America's New New Deal written by Julia San Miguel
What is the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill? On Tuesday, August 10th, the U.S. Senate passed President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework by a vote of 69-30, with 19 Republicans joining their Democratic counterparts. The bill is a sweeping increase of an investment into America’s infrastructure; the total infrastructure package has a $1 trillion price tag. A little more than half of that funding would be new spending over five years, on top of what Congress already would have allocated to infrastructure in the future. The White House claims this infrastructure bill would be the largest investment into improving and modernizing American infrastructure in almost a century, and the single largest investment into Amtrak since its creation fifty years ago. This is certainly the most ambitious infrastructure bill in recent memory, and has managed to attract crucial bipartisan support from a gridlocked federal government.
What Environmental Provisions are in the Bill? The vote in the Senate came shortly after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their 2021 report. This report raised major red flags for the planet given the world’s current consumption of fossil fuels, and pushed for more direct action to mitigate climate change from the world’s largest polluters. The bipartisan infrastructure bill includes major provisions meant to curb the effects of climate change, including major investments into public
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