Money Crashers: Inflation Reduction Act of 2022

I've already devoted one post on this blog to the Inflation Reduction Act and the fact that it could help the U.S. reduce its emissions by 40% from 2005 levels. But I haven't really gotten into the nuts and bolts of how it achieves those reductions. And I haven't even begun to talk about the other provisions in the bill, which are fairly significant in their own right: boosting U.S. industry, controlling Medicare costs, closing some big tax loopholes, and improving tax collection.

If you're curious about all that stuff, my latest piece for Money Crashers can help. It doesn't get too far into the weeds, but it does provide a broad overview of what this new law does, how it could affect you, and what it will cost. (Spoiler alert: It more than pays for itself.)

Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 – What’s in the Bill, What Does It Cost & What Does It Mean for You?

 

Recipes of the Month: Quinoa-Eggplant Salad and Black Bean Vegan Caprese

Last weekend, I mentioned to Brian that we would need to try a new vegan dish sometime this week if I wanted to get in my Recipe of the Month for August this weekend. He came through with not one but two new dishes, and I couldn't decide which one to cover. So rather than a detailed discussion of either one, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of both.

He discovered the first one by searching for recipes with eggplant and avocado, since we happened to have some of both that needed using up. Its name is a mouthful — Grilled Eggplant Quinoa Avocado Salad — and it tells you most of what you need to know about the dish. The only things it doesn't mention are the Vidalia onion, also grilled, and the dressing, a blend of olive oil, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, salt, oregano, and honey. Which makes this recipe not technically vegan, but it would be easy to make it so by subbing in sugar or agave nectar.

Brian originally planned to grill the eggplant and onion over wood in our little outdoor grill, but when the time came to make the dish, it was just too hot outside. So instead, he gave them a quick shot in the broiler. The other change he made to the recipe was using about half an avocado instead of a whole one, since the other half of the one we had turned out to be spoiled. (Seriously, what is it with avocados these days? They seem to go from "hard as a rock" to "brown and squishy" in minutes without ever passing through "ripe.") Both these changes probably made the dish not quite as good as the original version, but a good enough approximation to evaluate it.

And our evaluation was...meh. There was nothing in it that didn't work, it just wasn't outstanding. And given that the combination of eggplant, onion, and a wood fire can also be used to make a truly fabulous sandwich, we don't see any reason to bother again with a dish that's merely okay.

The second dish wasn't a brand-new recipe but a variant on an old favorite, pasta a la Caprese. We've been making this with our homemade vegan mozzarella, but it wasn't altogether satisfactory because the fake mozzarella didn't melt like the real stuff. (It melts fine on a pizza, but the heat of the cooked pasta isn't quite enough.) We tried leaving out the cheese, and while the uncooked tomato-basil-garlic sauce was still quite tasty by itself, it was a bit lacking in substance. And now that I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on my blood sugar, a pasta dish with no protein wasn't ideal.

Brian had previously tried adding some white beans to the sauce to add protein, and while this worked okay, it didn't have the nice soft texture that the cheese used to supply. So I suggested subbing in some plain tofu, as in this vegan Caprese salad we tried a few years back. I figured if it was left to steep in the sauce for a good hour or three, it should have plenty of flavor, along with a texture very close to mozzarella.

However, rather than simply doing this with regular pasta, Brian decided to try another experiment: substituting in some "black bean spaghetti" we found at Ocean State Job Lot. Actually, this doesn't mean what we usually think of as black beans: according to the label, the sole ingredient in it is black soybeans. That makes this form of pasta absolutely loaded with protein: a whopping 25 grams per serving, as compared to only 20 grams of carbs and 10 grams of fiber. So, with two forms of soy in it, the dish was quite substantial indeed.

Unfortunately, these soy noodles turned out not to be the ideal medium for this sauce. First of all, a thin pasta like spaghetti isn't as good at holding the chunks of tomato as a shorter pasta like penne or rotelle. But also, the chewy texture and slightly nutty flavor of the soy noodles, though quite enjoyable on its own, wasn't an ideal background for the tomato-garlic-basil flavor of the sauce. It worked okay, but it wasn't quite as good as regular pasta or some of the other less starchy versions we've tried, like whole-grain or red lentil pasta. (Perhaps I'll fill you in on some of those in a future post.)

