(This post was written by EDF Vice President for Political and Government Affairs Joanna Slaney)
President Trump just signed a deeply unpopular law passed by congressional Republicans — one that could thwart unprecedented American progress on clean energy and transportation.
New polling shows that 67% of voters oppose the bill when they learn what’s in it. But the law puts the U.S. on a more expensive, more dangerous, and more harmful path, threatening $980 billion in gross domestic product and taking away 900,000 good-paying jobs in energy and manufacturing alone. Sean McGarvey, president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, said, “This stands to be the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country.”
The law includes many harmful provisions that will needlessly raise household energy costs, destabilize grid reliability at a time of increasingly extreme weather, stifle new development, take choices away from American consumers and imperil everyone’s health and safety. The law would have been irresponsible in the 1950s. In 2025, there is nothing beautiful about it. It’s self-destructive, akin to pilots switching off an engine in the middle of a flight.
Throttling Clean Energy
The law axes tax credits for reliable, affordable wind and solar energy, despite America’s record-breaking demand for power, targeting the fast-growing industry and complicating the development of new projects and good-paying jobs that are exciting the next generation of workers. Clean energy made up 95% of the capacity added to the grid last year. Eliminating the credits could reduce the amount of new, clean capacity as much as 72% in the next decade, according to the Rhodium Group.
Less electricity might make it to people’s homes — and what does could only be more expensive. Rates could spike by 16% by 2035, adding $400 every year to existing household costs by the end of the decade, other new analyses find.
The law makes it much, much harder to build new clean energy projects while old sources of energy are getting much, much more expensive. Building a new natural gas plant now takes up to 6 years. The cost has tripled. The law constrains the supply of energy — and in the middle of a heat wave — making America weaker as global competitors invest in their own clean energy economies.
Giving Handouts for Polluters
Instead, the law gives a new tax credit to coal, whose pollution causes cancer and damages children’s brains irreparably and is much more expensive and less efficient to produce than wind or solar.
It also defunds and delays the methane polluter fee, a practical, cost-effective solution based on industry’s own goals to reduce the amount of the climate-destabilizing pollutant and incentivize operators to waste less of their product. Every year, enough methane gas to meet the energy needs of 14 million homes is wasted.
The methane program, now blocked for the next 10 years, was a triple win — reducing waste, raising revenue, and keeping methane and other health-harming pollution out of the air. The delay will result in 640,000 metric tons more methane every year and cost the government $1 billion in lost revenue next year. It will cause irreversible damage to public health and safety, too, at a time when climate change is overheating the planet and intensifying the danger of life-threatening extreme weather everywhere from the Carolinas to Kentucky to California.
Hindering Choices, Harming Health
It doesn’t stop there. The law abruptly ends credits available to consumers who choose to purchase an electric or plug-in-hybrid vehicle as well as support for clean heavy-duty vehicles like freight trucks and buses. It also ends credits available to homeowners to increase their energy efficiency and add solar panels to their roofs to help lower their energy bills.
The law also cancels fines for violators of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program, which was established to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil and has saved Americans billions of dollars in fuel costs.
Despite the record-breaking heat and incidence of billion-dollar hurricanes, tornadoes and other climate disasters, the law took away the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was helping finance projects to reduce climate and air pollution across the U.S., as well as canceled grants that were upgrading air monitoring equipment and measuring air quality at schools. The law also ended grants through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration helping to protect and prepare coastlines and fisheries for extreme weather and improve weather forecasts and communication with the American people.
The attack on these programs will only serve to increase pollution and increase costs for people across the country. And the law’s many abrupt cuts and cancellations will add $4 trillion to the national debt in the next decade — nearly 70% of voters said they find such an increase very concerning indeed.