By Evan Chapman, Senior Director
Picture it: you’re at the signing ceremony for the next landmark clean energy bill. Lawmakers are working the room, smiles are wide, and everyone knows that this new law will reduce emissions, create good-paying jobs, and make our nation more resilient.
You make eye contact with a key supporter of the bill and you both nod. Not just because you’re excited and proud to be there (you are, of course) but because you know how much work this has taken and how long the road has been. You both know that success starts not in a Congressional committee hearing or in a legislative markup meeting – and certainly not at a signing ceremony – but in the countless hours policy wonks and legislative staffers worked to build expertise, to find problems, and to address them.
The Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC) Institute’s Thriving Economy Project is one starting point. The project pairs ambitious ideas with actionable solutions for creating a healthy economy and ensuring a healthy environment. All 800+ policy recommendations are aimed at creating jobs here in the United States, ensuring energy is affordable, and fostering American innovation and ingenuity to build strong communities and develop technologies that will help power the future.
The landmark clean energy-focused legislation of recent years – the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and the Energy Act of 2020 – did not appear out of thin air on the floor of Congress. Prior to these bills, the last significant pieces of energy-focused legislation were the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
In the more-than-a-decade-long gap between the passage of each major climate- or energy-focused legislation, it took the work of those in Congress and those in the advocacy space to identify policy gaps necessary to deploy clean energy at scale. It took dedicated work to identify bottlenecks keeping innovative breakthroughs from scaling beyond the lab and identify where additional public support was necessary to sufficiently scale promising technologies.
It took someone thinking “this should work better.”
The Thriving Economy Project is one effort to identify what could – and what should – work better in government. Not every proposal included in it will become law, but these are serious proposals that deserve serious consideration.
It is easy to say “we should do the same thing we did last time” or that the policies that were effective in 2005 or 2022 will be effective again today. To meet our ambition in American innovation, to deploy clean energy, and to expand economic growth in the United States, we’re going to need a lot of new ideas. Tomorrow Energy Partners is proud to help shape this conversation, and we are excited for what comes next.
The time to invest in this work isn’t when an opportunity strikes, but years before. When we next have the opportunity to stand proudly behind a desk, or to sit in a sun-drenched lawn chair side-by-side with lawmakers, as the next landmark clean energy legislation is signed, we’ll think of this time: when a new policy agenda was shaped, and the course was set toward a thriving economy.