The tofu, on the other hand, worked pretty well. It hadn't picked up that much flavor from the sauce, but that may have been because the steeping time was a little on the short side. Given a full two hours or more, it would probably be excellent in both taste and texture.

So, in short, we think both these experiments were successful, just not in combination. We'll definitely try the tofu in our Caprese sauce again, this time with a longer steeping and a more appropriate type of pasta. And next time we're at Ocean State Job Lot, we'll plan to pick up another box or two of this soy spaghetti to experiment with. We think its nutty flavor would make an excellent foil for peanut or sesame noodles, or for any dish that's normally made with soba.

More climate solutions

Last week, while celebrating the fact that our country finally, finally managed to pass meaningful climate legislation, I also stressed that the new law itself wasn't going to be enough. We still need to keep up efforts to decarbonize our economy at all levels of government, and in the private sector as well. So what's next? Which new approaches will do most to help us cut carbon emissions, and draw down existing emissions, as fast as possible?

Glad you asked! Back in January, in an effort to fight off climate despair, I posted a small roundup of five ideas that had the potential to be game changers on climate. Here are four more — this time, complete with some suggestions on how to help them along.

Game changer #6: Fake meat

Last month, I read a piece in Knowable magazine that posed the question, "How sustainable are fake meats?" The answer turns out to be, "Maybe not as sustainable as other plant-based proteins, but way better than real meat." Measured in kilograms of CO2 equivalent per gram of protein, plant-based faux meats are much better than beef, better than pork or chicken, and in some cases, even better than eggs. They're not as carbon-light as tofu, pulses (legumes), or peas, but they're not that far behind. They use much less water, too. And in terms of land use, they're actually more sustainable.

How much could this help the climate? Quite a bit. According to the article, 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock. Replacing the meat we eat now with faux meat could cut that figure by anywhere from 53% (for pork) to 93% (for beef). So if you figure 70% on average, that's about a tenth of all our greenhouse gas emissions gone.

What's holding it back? Two things: quality and cost. At present, there are good plant-based substitutes for ground beef and chicken nuggets, but not for the good stuff, like steak and chicken breast. And because these meats are pretty cheap, the plant-based versions are currently more expensive.

How can you help make it happen? This one's easy. Fun, even. Just start sampling the wide variety of tasty plant-based meats out there until you find one you really like, and then sub it in for real meat whenever possible. 

Game changer #7: Superhot rock energy

Besides being a really good name for a band, superhot rock energy is "the carbon-free energy resource you've never heard of," according to the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). See, we already know that there's an essentially limitless source of heat energy in the earth's mantle, but the problem is tapping into it. Traditional geothermal energy relies on natural sources of underground steam, which you only find where there are hot spots quite close to the surface. But there are few such locations, which greatly limits its potential as an energy source.

For superhot rock energy, you have to go deeper into the earth's crust, down to the regions where everything is hot. Then you drill wells and inject water to pick up that heat and carry it back to the surface, where you can use it to generate power. It can also serve to split apart water for clean hydrogen fuel. 

How much could this help the climate? It could be huge. We're talking unlimited power that's available basically anywhere, anytime. All you have to do is build the power plants (or repurpose existing fossil-fuel plants) to tap into it. 

What's holding it back? First of all, these wells need to be really deep, and they're in areas that are, by definition, very hot. So we need new techniques and new materials to make it work. And second, you need to figure out how to do it without setting off earthquakes in the process, the way fracking can.

How can you help make it happen? You can donate to organizations (such as CATF) that are working to make this new clean energy source a reality. And in the meantime, you can read up on it, so when climate skeptics start whining about how renewable energy is unreliable because sometimes the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, you can say, "Well, actually..." and take the wind right out of their sails.

Game changer #8: Plastic-to-graphene recycling

This idea is about as ecofrugal as you can get. It's about turning something harmful that no one wants (plastic waste) into something incredibly useful that everyone wants. According to Design News, scientists at Rice University have figured out how to recycle waste plastic into graphene, a material that's a useful part of electronics, concrete, new plastics, and all kinds of other stuff. And better still, their technique is considerably cheaper than current methods of making graphene.

