[throwaway894345]

> Getting people to use more efficient appliances and insulating their homes should help reach these targets. We don't need to generate today levels of energy if we can drop usage by some percentage and just generate all of that with renewables.

Sure, but if the bulk of the problem isn’t residential inefficiency (or if these incentives are only going to recoup a small portion of that inefficiency), then perhaps this money and political will might be better spent elsewhere.

In particular, I suspect industry is a big emitter and the big gains are probably to be had in disincentivizing carbon emissions in industry. The low hanging fruit would be a border adjustment tariff on countries that don’t meet our current emission standards (bring more jobs to the US, which improves our supply chain security). From there we could set a low price on carbon and ratchet it up as necessary. I would much rather us squabble over the price of carbon than trying to play whack-a-mole with specific incentives and disincentives. Moreover, carbon pricing isn’t a cost, it’s a revenue source.

Besides carbon pricing, it would also be neat to see the money spent on increasing our renewable energy capacity. It’s not enough to convert our grid to renewables because we have all of these new EVs and electric heaters and electric industrial applications coming online and replacing fossil fuel applications. The grid is going to be much more strained than before, so we need to increase that capacity as quickly as possible.