6 energy takeaways from Trump’s big bill
President scores a political win at the expense of wind, solar, EVs and consumers
(Bill Sternberg is a veteran Washington journalist and former editorial page editor of USA Today.)
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. (Callaway Climate Insights) — It’s done. After weeks of permutations that roiled renewable energy stocks, Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending measure has squeaked through both chambers of Congress. Now the megabill is headed to the White House for the president’s signature.
Here are half-a-dozen key takeaways from the outcome, which will have enormous consequences for climate finance and efforts to combat global warming:
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Washington giveth, and Washington taketh away
America’s climate leadership lasted less than three years. On Aug. 7, 2022, the Senate passed President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, on a 51-50 party-line vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. On July 1, 2025, the Senate passed Trump’s marquee domestic policy plan, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill, 51-50, with Vice President J.D. Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
Biden’s bill represented historic investment in green energy solutions and America’s most ambitious action to combat human-caused climate change. Trump’s bill represents historic disinvestment and retreat. According to preliminary calculations, Trump’s bill will roll back $568 billion in IRA clean energy subsidies and programs, or about two-thirds of the federal investment that had been anticipated over the next decade.
The result is a bitter reminder for climate investors and entrepreneurs about the fragility of one-party legislation in an era of political tribalism. That tribalism is so intense that, when the House passed the Senate bill Thursday, it didn’t matter that the bulk of IRA funds had flowed to Republican states and congressional districts. In a bygone political era, lawmakers were loath to vote against jobs and economic development back home. Today, partisanship trumps all else, regardless of how whipsaw policies damage individual companies and the wider economy.
The clean energy lobby is still no match for the fossil fuel lobby
The battle on Capitol Hill pitted renewables against oil, gas and coal interests that have spent decades and billions of dollars cultivating GOP lawmakers. It turned out to be no contest. Republicans who claimed to be in favor of an “all of the above” menu of energy sources showed little hesitation in kneecapping the IRA to finance tax cuts.
In the congressional committees where the legislative sausage is made, fossil fuel interests prevailed time and again. “Utterly insane and destructive,” Tesla TSLA 0.00%↑ CEO Elon Musk wrote of the Senate bill on X. “It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.” He is not wrong. To cite just one example, the final bill adds a new tax subsidy for metallurgical coal, a fossil fuel used in steel making. It also provides another $400 million in tax breaks for energy drilling and waives $1.4 billion in fees that were designed to reduce leaks of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Electric vehicle growth hits a wall
Trump has long expressed disdain for EVs, interrupted only by his bromance with Musk in the months before and after the 2024 election. With Trump and Musk again feuding, Republican lawmakers were happy to yank the subsidy rug out from under the plug-ins. Tax credits of up to $7,500 to buy or lease qualifying EVs will expire on Sept. 30. The demise of the tax credits, along with rollbacks in tailpipe emission and fuel economy rules, will put the brakes on EV adoption in the United States. Last year, BloombergNEF analysts had expected battery-electric cars and plug-in hybrids to capture 47.5% of U.S. vehicle sales in 2030; their updated projections take the EV market share down to 27% in 2030. Even that might be optimistic.
For owners of plug-ins, the only consolation is that a new $250-a-year federal EV fee that was tucked into the House-passed version of the bill was dropped in the Senate because of “logistical and procedural issues.” Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio and former car dealer, said that implementing the new fee was too burdensome. Don’t be surprised, however, if lawmakers look for other ways to get EV owners to pay into the federal highway trust fund.
Trump has his way with wind and solar
Along with his mockery of electric vehicles, Trump has long expressed distaste for wind and solar energy projects, denouncing them as costly and ugly. The New York Times reported that Trump told Senate Majority Leader John Thune that he would veto the flagship bill unless it quickly ended the subsidies. To put an intellectual gloss on what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the president’s “irrational” and “infantile” energy prejudices, congressional Republicans tried to draw a distinction between “intermittent” energy sources such as wind and solar and around-the-clock “firm” sources such as nuclear and geothermal.
Under the new law, tax credits for wind and solar projects would end abruptly, except for those already under construction or close to breaking ground. At the same time, other sources of low-carbon electricity — such as batteries, geothermal, hydropower and nuclear — will be able to continue accessing the tax credits for nearly a decade.
In the it-could-have-been-worse category, the final bill doesn’t include a contentious new excise tax for wind and solar projects. Inclusion of that provision in the Senate bill sent solar stocks plummeting early this week; they rebounded after the new tax was removed shortly before the Senate voted.
Watch what lawmakers do, not what they write
As the megabill was making its way through Congress, four Republican senators (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Curtis of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Jerry Moran of Kansas) and 21 GOP House members wrote letters in support of retaining clean energy tax credits. That led some greentech investors to conclude that the credits were safe. This conclusion turned out to be just as mistaken as the belief that locating projects in red states would protect them.
In the end, just one of the four senators — Tillis — opposed the bill, and he promptly announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election next year. In the House, none of the 21 Republican letter signers voted against final passage.
Shorter-term considerations like Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and SALT (the state and local tax deduction) took precedence over clean energy. Those priorities illuminate the larger conundrum surrounding efforts to address global warming: It’s the most important problem, but never the most urgent one.
The law is indeed beautiful — for China. Leaders in Beijing are undoubtedly toasting the final passage of Trump’s big bill. China is by far the largest global emitter of greenhouse gases, but now it can point fingers at the U.S. for abdicating its leadership role on climate change for at least another four years.
While the U.S. retreats on electric vehicles, China is continuing to emerge as an EV manufacturing powerhouse. China produced nearly 70% of EVs sold worldwide last year and, within the next year, China’s EV market is forecast to be larger than the total U.S. car market.
The law could also give China a leg up in the artificial intelligence race. The bill’s attacks on wind and solar — which account for nearly two-thirds of new electric capacity expected to come online this year — threaten the ability to supply American tech companies’ power-hungry data centers, even as China increases its lead in low-carbon energy sectors.
For Trump, enactment of his flagship legislation is a huge success. For Planet Earth, not so much.
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Well, as someone who lives in a house with solar, a storage battery, and two EVs, I have a different take on this bill:
Should we just stop referring to Project 2025 and start referring to it as the "The Nazification of the United States of America by Project 2025" or maybe the "Donald J. Trump Nazification of the United States of America as Envisioned by Project 2025"? Let's not mince words or terms any more. I think we're here now.
Compared to energy from the sun and wind, and the fact that many people will starve because of the lack of attention paid to the climate crisis, the change of our government from a republic to a Nazi run government is now here. Get ready, here the Nazis come!