Impact of historic new investments in climate and energy spending

The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed this summer, includes $369 billion in climate and energy funding, much of it for high-tech solutions to help move the United States toward a greener future. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) and Cathy Zoi, CEO of the electric charging company EVGo, join Washington Post Live to discuss how far the legislation goes in helping the country meet its carbon reduction goals and this month’s COP27 climate talks.

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Highlights

"I don’t know what the precise scale is going to be, but the principle is important because we’re going to see incidents like what we saw recently in Pakistan – rising sea leveled for many, many nations in the Pacific. I think the lesson here is we’re all in this together and the United States should be a world leader. We have always been a world leader and we should continue to do that.”- Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) (Video: Washington Post Live)

"Look at January as a date when you can access some of those incentives immediately on the tax side. If you’re buying a new heat pump water heater or a new heat pump replacing an old gas fire furnace, those tax rebates become live next calendar year. In addition, we’re working with states … to speed up that process of getting those rebates available to people at the retail sector so they that can make the best possible decision about their future at the point of sale.”- Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) (Video: Washington Post Live)

“We're facing a catastrophic future. And the faster we act, the more we mitigate that … I do believe we can do more and that we should do more. But I also think we’re learning that this legislation actually has a substantially bigger impact than we may have appreciated at the time… We’re going to see more change in our economy and more action on climate and decarbonization in the next four years than we’ve seen in the previous 40. I do think it’s time to really take a victory lap on what we’ve accomplished. And at the same time, recognize that we’re going to have to do many other things as well.”- Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) (Video: Washington Post Live)

“We can't’ trade one evil for another and we mustn’t. What we need to be doing as we’re sourcing the material for batteries is make sure that the mining is done in an environmentally responsible way. That we consider the full life cycle. What we also need to do is recover where we can. It’s incumbent on all of us to look at the full life cycle of every bit of both the EV and the charging station so that we are not actually creating another problem while solving another.” - Cathy Zoi, Chief Executive Officer, EVgo (Video: Washington Post Live)

“We're at a tipping point in terms of the availability, the interest, the appetite and the sales of EV's … Over the next 18 months we're going to have probably 130 new EV models. When I started at EVgo, over five years ago, there were like three of four choices. We’re now having 150 choices of cars. All of that means that we’re going to be seeing so much uptick, so many choices. Whether you want to drive a little compact car or a pickup truck that’s electric. You now will have that choice.”- Cathy Zoi, Chief Executive Officer, EVgo (Video: Washington Post Live)

“It takes us four to eight weeks to build a fast-charging station. But the time it takes from thinking about where one is going to be, identifying a site and having it energized actually is taking 18 months these days. The long pull in the tent at the moment is the electric utility process… What is happened with some of the supply chain challenges that have arisen from the pandemic and from the War in Ukraine is that getting transformers to upgrade the system are taking a long time now. This is all a long way of saying… that the timetable for getting these stations to go live is longer than we would like. And probably doesn’t match President Biden’s ambitions in terms of timing.”- Cathy Zoi, Chief Executive Officer, EVgo (Video: Washington Post Live)

Sen. Martin Heinrich

(D-N.M.)

Cathy Zoi

Chief Executive Officer, EVgo

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The following content is produced and paid for by a Washington Post Live event sponsor. The Washington Post newsroom is not involved in the production of this content.

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Shannon Kellogg

Vice President of Public Policy, AWS