|
The Republican budget is a climate horror
Not content to ignore climate change, they decided to make it even worse.
|
| |||||||||||||||
 |
🗣️ Paid subscribers make Public Notice possible. If you appreciate our fiercely independent coverage of American politics, please support us. 👇
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.
