The Disastrous Climate Impacts of Trump’s Budget Bill: How To Fight Back

President Donald Trump’s newly enacted tax and spending law (with the characteristically ridiculous name “One Big Beautiful Bill”) is just one more attack amid his relentless wave of assaults on any and all efforts to address the deepening climate crisis. Even prior to the bill’s passage, the Trump administration had already introduced, according to Climate Backtracker, more than 200 measures to “scale back or wholly eliminate climate mitigation and adaptation measures.” Trump had also fired hundreds of government scientists and installed climate change deniers into critical government positions.  

The bill itself eliminates the tax credit for electric vehicles, ends the advanced manufacturing tax credits for clean energy and batteries, including wind turbines, and slashes tax credits for solar and wind projects. It also repeals residential clean energy tax credits that help homeowners install renewable energy systems such as rooftop solar, and eliminates incentives for home energy efficiency upgrades, including weatherization. These measures are all of a piece with the pronouncement last March by Lee Zeldin, the head of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, that “Yesterday was the most consequential day of deregulation in American history…Today marks the death of the Green New Scam.” 

The impact of the overall Trump program on the climate will be severe, as intended. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions—the main cause of global heating—have fallen by roughly 20% over the past 20 years. The Biden administration’s policies did accelerate this downward trend, in particular through the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a 2022 measure that primarily created large subsidies for clean energy purchases such as solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. This downward trend was itself insufficient to meet the global climate stabilization goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. But Trump’s policies will end even these modest gains. If Trump’s program is allowed to remain intact, the prospects for achieving the 2050 climate stabilization goals will become nil. 

How can we fight back effectively? For starters, we need to proclaim loudly the reality that clean energy investments are delivering money and jobs in all regions of the United States, including in red states. Wind power is thriving in Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Moreover, by the end of Biden’s presidency, West Virginia had received about $5 billion and Pennsylvania about $9 billion in new clean energy investment commitments tied to Biden’s IRA. It is hard to believe that working people in these and other states will be okay with these projects folding, and the jobs generated by them foregone, all thanks to Trump.  

Still more: Investments in clean renewable energy and high efficiency are now, by far, the cheapest ways to deliver energy to consumers. Even Trump’s own Energy Department’s most current report on comparative electricity costs confirms this. It estimates that electricity generated by onshore wind and solar projects that begin operating in 2030 will cost between 3– 3.2 cents per kilowatt hour. The price of natural gas will be more than twice as high, at 6.5 cents.  

We have opportunities right now for major climate policy victories at the state and local levels, even in the face of Trump. One important example is the passage of the Climate Change Superfund Act in New York State last December, right before Trump took office. With this measure, oil and gas companies will pay an average of $3 billion a year for the next 25 years for climate adaptation and resilience investments throughout the state. This victory in New York followed from the successful campaign to enact a similar measure in Vermont earlier in 2024.   Comparable bills are now advancing in Massachusetts, California, and Maryland.

We need to continue building momentum to advance these and similar fight-back initiatives in all states and communities throughout the country. Nothing less than saving the planet is at stake.