Earth Matters: The Senate may push for changes, but House Republicans have already written the Inflation Reduction Act's obituary

Nine months ago I had prepared a list of a couple dozen articles and commentaries that I planned to write in 2025 after President Kamala Harris took office. Pieces that would focus on good policies that need accelerating, somewhat good policies that need tweaking, and wrong-headed policies that need discarding, like the climatically lethal “all of the above” federal approaches to energy of the past half-century.

It was an upbeat list because, although Harris was not climate activists’ dream candidate, she was and is an ally who could be counted on to take the dual crises of biodiversity and climate seriously even though on some issues she might require a few friendly nudges. Given the likely makeup of Congress even if she were to win, her veto could keep the climate crisis denialists at bay.

It was also an upbeat list because we had the ongoing distribution of unprecedented funding via the Inflation Reduction Act to put us on a trajectory of 100% clean energy within a few decades. It wasn’t perfect by a long shot. Too much carrot, not enough stick. And it was a shadow of the Democrats’ Build Back Better proposal deep-sixed by Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin. But it was nevertheless a big step in the right direction for the environment with the promise of hundreds of thousands of new jobs in a world where the old ones are disappearing and a step toward reducing the emissions that exacerbate global warming. And although it fell short of BBB’s safety net provisions, environmental justice was a crucial element of the IRA.

Republicans hated it, of course, because it smacked of industrial policy and because of its focus on a crisis many of them don’t believe is a crisis. This week, as expected, they showed us just how much they hate it with an assault on the IRA to match their attacks on the social safety net. The IRA was set to provide $783 billion in energy and climate spending, a gargantuan amount but less than a third of the $2.4 trillion Republican tax code redistribution atrocity that would transfers more wealth to the ultra-wealthy. 

The question now is how fast the Republican-led Senate will act, and what changes, if any it will demand in order to pass a bill that can not only clear that body but get through the House. 

At Heatmap a couple of days before the House vote, Emily Portecorvo summarized the firm Energy Innovation’s take on what would happen if the cuts being then proposed made it through both houses. In short:

Americans will have to spend another $120 annually in 2030 on transportation and home energy than without the cuts. Ten years from now, the extra spending will be $230 a year. The cuts will price people out of the market for clean tech like EVs and solar panels, killing 790,000 potential jobs by 2035. With the cuts, generating electricity will be 50% higher, which translates into about 17% more on customers’ bills, according to the Energy Information Administration. 

Portecorvo followed up Thursday with The House’s 11th Hour Cuts to Clean Energy Tax Credits, Explained. To make a long story super short, the cuts are even worse than previously proposed. Here’s a summary:

Eligibility for production and investment tax credits for building clean power, will require breaking ground within 60 days of the bill’s passage and starting generation of electricity by the end of 2028. Nuclear power plants, however, get the credit if they start construction by the end of 2031 and there is no deadline for when their electricity is added to the grid.

Previously power companies would have had a full year to ensure their supply chain doesn’t include anything made in China. Now, that ludicrous a timeline starts this coming January 1.

Incredibly, at the same time Republicans are cutting off credits for companies that use Chinese clean energy components, they are also killing the tax credit that subsidizes the domestic production of solar energy components, wind energy components, battery components, and inverters. Cognitive disssonance, anyone?

Currently, companies that lease solar installation to users, including residential rooftop solar, can claim the commercial investment tax credit for such installations. The bill bars such third parties from claiming the credit. 

As for the refundable tax credit of $7,500 tax credits for EVs and some plug-in hybrid leases or purchases, the bill kills that by year’s end. The only exception is for cars made by manufacturers that haven’t yet sold 200,000 EVs. But however many they do sell will only qualify up until the end of 2026. The $4,000 tax credit for used EVs and plug-in hybrids is also gone. 

Determined apparently to add insult to injury, the Republican bill also is instituting a special tax for EV and hybrid owners—$250 and $100, respectively.

In addition to everything else, Energy Innovation says the killing of the IRA will boost climate pollution more than 530 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent in 2035. That’s equal to adding 116 million cars to the road.
At Energy Innovation there is a interactive map showing the expected economic damage in each state. 

​​​​​​—Meteor Blades

Related:

• Just how many jobs and GDP dollars do US clean energy factories create? (Canary Media)
• The House GOP Tax Proposal Would Effectively Kill The IRA (Heatmap, May 12) 
• Congress Just Took A Sledgehammer To The EV Industry. Here's What It Means (InsideEVs)

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

GREEN BRIEF

Trail CAM Photos are saving jaguars

Jaguars are the biggest cats in the Western Hemisphere, and they used to roam widely, including in the U.S., from southern California to Louisiana. But, like the gray wolf in the same period, they were extirpated from their U.S. range by the mid-1900s. Killing the endangered animals is now illegal in the U.S., Mexico, and throughout most of their natural range in Central and South America. Protections were enacted in the 1970s. But as always, no matter how well-intentioned, laws depend on enforcement. Nonetheless, the hunting ban seems to have led to a handful of recent jaguar sitings in Arizona. 

