Full Title: Powering Progress: Industrial Decarbonization Planning at the State Level
Author(s): Molly Freed and Trevor Dolan
Publisher(s): Rocky Mountain Institute
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
As the world moves toward cleaner manufacturing, states have the opportunity to lead a new wave of investments in decarbonizing American industry. Globally, the clean industrial transition is well underway: recent advances have made lower-carbon industrial equipment cost-competitive, buyers are seeking cleaner industrial products, and international pressure is mounting on US industry to cut its climate footprint — the European Union will soon implement its tariff on high-carbon imports, and Canada is considering a similar measure, as Chinese industry rapidly decarbonizes. American manufacturing must cut its carbon pollution in order to stay competitive. Industrial decarbonization is a market imperative, and states looking to tackle the climate crisis must seek to cultivate a cleaner, more durable domestic industry.
State leaders can build on the momentum generated by investments from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Thanks to those federal initiatives, the last few years have seen $289 billion of private investment in innovative clean energy technologies. Across key sectors, however, much more remains to be done, and market forces alone will not achieve the deep decarbonization required to stay competitive and meet international climate targets. As federal climate programs are frozen and rolled back, states can take the reins of the clean industrial transition.
In this analysis, Evergreen and RMI study exactly how states have been planning for that transition. Of the 47 climate plans recently produced by states and territories, 25 states and Puerto Rico committed to act on industrial emissions in their Priority Climate Action Plans (PCAPs), submitted under the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program. These state plans provide clear windows into state climate planning with extensive reporting on which climate policy measures states intend to pursue. This analysis studies the industrial measures in those 26 plans to identify trends, gaps, and future needs for industrial decarbonization policy at the state level.