law remains largely unknown to much of the public. The IRA might be the most important law that many people have never heard of, and that has major implications for climate policy and electoral politics.

Aiming at Pocketbooks

In a press briefing last week, Biden-Harris administration officials ran through a list of the IRA's accomplishments in its first two years.

"I know we're throwing a lot of numbers at you" Senior Adviser to the President for International Climate Policy John Podesta said apologetically.

The law's very size and its title both present communications challenges. First, that name. "Inflation Reduction Act" does not relay much about the bulk of the legislation's contents and climate goals. If anything, the title reminds many voters about something they don't like: inflation.

Then there is the complexity of a law that tackles prescription drug prices, upgrades of the Internal Revenue Service and pumps hundreds of billions of dollars into clean tech and manufacturing.

"I think it's such a multifaceted piece of legislation that it's hard to underline that in an easy way," White House Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi told Newsweek in an interview last week. "It takes a minute to get across both the magnitude and then the minutia underneath it."

A new campaign aims to help people better understand how to take advantage of the IRA's many incentives.

The nonpartisan, nonprofit Civic Nation launched a campaign last month called "Save on Clean Energy."

Civic Nation CEO Kyle Lierman called it "a one-stop-shop hub" to identify opportunities for communities and households.

"This is a big new thing, it's complicated," Lierman said of the IRA. "It takes time from passage to implementation to actually get the word out in the community."

Lierman told Newsweek that Civic Nation is partnering with the DOE and a range of civil society groups, corporations and elected officials for a "surround sound" campaign.

Notably, the campaign does not lead off by talking about the IRA or climate change. Rather, he said, the focus is on what the law can do for people.

"Make this clear and clean and simple for folks by just saying, 'You can save on clean energy,'" Lierman said.

That message aims at pocketbook concerns, but the end result will determine just how much the IRA can cut climate pollution.

"Every new heat pump that folks install, every solar that goes on a rooftop is chipping away at reaching the climate goals that we all know we need to reach," Lierman said. "We're never going to get where we need to get in terms of achieving our climate goals as a country unless there's mass adoption of these programs."

Red State Clean Energy

When Congress approved the IRA two years ago, it did so on party-line votes in both chambers. Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic candidate for president, cast the tie-breaking vote for the IRA in the Senate.

Congressional Republicans criticized the law as wasteful spending and attempted to repeal sections of the IRA. On the campaign trail, Vance has attacked the IRA as a "green scam," and his running mate, former President Donald Trump, has said he will do away with the IRA's climate programs.

Zaidi told Newsweek that the nation is at a "fragile inflection point" on energy with the coming election.

"There is a group of folks who would rather pull the rug out from underneath this massive economic expansion," Zaidi said of those who would repeal the IRA.

However, as more of the law's programs take effect in Republican congressional districts and states, that dynamic might change. Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey, a long-time supporter of climate action, said he thinks that once clean-energy jobs grow in red states, elected leaders will be reluctant to repeal the law supporting them.

"My hope is there can be some recombinant political DNA," Markey said at a June event hosted by Harvard University. "We already see the seeds of red state investment from the IRA and, in my opinion, we can build bipartisan coalitions for clean-energy solutions."

But that sort of political shift will likely depend on whether voters make the connection between the IRA's clean-energy investments and new jobs like those coming to the Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill in Middletown.

In the working-class neighborhood not far from the mill's gates, Middletown resident Tracy Denlinger was cutting her grass with a riding mower and stopped to answer a few questions.

A large "Trump 2024" flag was draped over the white metal railing of her front porch. "Union members for Trump—that's me," she said, gesturing to the flag.

Denlinger works at Cleveland-Cliffs. She had heard about the DOE's big announcement at the mill, but she was not very impressed. Her bigger concerns were about inflation and how much groceries cost.

She asked, "Have you seen the price of gas?"