In the summer of 2023, the Inflation Reduction Act turned one year old, and my daughters turned two. Their birthdays would always be a week apart. This time, we didn’t have COVID, and I wasn’t working endless hours. To celebrate, we had friends over to our home, where we had just added solar and heat pumps using the tax credits I’d helped pass. It was now fully electrified, and I’d paid my last dollar to a gas company. That felt great.
For the occasion, I wore a long lavender dress and baked a sesame cake, elaborately decorated with peaches from our garden. My daughters sat on the living room floor with my husband as I lit the candles and we all sang. They marveled at the tiny fire, trying to blow it out with little success.
It felt painful to think back two years, to that day in the hospital when I was rushed into surgery for an emergency delivery. We didn’t know if the babies would survive or suffer profound difficulties all their lives. After they were discharged from the NICU, my daughters continued to be monitored. Just before turning two, they were assessed— and the results were extremely positive. Their language was advanced. Both girls were so thrilled when they communicated an idea or got an adult to do something they wanted. They loved looking at picture books, with paintings by Mayumi Oda, photographs of animals, and images of gardens.
Despite the difficult pregnancy and months in the hospital, they were both now healthy. When a mother gives birth, she often experiences a powerful flush of oxytocin, bonding her to her newborn. Given I’d had a c- section at just 29 weeks, I never experienced this hormonal surge. And for the first week of their young lives, I couldn’t even touch or hold them. These strange and scary circumstances made it harder for me to feel that instantaneous connection. Instead, it took time to bond with them, and I found my love expanding as weeks, months, and years passed.
It was the same with the Inflation Reduction Act. When it was first signed into law, I was too exhausted to celebrate. But in the months that followed, a deep sense of pride grew inside me. When a coal plant was scheduled to close early, I knew I’d helped make that possible. When a heat pump factory was announced, I knew I’d supported its funding. When states made plans to cut pollution, I could see them using the dollars I’d helped secure. And it was the same for so many others: thousands of people were proud of helping to pass this law.
In that first year of the law’s life, these same people worked to implement it. Implementation required a deeper level of attention, and no one person could track more than a few programs in detail. The environmental movement began to branch out, like a river forking in many directions. As the months passed, I talked to my activist friends less and less. I decided to focus on working with environmental justice groups to
try to maximize state electrification funding flowing out of the Department of Energy. We aimed to deliver as much as possible to lower- income Americans and minimize any funding for gas furnaces. My friends at the Natural Resources Defense Council put together a broad coalition to fight for a hydrogen tax credit that was as green as possible, and I helped with that when I could. Ricketts pored his attention into the $5 billion in state grants we’d helped secure. Even deep- red places like Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas applied, with about $33 billion in total requests. When the clean electricity program had fallen apart, we were right to ask for so much funding for states. They were ready to lead.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, Jahi spent his time trying to ensure that the green bank would help people across the country. When Jahi was just a few weeks into his new job, Senator Bernie Sanders started demanding to know what was happening with the $7 billion in solar funding he’d made happen. Sanders had dreamed for years about a program to help lower income folks put solar on their roofs, just like he had done on his own home. But he worried that the EPA wasn’t doing what he intended under the law. He was so upset, he’d put a hold on confirming a nominee for the agency until they could sort this out.
Together, Jahi and the EPA administrator walked over to Senator Sanders’s office on the Hill. They found him in a bad mood. “I understand we’re here so you can tell me how you’re planning to implement this solar program,” Sanders said gruffly, looking straight at them. His boss turned to Jahi, saying, “Yes. Please explain to the senator our plans.” After two years in the White House, Jahi knew how to think on his feet. Plus, he’d built a deep understanding of the gaps in solar deployment. He quickly laid out their plans to launch the program. Sanders, nodding along, softened as Jahi spoke. When the meeting wrapped, he turned to Jahi and said, “You seem very serious about this.” “Of course, senator,” Jahi replied. “This is very serious. I am looking forward to working closely with you.” Shortly after, Sanders voted for the EPA nominee. As the months passed, Jahi worked hard alongside dozens of colleagues to try to get the money awarded and out the door. But moving billions of dollars through an agency built to regulate, not spend, was challenging— and slow.
The Treasury Department was similarly working around the clock to launch the bill’s more than 40 energy tax credits. By the end of 2023, that manufacturing policy, which Hasan worked on with Adrian, was projected to cost almost $73 billion— making it the largest in the package. Plus, it was leveraging hundreds of billions more in private funding. Hasan thought back to how little attention the provision had received when the law passed, and had to laugh. He’d known it would be transformative, but it became much bigger than even he’d imagined. Crucially, around 80 percent of this investment was in Republican states. Adrian and Hasan’s idea to shift the politics was starting to pay off.
As the law rippled out across the country, many environmental groups who had opposed it during passage became vocal supporters. For one thing, their worst fears of a fossil fuel leasing boom did not come true: when some auctions were held, there were almost no bidders. A year into implementation, I met with one activist who had changed her opinion about the law and, by extension, me. We found much more common ground than I expected. “There’s a perfectionism to the climate movement,” she told me when we met in person. “I’m a perfectionist myself— and it’s something I’m working on.” I found her honest and insightful.
Activists know how little time there is to act on the climate crisis, and the dire consequences if we fail. But we can sometimes struggle to distinguish between progress and perfection. And we can glorify process over outcomes.
Not everyone felt that the law’s widespread success was a good thing. By the time the first anniversary rolled around, Manchin had soured on the package, claiming the Biden administration had implemented it as a “radical climate agenda.” Perhaps the senator had been caught in the fog of enactment, unable to anticipate the law’s profound changes to the energy system. But his views wouldn’t be relevant much longer. With West Virginia’s popular governor challenging him, Manchin decided to retire rather than lose his seat.
