Not only do we not love the IRA, but equally unfortunately for its place in our collective, TikTok-fueled consciousness, we don’t hate it either. Even progressives who find it too business-focused don’t mind the IRA that much. Despite the best efforts of conservative media, even right-leaning members of the public can’t work up too much bile. Unlike the Green New Deal, which became the catchall bogeyman for the government’s Communist green agenda, the IRA isn’t associated with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, nor does it fit easily into a narrative about how George Soros is trying to make us all give up steak and eat insects.
Our climate feelings are strong—concern about climate change is the number one issue for 2020 Biden voters, according to Economist/YouGov polling—and therefore not absent from social media. That’s why the Willow Project, an oil drilling project in Alaska, garnered widespread coverage and protest from users on every social media platform imaginable when President Biden approved it this March. The internet weighed rage about Willow much more heavily than happiness about the IRA, despite the greater carbon impact of the latter—not good news for Biden or the Democrats looking at the upcoming election year.
In our current media cycle, information does not spread without feelings like love and rage. The IRA, then, needs to provoke much stronger feelings among the American public than it does. Democrats and climate advocates should emphasize the species, cities, pastimes, gardens, national parks, and foods that we love; everything that we could save, in part by decarbonizing society through policies like the IRA. It’s also important to stir the pot on the other side by mobilizing some hatred against the industries and Republicans that are trying to undo the IRA—like presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has rejected federal IRA money that could benefit his state—and in the process, destroy everything we love.