Building a movement that can take full advantage of the IRA
The Inflation Reduction Act is ambitious climate policy, but history shows that ambitious policy is not always followed by ambitious implementation. In this episode, Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins University and David Beckman of the Pisces Foundation talk about Mosaic, a grant-making coalition that aims to help build a robust movement infrastructure to ensure that vulnerable and underserved groups can take full advantage of the significant funding offered by the IRA.
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David Roberts
For all that has been written about the Inflation Reduction Act, the most salient fact about it remains widely underappreciated. What is significant about the bill is not just that it sends an enormous amount of money toward climate solutions, but that the money is almost entirely uncapped.
The total amount of federal money that will be spent on climate solutions via the IRA will be determined not by any preset limit, but by demand for the tax credits. The more qualified applicants that seek them, the more will be spent. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill’s spending at $391 billion, but a report last year from Credit Suisse put the number at $800 billion and a more recent Goldman Sachs report put it closer to $1.2 trillion.
Big companies will have teams of lawyers to tell them when they qualify for the tax credits, but there are also billions of dollars in the IRA that are meant to be spent on vulnerable and underserved communities. Those communities do not typically have teams of lawyers.
Who will work to enable them to take full advantage available of the money? Getting that done will require campaigns, relationships, and grassroots mobilization. It will require movement infrastructure.
A relatively new grant-making coalition called Mosaic is attempting to help build that infrastructure by dispersing money to the frontline organizations that comprise it. Mosaic is a cooperative effort among large national environmental groups like NRDC, big foundations, and various smaller regional, often BIPOC-led groups.
It has pooled philanthropic money and thus far given almost $11 million of it to dozens of relatively small groups and campaigns — 85 percent of them BIPOC-led, 87 percent of them female-led — selected by a governing committee from well over a thousand applicants. The governing committee contains a super-majority of representatives from frontline communities; the foundations have a super-minority.
To discuss the need for movement infrastructure, the Mosaic effort, and the possibilities IRA offers for frontline communities, I contacted Dr. Hahrie Han, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, and David Beckman, one of the founders of Mosaic and the current president of the Pisces Foundation. We talked about what movement infrastructure is, the failure of the climate movement to build enough of it, and Mosaic’s theory of change.
So, without any further ado, Hahrie Han and David Beckman. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Hahrie Han
Thanks so much for having us.
David Beckman
Yes, thanks David.
David Roberts
I want to start with you, Hahrie. You have written in the past, and one of the themes of your work is that social welfare legislation or policy can often fail to reach, let's say, its full potential if there isn't the sort of civic and movement infrastructure around it to help it succeed. So maybe you can just talk for a little bit about what do we mean by infrastructure here? What does infrastructure m
