San Miguel

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

transportation help lessen the use of cars, which contribute significantly to global carbon dioxide emissions. The bill also encourages an increase in the use of personal electric cars by building more electric charging stations along highways and in rural and disadvantaged areas, while also supporting the electrification of school and transit buses to reduce emissions.

President Biden claimed to help facilitate getting the country to net-zero emissions by 2050; a crucial step along that journey is shifting the economy to run on renewable energy. This infrastructure bill billion in spending would would address that ー $65 go towards upgrading current power infrastructure, which includes building new transmission lines to both attempt to prevent power outages and prepare the power grid for an uptick in renewable energy.

In terms of cleaning up American communities, the bill includes provisions to restore water and land quality across the nation. $21 billion would go towards environmental remediation projects, or large-scale cleanups of abandoned industrial and energy sites. Another $55 billion would go to completely replacing the millions of lead pipes across the country, improving the drinking water quality in small and large communities alike.

What Has to Happen for the Bill to Become Law?

Having already passed one chamber of Congress on August 10th, the bill now faces an uncertain future before it is voted on by the House of Representatives and then signed into law. Democrats in the House are divided on where they stand on the bill; a significant Democratic caucus believes the bill doesn’t go nearly far enough in protecting the environment and preventing the worsening of climate change. Many progressive Democrats have signaled that they will not support the bill unless the Senate passes another, more costly package that makes significant headway on Democratic initiatives. The vote on this second package is expected to occur sometime later in the fall; until then, the fate of the bipartisan infrastructure bill is uncertain.