Details matter.
A lot of people don’t know what the “bipartisan” bill consists of (despite text) and why it’s critical that Build Back Better be paired with it.
Take climate. There is a LOT of oil and gas lobbyist spin about BIF, but deal is it’s climate negative. One example:
People will say “oh look at all this money in climate - like hydrogen energy!”
Well, not all hydrogen is the same. The H sources matter. There are 3 kinds: blue, green, and grey.
Green hydrogen is the good stuff: that hydrogen comes from water and helps us draw down emissions.
You know where Blue hydrogen comes from? Fracked gas. Blue hydrogen has worse emissions than coal, locks in more powerful climate destruction than what we’re doing now.
Blue is bad. (Grey too)
Guess which one bipar bill finances? Blue. So we need to mitigate that BIF alone harm
Passing BIF w/o BBB makes our emissions & climate crisis worse. Sure, some BIF investments do good - but not enough, so it keeps us in the emissions red.
As someone who actually has to live in the future being debated for us: BBB gives us a fighting chance. BIF alone buries us.
Now for folks who say “you need to compromise”: to start, I do not support blue hydrogen. I am against expanding it.
The compromise is allowing blue hydrogen w/ the drawdown provisions in BBB. Passing blue hydrogen alone without guaranteed drawdowns is not a compromise.
So for those who like to call folks like me naïve, immature, or that “I don’t know what I’m doing”- some of us actually read the text while others get hustled by spin.
Details matter. On climate, they’re life+death. So to do my job, I need more than an IOU. Not too much to ask.
There are so, so many details like these linking BIF & BBB.
We can’t just say “oh there’s X million for this!” Does X million actually get it done or is it half a bridge?
How many times has leg been rushed just for people to be resentful at details later? Let’s do this right.