Senator Carper Celebrates Two-Year Anniversary of the Historic Inflation Reduction Act

U.S. Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.), Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, today released a video statement celebrating the two-year anniversary of the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act. In the video, Senator Carper highlights how the law is reducing the cost of prescription medications, fighting the climate crisis and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Click here to watch Senator Carper’s full remarks or read them below.

Today marks the two-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act — the most significant investment in climate action and clean energy in our nation’s history.

For years, scientists around the world have warned us that time is running out to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

And we are feeling effects of the climate crisis every single day. Increasingly powerful storms, worsening droughts and record-shattering heat waves are threatening our communities and our world.

Fortunately, the Inflation Reduction Act is creating a brighter future for our nation and our planet.

This historic law is lowering energy costs for families, reducing planet-warming emissions, and cleaning up the water we drink and the air we breathe, all while creating good-paying jobs. And that’s not just a few jobs. That’s a whole lot of jobs.

In fact, according to Climate Power, clean energy companies and manufacturers have announced more than 312,000 new good-paying jobs across America since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law.

And studies project that the Inflation Reduction Act will add nearly 1.5 million jobs to the economy by 2030. That’s right — 1.5 million jobs! For comparison, that’s more jobs than there are in Maine, in North Dakota, and in Alaska combined!

As Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, I’m especially proud of a number of significant climate and clean air investments that we worked to secure in this law.

That includes the Methane Emissions Reduction Program to rein in methane pollution — a super pollutant that’s over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

And programs like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the Solar for All program and the Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program are already investing tens of billions of dollars into projects across our nation. These projects will help us address legacy pollution, meet our climate goals and build America’s clean energy future.

For example, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Connecticut just received nearly $250 million to work together to deploy EV charging infrastructure along the I-95 corridor across all four states. And that’s just one example! That’s just one example.

But it doesn’t stop there. Two years on and the Inflation Reduction Act is hard at work delivering for hard-working working families and seniors all across our nation.

Thanks to this transformative law, Medicare was granted the authority to negotiate the cost of prescription medications directly with the manufacturers, and seniors are realizing those cost savings today.

In fact, the Inflation Reduction Act also has capped seniors’ out-of-pocket costs on prescription medications at $2,000 annually and capped the cost of insulin at $35 per month for seniors, a massive decrease from the hundreds of dollars that they used to have to pay out of pocket before we passed this bill into law.

The Inflation Reduction Act has also made critical investments in the IRS to modernize the agency, improve customer service and ensure that all Americans are paying their fair share in taxes.

Recently, the IRS announced that — thanks to the resources provided by the Inflation Reduction Act — they have collected more than $1 billion in back taxes from America’s wealthiest individuals.

In only two years, we’ve made historic progress to create hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, lower healthcare costs, modernize our government agencies and protect our one and only planet — thanks in no small part to the Inflation Reduction Act.

Let me close with this if I may: someday, our children and our grandchildren will inherit the Earth we’re going to leave behind.

I hope we can leave for them a planet to grow up on and a planet to grow old on. And I believe that the Inflation Reduction Act is going to help to make that possible.

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