For the big cat to make a real comeback, however, requires that there be an ample jaguar population in northern Mexico to spur some of the animals to cross the U.S. border through the remaining gaps in the wall meant to keep humans out of the country.

Just as Americans did, ranchers in Mexico used to kill jaguars and occasionally still do. According to one source, in the late 20th century, about five jaguars were annually killed in the state of Sonora, which borders on Arizona. For part of a captivating article at Vox, a news and analysis outlet, Benji Jones interviewed a 70-year-old rancher who said he had in the past killed six of the animals because he could get the equivalent of $260 from cattle ranchers happy to see another dead jaguar. Like wolves, the creatures will occasionally kill calves but their preferred prey is wild game, particularly the pig-like javelina. 

A biologist’s trail camera spotted in 2000 a jaguar in a region of northern Sonora about 125 miles of the Arizona border. That jaguar was later killed for killing livestock. This spurred some scientists and other advocates of the big cats to purchase a ranch in 2003—and then several others eventually totaling 56,000 acres—to create the Northern Jaguar Reserve. Its protectors think there are five or six jaguars on the reserve now and others who pass through. Here’s Jones:

For more than a decade, Villarreal, who wore a ball cap, jeans, and a button-down shirt, has been part of a program called Viviendo con Felinos [Living with Felines]. The program, launched by NJP in 2007, works with ranchers to place motion cameras on their land. When those cameras detect a wild cat — a jaguar, puma, ocelot, or bobcat — the nonprofit pays the rancher from a pool of funds they’ve raised from donors. The idea, said Wolf, who has a background in veterinary medicine, is “to make living wild animals more valuable than dead ones.”

Photos of jaguars are worth 5,000 pesos each (~$260), which is similar to what hunters might make for killing them. Photos of ocelots earn 1,500 pesos (~$78), pumas 1,000 pesos (~$52), and bobcats 5,000 pesos (~$26). Each rancher can earn a max of 20,000 pesos (~$1,038) a month for their photos — more than double the minimum monthly wage in Mexico. By joining Viviendo con Felinos, ranchers also agree not to kill any wild animals on their ranch, including deer and javelina.

While the money has often been the prime attractor for many who participate, over time some of them who used to hate jaguars came to love them. But not everybody. Predation still takes calves every year, and while the handful of jaguars in the reserve are less likely than cougars and ocelots to be the culprits, some ranchers would rather see them dead and some are no doubt discreetly killed. But the NJP is slowly changing minds.

The reserve is well away from the Arizona border, but the fact that more jaguars are passing through its protected acres could mean more of the animals coming into the U.S. Assuming those gaps in the border wall aren’t filled. 

—Meteor Blades

RESEARCH & STUDIES

• Ancient pollen reveals stories about Earth’s history, from the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs to the Mayan collapse by Francisca Oboh-Ikuenobe and Linus Victor Anyanna.
• Irreversible glacier change and trough water for centuries after overshooting 1.5 °C. Researchers, whose study was published in Nature Climate Change, wrote in the abstract “Exceeding 1.5°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels has become a distinct possibility, yet the consequences of such an overshoot for mountain glaciers and their contribution to raising sea levels and impacting water availability are not well understood. Here we show that exceeding and then returning to below 1.5°C will have irreversible consequences for glacier mass and runoff over centuries.”
• Warming of +1.5 °C is too high for polar ice sheets. Published by Nature Communications Earth & Environment, the study’s abstract begins: “Mass loss from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica has quadrupled since the 1990s and now represents the dominant source of global mean sea-level rise from the cryosphere.[...] Here we synthesise multiple lines of evidence to show that +1.5°C is too high and that even current climate forcing (+1.2°C), if sustained, is likely to generate several meters of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and challenging the implementation of adaptation measures.” Media reporting on the study can be found here and here.
• Clouding the forecast: Researchers reveal why so many climate models are wrong about the rate of Arctic warming. Published in Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research, study conducted by researchers at Kyushu University concluded that the why is clouds.
• Managing for climate and production goals on crop-lands. The study was published at Nature Climate Change. The researchers noted, “The assumption that crop-land natural climate solutions (NCS) have benefits for both climate change mitigation and crop production remains largely untested. Here we model GHG emissions and crop yields from crop-land NCS through the end of the century. We find that favourable (win–win) outcomes were the exception not the norm.”
• Investment risk for energy infrastructure constructiom is highest for nuclear power plants, lowest for solar The study was published in Energy Research & Social Science. Media reporting on the study here.

