Summary Report: The Climate Impact of Congressional Infrastructure and Budget Bills

This summary report of the REPEAT Project (repeatproject.org) describes the national-scale impacts of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, H.R. 3684), which was signed into law in November 2021, and the Build Back Better Act (BBBA, H.R. 5376), which passed the House of Representatives on November 19, 2021 but remains stalled in the Senate. To track the impacts of Congressional negotiations, we also model the original version of the Build Back Better Act introduced in September 2021 (H.R. 5376, H. Rept. 117-130) .

The report also presents two ‘benchmark’ scenarios: Frozen Policies, which captures the impacts of federal policies and regulations as of the start of the 117th Congress and inauguration of President Biden in January 2021; and Net-Zero Pathway, a cost-optimized pathway to reduce economy-wide U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030 and to net-zero by 2050.

This report contains macro-energy system modeling results including impact on carbon dioxide emissions, clean energy and electric vehicle deployment, fossil energy use, and more, along with estimated impacts on U.S. energy expenditures, capital investment in energy supply infrastructure, energy supply-related employment changes and improvements in air pollution and public health.

All quantitative results from this study are available via an interactive data portal at repeatproject.org.