Just after the bill’s first anniversary, in the fall of 2023, I returned to DC for a work trip. It was unseasonably warm, at over 100°F. Climate change had not stopped just because we passed one law. In some ways, it was even more painful to watch the impacts now that we’d finally acted. When Canada’s boreal forest burned that spring, blanketing the East Coast in thick smog, I felt heartbroken. The lungs of our Earth were burning, and now they were burning our lungs. These ecosystems that had protected us for so long were harming us— because we had harmed them. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. But even on these hard days, I knew there would be fewer tragedies like this because of our work. I would never have been able to say that if I’d focused only on my own small carbon footprint. This progress was only possible by working through our democracy, joining with thousands of others to create a big carbon wave.
On that fall trip, I met with staff in the Biden administration and Congress, sharing advice on how to implement the law. Sonia happened to be in town, so we met up with Adrian. It was the first time the three of us had ever hung out in person. Adrian, still working for Schumer, wore a suit and melted in the heat. He talked about quitting his job soon. Sonia was now running a big climate organization, helping to drive strategy and funding for the movement. Having these two people in my life, who saw the world like I did and worked to cut pollution every day, was a blessing beyond measure. And if Sonia and Adrian existed, there must be tens of thousands more like them, in every corner of the planet, linked in a vast web of action.
Now, renewables were surging. Solar, batteries, and wind would end up supplying 96 percent of new electricity capacity in 2024. With only one new gas plant in the entire country, clean energy was basically the only thing being built. And supply chain problems meant that even if a utility wanted more gas, they would have to wait upward of seven years just to get a turbine.
The law was catalyzing real projects in every corner of the country. Thanks to Brian Deese’s efforts, the number of fast EV- charging stations had tripled since Biden took office: by 2025, there were 12,000 across the country. No one would have trouble finding a charger like he did years earlier.
Adrian found it particularly gratifying to see so much manufacturing growth in Georgia. If Warnock and Ossoff hadn’t won their Senate seats in the runoffs, the climate bill would never have passed.
Outside Cleveland, Ohio, near where Sonia grew up, $129 million in funding was now flowing to several huge solar and battery projects to replace a coal plant, which had operated since 1888. For 136 years, kids like her had played outside, breathing polluted air from that plant. But now, because we’d secured state and local funding after the clean electricity program died, it would finally shut down.
For Ricketts, his deepest joy was found in the bill itself. Even two years after it became law, he found himself rereading the text, marveling at all the threads he could connect to earlier policy proposals. When he first started working in Congress in 2009, he remembered being summoned one afternoon to the speaker’s office, just off the Capitol Rotunda. When he walked inside and noticed the elegant chandeliers and historic portraits, he knew he was in a special place. He was there to present Pelosi’s top advisors with a list of economic recovery ideas from the House environment caucus. All the most seasoned Hill staffers were there that day, true veterans with the gray hairs to prove it. And there was Ricketts, just 23 years old, with the audacity to tell them he had the plan. Now he was 37, and so many of those ideas had become law. He knew his mom would have been proud.
But the summer of 2024 was hardly a time for celebration. When Biden debated Trump in June, he did a terrible job. The polling was awful, and I could see he wasn’t going to win the election. He probably should never have run for a second term and stuck to his word that he planned to be a one- term “transitional” president, passing the torch to a younger candidate. Still, I felt bad for Biden, who’d been the most progressive president in my lifetime and had delivered on climate. But most Americans didn’t see him the way I did. They saw him as too old for another term. When I went on a radio show for the climate law’s second anniversary, praising Biden fell flat with listeners. The November election was still months away, but I had a sinking feeling it wouldn’t go well. And I worried what that would do to our law, still only a toddler, let alone our democracy.
But even if the law was repealed, I knew many of its impacts could never be reversed. There were already millions more electric vehicles on the road, solar panels on roofs, and heat pumps in people’s homes. The cost reductions in all these technologies would stick around too. There was always going to be more work to do, regardless of who won the election. We needed to eliminate all carbon pollution by 2050, a deadline smack at the end of my working life. I knew I would spend my career cranking away on this one problem. Once, we were young activists who inherited the climate crisis. But we were not so young anymore. It was now our responsibility to solve it. Working together, we can break the chain and refuse to pass this problem along to the next generation.
In the end, having children did not narrow my focus like I feared. In an unexpected way, it expanded it, connecting me more deeply to all life. When I heard stories of children harmed by fossil fuel pollution or killed in war, I felt their pain in my bones. Sometimes, in my daughters’ tiny faces with their big eyes, I could glimpse other baby animals: kittens and
birds and even fish. So much of our genetic code is shared across species. This scientific fact felt less abstract now. All of life is related. The work was to protect this beautiful, interwoven world not just for my children but for all living beings.
As they grew, I also learned about myself. I could see their budding concern for the life around them. If they dropped a cracker on the ground, they would say it was “for the birds.” Their sensitivity to touch and sound and light mirrored my own, giving me a new understanding of the body I’d been born into and now passed along. It connected me to my parents and grandparents and ancestors I had never met, tracing back until humans were other species. It connected me more clearly to the air and the ocean. That ocean we came from, in the salty brined belly of our mothers. That ocean we will return to after we die. That
ocean that dances with the air and absorbs all that extra carbon we’ve put into the atmosphere. That ocean is us. Somehow I knew that more deeply than before.
Years later, when I looked at my children, now walking, now talking, now marveling at the world, I knew, beyond a doubt, I’d made our planet a better place for them to grow up in. There is no better feeling than this.
Excerpted from The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet by Leah C. Stokes. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2026.
