Businesses to Congress: Pass The Build Back Better Act. Now.
As Congress plods its way toward voting on the most sweeping climate and clean energy policy ever proposed in America, and international leaders head to the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Scotland, businesses have a message: It’s time to build back better.
This week, E2 launched a six-figure television advertising campaign to let Congress know that businesses understand that climate risk means economic risk, and that the infrastructure bill and separate Build Back Better Act before Congress mean jobs and opportunity. Watch our new TV spot below and check out our new Build Back Better website here.
The ad echoes what we’ve been hearing from E2 members and other business leaders across America. In September, more than 400 E2 members and supporters signed this letter urging Congress to pass the elements of the Build Back Better and infrastructure packages. They were some of more than 1,000 business leaders and businesses that have said they strongly support the legislation, which would invest billions in clean energy, clean vehicles and charging infrastructure, grid modernization and energy efficiency.
Businesses support the Build Back Better Act because they know it will create jobs and drive economic growth. A study by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the clean energy and other climate-related provisions of the Biden administration’s proposed legislation alone would support 763,000 jobs a year for the next decade — just part of the 4 million jobs overall the legislation would create and support. That’s similar to the findings of E2’s Build Back Better, Faster report that showed investing just in energy efficiency, grid modernization and renewable energy would create 860,000 jobs and generate $330 billion in economic growth.
Businesses also support Build Back Better because they know the economic costs of climate change are clobbering our economy — and with it, American businesses and jobs. In 2020, weather-related events caused a record $100 billion in economic damage, according to NOAA. In the first nine months of 2021, we surpassed that amount — and that’s not including the climate related disasters now occurring almost weekly, from this week’s “atmospheric river” that sent record rain pouring down on California to the “bomb cyclone” in the Northeast.
The economic threats run beyond horrific weather. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and the Federal Stability Oversight Council just issued a new report showing climate change as a growing threat to the U.S. financial markets and with it a threat to the economy overall.
The disasters, the reports, the costs, the opportunities: It all adds up to the fact that it’s time for lawmakers and policymakers to quit talking and start doing.
It’s time for Congress to pass the Build Back Better and infrastructure packages.
Now.
