Biden administration seeks to lower industrial greenhouse gas emissions -- and that won't be easy
With the passage last month of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the federal government has taken its first major steps towards reducing greenhouse emissions from cars, houses and power plants by incentivizing the purchase of electric vehicles, solar panels, electric heat pumps and other existing technologies.
But after transportation and electricity generation, the next largest source of carbon dioxide emissions is the manufacture and refining of industrial products like iron and packaged foods. These processes all rely on the burning of fossil fuels in order to facilitate chemical reactions, emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases as a result.
Collectively, industry accounts for 24% of annual U.S. emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, compared to 25% for electric power and 27% for transportation, and lowering those emissions will be especially hard. Cutting fossil fuels out of industry is a more complicated task than switching to electric cars or replacing coal-fired power plants with wind farms, as it requires changing the way everything from plastics to cement are made.
Last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) released a four-part “roadmap” that lays out the possible pathways to decarbonizing the industrial economy.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-administration-seeks-to-lower-industrial-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-that-wont-be-easy-090047913.html