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

Solar apprenticeships give Virginia students a head start on clean energy by Matt Busse and Lisa Rowan from the Rural News Network via Canary Media.  When Mason Taylor was getting ready to graduate from high school in 2022, he thought he would have to take an entry-level technician job with a company in Tennessee. Taylor grew up in the town of Dryden in rural Lee County, in the westernmost sliver of Virginia between Kentucky and Tennessee. He had come to love the electrical courses he took in high school because there was always something new to learn, always a new way to challenge himself. Driving to Tennessee for work would likely mean two hours commuting each day. Taylor, now 21, just wanted to work close to home. A summer apprenticeship learning how to install solar arrays helped him get on-the-job training and opened up connections to local work. A regional partnership working to add solar panels to commercial buildings in the region aims to train young people as they go, developing workforce skills in anticipation of increasing demand for renewable energy-focused jobs in the heart of coal country, where skill sets and energy options are both changing.

USDA Introduces Policy Agenda Focused on Small Farms by Lisa Held at Civil Eats. The agenda says the USDA will “streamline delivery and increase program efficiencies” related to application processes, credit, and farmland access. “Small family farmers often have little to no support staff to fill out USDA required paperwork to participate in programs,” it reads, before proposing simplified, digitized forms. In addition to recent layoffs, about 16,000 employees have accepted resignation offers and more staff cuts are expected. The proposals also include disincentivizing federal funding for solar energy on farms, increasing production of fossil fuels, revising the controversial Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule that regulates farm runoff, and pursuing “additional flexibility” for farmers to comply with other environmental regulations. The plan also says the agency is reviewing farm size definitions to “ensure they adequately reflect modern-day realities,” suggesting the USDA is considering including larger operations in the small-farm category. And it calls on Congress to ensure farms and ranches “are protected from an increase in the death tax.” Republicans in Congress are currently trying to extend exemptions on estate taxes—which are often referred to as a “death tax”—that already exempt up to $28 million in inherited property.

Colorado’s rural electric co-ops are determined to go green by Keaton Peters at High Country News. Ratepayers themselves own rural electric cooperatives and elect the board of directors. Co-ops tend to have older equipment than for-profit utilities. They often use less renewable energy than America’s electric grid as a whole and typically have fewer financial resources to invest in large projects. To help fill this gap, the Department of Agriculture launched new programs as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that altogether mark the largest investment in rural electrification since the 1930s. The $9.7 billion Empowering Rural America (New ERA) and the $1 billion Powering Affordable Clean Energy (PACE) offered grants and loans to electric cooperatives and other energy companies to build new clean energy facilities and upgrade infrastructure. “(Electric co-ops) are often at the center of what is going on in a community, and they need to thrive for rural America to grow and prosper,” said Andy Berke, who served as the administrator for the USDA’s Rural Utilities Service, overseeing rural electricity programs, from 2022 until January 2025. [...] President Donald Trump issued an executive order pausing climate and energy spending. Billions of dollars of funding for rural electric cooperatives, including the San Luis Valley co-op, are stuck in limbo as cooperatives that received money through the programs have been asked to resubmit their applications.

China’s CO2 Emissions Fall for the First Time Despite Rising Power Demand, Signaling Possible Peak by Cristen Hemenway Jaynes at Ecowatch.For the first time, a surge in China’s renewable energy output has led to a drop in the country’s carbon emissions, despite rapidly increasing power demand. The emissions decline marks a major milestone in China’s energy transition, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllivirta, lead analyst and co-founder of the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland, published by Carbon Brief. “Growth in clean power generation has now overtaken the current and long-term average growth in electricity demand, pushing down fossil fuel use,” Myllyvirta wrote in the report. “The current drop is the first time that the main driver is growth in clean power generation.” The report said China’s total power demand rose 2.5% in the first quarter of this year, while thermal power generation — mostly from coal and gas — fell by 4.7%.

IEA:  More than 1 in 4 Cars Sold Globally in 2025 Expected to Be EVs. The International Energy Agency reported in its Global EV Outlook 2025 that growth in sales of electric vehicles is growing everywhere, and that 25% of all new cars sold around the planet will be EVs this year. Among the details: Electric car sales exceeded 17 million globally in 2024, reaching a sales share of more than 20%. Emerging markets in Asia and Latin America are becoming new centers of growth, with electric car sales jumping by over 60% in 2024 to almost 600 000 — about the size of the European market 5 years earlier. Electric car sales in 2025 are expected to exceed 20 million worldwide to represent more than one-quarter of cars sold worldwide. