The Republican budget is a climate horror
Not content to ignore climate change, they decided to make it even worse.
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Standing on a balcony at the White House on July 4 to celebrate his signing of the Republican budget bill, President Trump couldn’t help but return to one of his favorite topics: the evils of wind power.
While China is building coal-fired power plants, he said, “we’re putting up wind. Wind. It doesn’t work, I’ll tell you, aside from ruining our fields and valleys and killing all the birds. Being very weak and very expensive, all made in China. You know, I notice something, that with all of the windmills that China sends us, where we waste our money because it’s the most expensive energy, I see that — you know, they make about 95 percent of ‘em, the wind turbines, I have never seen a wind farm in China. Why is that? Somebody check that out.” (Watch below.)
Though Trump did not bring up his deranged belief that windmill noise causes cancer, just about every word of what he said is false, from the price of wind energy to the hardware to the fact that not only do they have wind farms in China, they generate more wind power than any other country on earth, including the US.
Why was a victory lap on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (as stupid as it makes one feel to even say it, that is its official name) the opportunity for an anti-wind rant? Because the bill includes the most aggressive assault on climate action of any legislation in history. In fact, it represents a profound shift in policy, a change not just from the previous administration but from the stance Republicans have taken on climate for decades.
We’ve been used to the argument around climate change being a debate between action and inaction, the scientific consensus and the denialism of dead-enders. With this bill and the policies of the administration, Trump and his party have gone somewhere new. To judge them by their actions, they are not just ignoring climate change — they’re actually trying to make it worse.
This shift comes after Democrats spent years moving to an all-carrots, no-sticks approach to climate policy, one intended to minimize opposition among both the general public and Republicans in particular. That included crafting climate programs in such a way that their benefits would flow disproportionately to Republican-leaning states and districts.
Partly as a consequence of those efforts, we are at the early stages of nothing less than a green power revolution, one that promises a future of cheap, abundant energy without carbon emissions. Trump and his party want to strangle that future in its crib.
The BBB is a litany of climate horrors
Many of the climate provisions in the budget bill are directed at unwinding what was done in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Joe Biden signed in 2022. Its name notwithstanding, the IRA was in fact the most significant climate legislation in history, directing hundreds of billions of dollars to the development of renewable energy, green manufacturing, new battery technologies, electric vehicle adoption, and more. Many of those incentives, programs, and tax credits are now being eliminated, even when doing so threatens the viability of projects that are already being built.
The Republican budget eliminates tax credits for the purchase of American-made electric vehicles. It rescinds funds from the IRA’s “green bank” for green community projects. It phases out tax credits for wind and solar installation. That applies to both large-scale and residential solar — “the residential solar industry is going to be absolutely creamed by this,” said the head of a business group advocating green policies.
Other residential tax credits for things like energy audits and heat pumps are also eliminated. The building trades union called it “the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country,” saying it threatens to eliminate 1.75 million construction jobs.
This comes at a time when the demand for electricity is increasing dramatically, especially with the explosion in data centers, while the cost of green energy has plunged. The US Energy Information Administration projects that the country will add 63 gigawatts of utility-scale power in 2025, 81 percent of which will come from solar and battery storage.
The Republican budget is a direct attack on that progress. According to an analysis by energy experts at Princeton University, by 2035 the bill will increase electricity costs for consumers and businesses, decrease investment in clean energy, “decrease clean electricity generation in 2035 by more than 820 terawatt-hours — more than the entire contribution of nuclear or coal to our electricity supply today,” and “increase US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 190 million metric tons per year in 2030 and 470 million tons in 2035.”
The Rhodium Group has identified over half a trillion dollars in green energy investments that have been announced since 2022 but have yet to come online — the future of all that private investment is now in doubt. For some manufacturing tax credits that remain, new requirements have been added that impose bureaucratic costs on industry.
But wait, there’s more! The bill doesn’t just attack green energy; it also contains a truckload of goodies for the fossil fuel industry.
It opens up federal lands to oil and gas drilling as well as coal mining, and reduces the royalties companies have to pay on the fossil fuels they pull from those lands. It requires auctions to drill in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Alaskan coast. And it redefines metallurgical coal — which is used to make steel — as a “critical mineral” eligible for a special tax credit, even though almost all the metallurgical coal made in the US is exported. As one former Biden administration official told Heatmap, the bill “has American taxpayers pay to send metallurgical coal to China so they can make more dirty steel and dump it on the global market.” There’s also a special tax loophole for oil drillers, allowing them to circumvent the corporate alternative minimum tax.
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Not surprisingly, the fossil fuel industry couldn’t be happier. The bill “includes almost all of our priorities,” the president of the American Petroleum Institute told CNBC.
The Republican line about energy used to be that they wanted “all of the above” — go ahead and pursue zero-carbon options, but don’t do anything to limit fossil fuels. That goal has been replaced by the new effort to turn back the clock and hinder the development of renewable energy.
“So we opened up coal,” Trump recently said. “I don’t want windmills destroying our place. I don’t want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up a half a mountain that are ugly as hell.”
A sound strategy that completely failed
When they crafted the IRA, Democrats in Congress and the Biden administration were intent on protecting it from future Republican efforts to undo the progress it would make. So they designed it to create as broad a base of support as possible by giving Republican areas and Republican politicians a stake in its future. After all, if a new battery factory is established in a congressman’s district and 1,000 of his constituents work there, he isn’t going to vote to take away the tax incentives that made it possible.
At least that was the idea.
“We thought we were doing something that would create the maximum political constituency for this program by linking it to jobs, by designing it in a way that a lot of the investment would flow to redder communities,” former Biden economic adviser Bharat Ramamurti told the Washington Post. And flow it did, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in both government spending and private investment, most of which wound up in red districts.
So when 18 House Republicans wrote a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson before the 2024 election begging him not to eviscerate the IRA, many in the climate community took it as a sign that interests would overcome ideology and the IRA might be spared, at least in part. But in the end, all 18 voted for the bill that did exactly what they hoped it wouldn’t do. Other Republicans whose states and districts benefited from the IRA specifically, and the green manufacturing boom generally, also voted to destroy that progress.
Republicans weren’t motivated by their own constituents’ interest, nor were they swayed by arguments about competition with China, which emerges as one of the biggest winners of this bill.
“Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, EVs and many other clean energy industries,” the New York Times reported, “but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead.”
So while the whole world turns away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy, China is going to be the one supplying that transition, which increases both its wealth and its influence around the globe — at a time when America has shut down the US Agency for International Development and ceased our foreign aid operations, abandoning one of the main tools of soft power.
In sum, with this bill we get fewer jobs, higher energy prices, a weakened economy, a less reliable grid, and higher carbon emissions. Republicans have gone from acknowledging climate change is real but insisting we should do nothing about it, to delivering all manner of harm to the country so they can make climate change worse. You won’t find much better evidence of how radical their party has become.
That’s it for today
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It’s not the BBB. That’s the acronym for The Better Business Bureau. Let’s call it what it really is: BUB, a big ugly bill which plays to Trump’s ego and threatens our civilization and our planet. The quote from the Petroleum Institute is telling and typical of the pandering which Trump and his administration do every minute of every day. It’s horrific and disgusting.
The GOP/MAGA legacy: An uninhabitable planet.