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This is OnPoint. I'm Debra Becker and for Magna Chakrabardi.

It's described as the largest climate policy ever undertaken in U.S. history.

The Flesher Reduction Act invests $369 billion to take the most aggressive action ever, ever, ever in confronting the climate crisis.

This week marks a year since implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The ultimate goal of the law is to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of this decade.

In marking the laws one year anniversary this week, the White House said the Inflation Reduction Act has created 170,000 clean energy jobs so far and has helped fund hundreds of projects.

One of the communities hoping to benefit from one of these projects is Newton, Iowa, which for more than a century was the washing machine capital of the world.

The Maytag Company started building its appliances in Newton, Iowa in 1893 at its peak and employed more than 3,000 people.

But in 2007 the Maytag plant closed. The company Whirlpool bought Maytag and moved all operations out of Newton.

The city's unemployment rate jumped to nearly 10% according to Frank Lebel, head of the Newton Development Corporation.

So as a commuter day we got together and we kind of went out and tried to recruit different companies to the commuter day.

We knew we had the workforce and we knew we had the buildings and the infrastructure.

So that made it a little bit easier to go out and say, hey, you know, we already got a workforce and we've got the buildings.

So it could be kind of a turnkey operation.

And within a year those efforts appeared to work. A new company set up shop in Newton, TPI composites and TPI makes blades for wind turbines.

Lebel says while TPI didn't take over the Maytag building, they did bring back some jobs.

They started with about 300 people and didn't take long to ramp up to 500 people.

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