How much could this help the climate? So, plastic waste isn't just ugly and toxic and harmful to wildlife. It's all of those things, but it's also a threat to the atmosphere because when it ends up in the oceans, microbes digest it and in the process convert oxygen to carbon dioxide. Plastic that ends up in landfills can break down into methane, which is even more harmful. Turning plastic into graphene not only eliminates these emissions sources but also reduces the need for environmentally harmful graphite mining. It's not clear from the article just how big an impact it could have, but considering all the other problems plastic waste creates, having less of it (and better yet, turning it into something useful) is clearly a Very Good Thing.

What's holding it back? Mostly the fact that the idea is so new. The paper announcing it came out less than two years ago, so it will take time to scale it up. But the team at Rice is already getting started, working with Ford Motors to recycle the plastic parts of deceased Ford F-150s.

How can you help make it happen? Well, you could consider a Ford for your next vehicle. But for now, you can probably do more good by reducing plastic waste in other ways, like giving up stupid bottled water.

Game changer #9: Leaner, cleaner, greener air conditioning

Living on a warming planet makes us all more and more dependent on air conditioning — but the more we use air conditioning to cool ourselves, the more we heat the planet. The electricity it uses is part of the problem, but we can fix that by making the power grid greener. The bigger problem is that the coolants in most air conditioners are themselves potent greenhouse gases, and there's no way to keep them perfectly contained. It's an environmental catch-22.

But that may not be the case much longer. A recent Vox article talks about new, experimental air conditioners that could completely change the way we cool ourselves. For instance, a company called Blue Frontier has developed an air conditioner based on a "liquid dessicant": a highly concentrated salt solution that absorbs moisture from indoor air, then releases it outdoors. (A video from a rival company, Advantix, shows how this works.) Another company, Transaera, uses "a novel sponge-like material" to snork up moisture from the air, then recycles the heat thrown off by the machine to dry it out again. And the British company Barocal is using "barocaloric cooling," which depends on a material that heats up as pressure is applied to it and cools off when the pressure is released.

How much could this help the climate? If an A/C unit runs on 100 percent renewable energy, and if it stays completely sealed, it does very little damage. However, those conditions seldom apply. According to the World Economic Forum, if we could replace today's conventional air conditioners with new designs that cut emissions by four-fifths (which these experimental models do), it could eliminate emissions of as much as 100 gigatons of CO2 equivalent by 2050.

What's holding it back? The technology is there, but it's very new. It will take time and money to scale it up.

How can you help make it happen? Unfortunately, you can't buy one of these new, hyper-efficient air conditioners today, and you won't be able to any time in the next few years. But you can follow the news of these companies, as well as the Global Cooling Prize, which helps support new cooling technologies like these. And if you get a chance to invest in them or otherwise support their work, go for it. It'll help bring these technologies to market faster, and given how much the world needs them, it'll probably pay off in the long run.

At long last, some good news on climate

The past several years — five or six at least — have been a very depressing time to be a climate activist. All through that period, pretty much all the news on climate was bad. 

First came the election of Donald Trump, ensuring that the U.S. government would be taking no action on climate for four years at least. Then we learned that the earth was heating faster than scientists had previously thought, giving us even less time to prevent disaster. Scientists started saying that "baked in" warming from greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere meant we had to not only cut emissions dramatically — something our nation had so far failed to do — but also remove huge amounts of carbon if we wanted to avoid running right over the cliff edge like Wile E. Coyote. Last April, the final IPCC report narrowed the window of opportunity down to a mere eight years, saying if the world's nations couldn't reduce their emissions around 43% by 2030, it would be too late to prevent the climate apocalypse. And just two months ago, Joe Manchin's announcement that he would not support President Biden's climate bill seemed to definitively destroy any possibility of meeting that goal.

And then came the miracle. A mere six weeks later — six weeks of, we now know, constant behind-the-scenes negotiations on the part of Chuck Schumer — Manchin announced that he had changed his mind and would now agree to support a slightly scaled-back version of the climate bill. Over the next two weeks, the newly rebranded "Inflation Reduction Act" gained the support of Krysten Sinema, the only other Democrat who remained on the fence; it got the go-ahead from the Senate Parliamentarian; it squeaked through the Senate with the support of all 50 Democrats and a tie-breaking vote from the Vice President; it made it through the House by a 13-vote margin; and the President is preparing to sign it next week. After literally decades of effort, our country has finally joined the rest of the world in taking action against the most existential threat of our time.

