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This week marked the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Bidens signature piece of legislation. His administration had big plans to celebrate the occasion and to promote the laws accomplishments by dispatching officials for appearances across the country, culminating with a major speech by Biden at the White House.

Chances are good that you heard little or nothing about these events, because the news cycle was all about the latest Donald Trump indictment . And lets face it: You might not have noticed even if Trump hadnt been in the headlines. Official efforts to tout legislation rarely break through the political noise, and even more rarely move the needle on public opinion.

But major changes in policy do still seem to affect the political conversation eventually.

They can change expectations of how laws should work, or what the government should do. They can also send subtle signals about priorities and loyalties.

Thats pretty much how things went with the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obamas landmark health care law, which didnt help (and probably hurt) Democrats in the immediate aftermath of its enactment in 2010. But it went on to create a new reality, such as coverage of preexisting conditions, that has proved politically impossible to dislodge. When was the last time you heard a Republican say the words repeal and replace?

Biden, who was vice president in 2010, famously called it Obamas big fucking deal. He was right about that. And now the IRA could prove to be Bidens very own BFD.

Thats especially true if you think of the law as part of a series of investments, including the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and last years CHIPS and Science Act, which subsidizes semiconductor development and manufacturing.

But to be a BFD, these initiatives need to change American life in deep, enduring ways.

Will that actually happen?

We put that question to three of our reporters, asking each to reflect on the part of the IRA that theyve covered most closely. Heres what they said.

What The IRA Means For Climate

Headlines about the IRA tend to focus on its sheer size, rivaled only by the total sum spent by China and the European Union. But to understand its true significance, you need to consider where the United States was on climate just 13 months ago.

Over the decades, the United States fleets of gas-guzzling vehicles, sprawling suburbs and fossil-fueled power plants transferred more carbon from the Earths crust to its atmosphere than in any other country.

Even now, 17 years after China became the top annual emitter, the U.S. remains in second place, increasing its overall output year over year with few exceptions.

While individual states adopted renewable-energy goals and set limits on emissions from coal and gas plants, the federal governments official stance on a crisis already rendering parts of the planet uninhabitable has flip-flopped based on which party controlled the White House.

A breakthrough came in 2007, the first year the U.S. was no longer the worlds top emitter: The U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of Massachusetts against then-President George W. Bushs Environmental Protection Agency, ruling that the federal government is responsible for regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. From that point on, the federal government was required to do something about climate. But little changed.

After refusing for decades to support any global pacts to cut back on emissions, the U.S. and China finally recognized the threat of climate change in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The Obama administration, which had helped broker the nonbinding deal, set about proposing and enacting regulations to limit carbon from all sorts of sectors of the economy, but from power plants in particular.

Republican states opposed to the so-called Clean Power Plan seized on a provision in the proposal meant to give utilities more options to comply with the rule by running coal-fired plants less frequently, which was justified based on a hotly debated line in the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court put implementation of the rule on pause in February 2016 to sort out the legal details. But before the issue could be resolved, Trump won the White House and put the Oklahoma attorney general who had led the push to block the power plant rule in charge of the EPA.

Few regulations designed to cut emissions, no matter how benign or widely supported by industry, escaped the Trump administrations deregulatory ax.

Four years later, many of Trumps rules were easily scrapped or altered by the Biden administration in turn.

To avoid a repeat of this cycle one administration prioritizing climate regulation, the next undoing it Democrats made passing legislation on climate change a priority.

In that sense, the IRA accomplished one big thing for which it receives little credit: codifying the requirement that the federal government regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act.

But after months of negotiations with conservative Democrats, the IRA wound up with many carrots and few sticks to direct the future of U.S. energy systems.

The resulting regulation firehose of subsidies and tax credits for everything from mining minerals to manufacturing solar panels to installing solar power represents the largest spending package on climate change in U.S. history. The effects are becoming clear in the number of factories taking advantage of the new priorities that are opening across the country to manufacture electric vehicles, batteries and wind turbines.

Now, the problem is in figuring out how to manage the money.

Key details of how the money will be spent are still being worked out: Debates over how to measure whether hydrogen fuel is green or not, how to better connect the countrys disparate grid systems, and how to assess the amount of energy home improvements save will all need to be resolved before money can start going out the door.

But the degree to which the spending actually bends the curve on U.S. emissions depends largely on state and local policies policies that currently suggest a strong bias against change .

Unless the IRA can deliver its maximum benefits for carbon-free energy sources and the U.S. becomes willing to go even further, its difficult to envision a world where anyone can avoid change.

Alexander C. Kaufman