The new bill isn't perfect, of course. Nothing in this world ever is, and that goes double for anything that has to make it through Congress. Analyses from the Rhodium Group, Energy Innovation, and the REPEAT Project all estimate that with this bill, the U.S. will reduce its overall emissions to something like 40% below their 2005 peak by 2030. That's very good, but still shy of the 50% goal set by President Biden...and also not as impressive as it sounds, since we were already on track to cut emissions by around 25% within that time frame even without this bill. But still, it puts that 50% goal within reach. With additional action at the federal and state level, and with the private sector doing its part, hitting that target is now a real possibility.

And there's more good news: cutting emissions may, in fact, be enough to bring global warming to a halt. Climate scientists now believe that, rather than rising inexorably for decades even after emissions drop to zero, global temperatures will in fact stabilize within just a few years after that point. Cutting emissions won't reverse the warming that's already taken place, but it will, repeat will, stop it from getting worse. That means we'll have more time than we thought to deal with the consequences, such as rising sea levels and ocean acidification, and find ways to either counter them or adapt to them.

This doesn't mean we can all just dust off our hands and say, "Our work here is done." It's not done by a long chalk. There's still that extra 10% of emissions we need to cut by the end of this decade, not to mention that we need to keep the momentum going to get emissions to zero by 2050. And ideally, we should be working at the same time on carbon drawdown (new forests, enhanced weathering, soil carbon storage, etc.) to have some hope of bringing temperatures back down to a reasonable level.

In short, there's still a lot of work to be done. What's changed is that there's now reason to hope that the work we do will actually make a difference.

Air cooling for the win

Two weeks ago, I decided it was time to give in and get a window air conditioner for our bedroom. We'd been relying on a window fan to keep us cool at night, but with the outside air still around 80 degrees at bedtime, it could only do so much. So I found a GE Profile air conditioner with a "saddle" design that could occupy our one bedroom window without obstructing it completely. I figured this would allow us to have A/C on those nights we absolutely needed it, and the rest of the time it would run in fan mode. It would do the same job as our old window fan, except that we wouldn't have to switch it off to keep out light in the morning or water if it started to rain. A win-win, right?

One hundred percent wrong. This thing was a complete horror show, from the moment we took it out of the box until we returned it less than 24 hours later.

The first problem with it was its sheer weight. It took both of us just to drag the box inside and lift the unit onto the bed (which Brian had prepared by laying a sheet of plywood on top, covered with an old quilt). So before attempting to manhandle it into the window, we took the precaution of plugging it in and turning it on to make sure that it actually produced cool air. It did, so we moved on to the massive job of installing it. 

We had checked before buying this air conditioner to make sure that our window had the 13 inches of clearance required to fit it through, and it did, with a tiny bit to spare. But what we didn't realize was that the unit couldn't just go straight into the window. If its full weight came down on the vinyl window frame, it would crush it. So GE had provided two foam spacers with sticky backing that were supposed to sit inside the window frame and create a secure base for it. The problem was, the two pieces were both the same size: roughly 18 inches long, a little under an inch wide, and half an inch thick. A single one wasn't quite tall enough to support the unit, but stacking one on top of the other would make the window opening too small to fit it through.

So we came up with a jury-rigged solution: stacking the two strips together and installing them sideways. Since the width of the strips was a little less than their combined height, our measurements indicated that this would leave us just enough space to squeeze the unit through the window. Since this meant we couldn't use the sticky backing to hold them in place, Brian put down a line of hot glue on the window frame and quickly pressed the joined spacers on top of it. It wasn't super secure, but we figured it only had to hold long enough for us to get the unit through the window.

The next problem we encountered was with the "chase," the top part of the machine. This was, in theory, adjustable to accommodate walls of varying thickness. But when we opened it up to the desired width and then tried to put the screws back in, the screw holes didn't line up. Once again, we had to brute-force a solution, squeezing the tip of each screw into the tiny amount of overlap between the holes and then applying massive torque on the screwdriver to force the screw into place.

After that, we were finally ready to lift the thing into the window. This was the hardest part yet, because the bottom of the A/C unit kept snagging on the spacer strips. This had nothing to do with the unconventional way we'd installed them; the problem was that the unit had two little feet on the bottom, heaven knows what for, that apparently weren't counted as part of its 13-inch height. No matter which way we turned the thing, we could not get both feet around the spacer strips, so in the end we just shoved and shoved until they dug their way across the foam and popped out the other side. After that, it took several minutes to adjust the supports and get the thing snugged up against the outside wall, but compared what we'd already gone through, that was nothing.

However, our problems were not over. The side panels that came with the air conditioner were sized to align with the top of the unit when it was sitting on top of the two stacked spacers. This meant that with our slightly shorter spacer, they extended past the top of the unit. Brian had to shave the tops of them off with a utility knife to get them roughly aligned with the top of the chase before adding a foam weather strip across the top. It still didn't line up perfectly, but the foam was squishy enough that we were able to get the window closed.

At last, we had the thing in place and were ready to turn it on. Since it was fairly cool outside, we decided to run it in fan mode, figuring that it should manage to get the bedroom down to a comfortable temperature in the few hours before bedtime.

This did not happen. I first began to have misgivings an hour or so after we installed it, when I went into the bedroom and found that it was significantly warmer than the rest of the house, where we had the windows open and fans running. But Brian argued that it was just taking some time to disperse all the body heat we'd put into the room while getting the thing installed.

By bedtime, though, the room had not cooled down at all. Brian suggested we turn the air conditioner to cooling mode, but I hated the idea of running A/C when it wasn't actually that hot outside and the rest of the house felt perfectly comfortable without it. I knew I didn't want to rely on it every night, so I figured I'd have to get used to this thing's pathetic excuse for a fan sooner or later

I finally managed to get to sleep by snuggling up to an ice pack. When I woke up the next morning, the pack had turned into a hot-water bottle, the room felt even stuffier than before, and Brian wasn't there. I emerged to find that he had already started up the big fan in the kitchen window and the rest of the house now felt much, much cooler than the bedroom. He had slept even worse than I had. He'd eventually turned the cooling on briefly just to get the room down to a bearable temperature, but when he woke up a few hours later, it was so stifling that he gave up and spent the rest of the night on the sofa. 

Based on this experience, Brian was now convinced that the air conditioner's so-called fan mode didn't actually exchange air with the outdoors. All it did was blow it around the room, creating a little bit of airflow but providing no actual cooling whatsoever. We didn't know whether our unit was defective or it was actually designed this way for some idiotic reason, but one thing was clear: If we wanted to cool our bedroom with outside air for most of the summer and use A/C only in emergencies, this machine wasn't going to do it.

So we spent a good part of that morning wrestling the unit out of the window we'd worked so hard to wrestle it into the day before. This was even harder, since our jury-rigged foam support kept pulling loose and snagging on the machine, but eventually we managed to get it out of the window and back into its box. And even before taking it back to Best Buy (which, fortunately, accepted our return with no difficulties), I had already ordered its replacement: the TRANSOM window fan from Vornado.

Compared to the nightmare of dealing with the air conditioner, installing this was almost ludicrously easy. Lifting it into the window was no problem, since it weighs less than nine pounds. The foam pieces that fit around the edges to block out light came in an assortment of sizes, so we didn't have to do any carving or shoving or squeezing to get a reasonably close fit. (There is a slight gap, but Brian thinks he can fill it with some more of that foam weather-stripping.) And when we plugged it in and turned it on, lo and behold, cool air came into the room.

I can't honestly claim that this fan keeps us every bit as cool and comfortable as an air conditioner would. In fact, in terms of airflow, I'm not really sure it's superior to our old window fan. But it is much more user-friendly. Thanks to its lower profile and weatherproof case, we can simply leave it in the window all summer long, rather than having to move it into the window at night and back out in the morning. It also doesn't admit nearly as much light into the room, so we don't have to make a tradeoff between keeping the room dark and keeping it cool. It even comes with a cute little remote control, in case we want to switch it off or adjust its speed in the middle of the night.

Bottom line: If what you want is a fan 98% of the time and an air conditioner 2% of the time, do not, repeat not, spend $500 on this air conditioner. You're much better off spending $100 on a good window fan and migrating into a room with air conditioning on those rare occasions when you really need it.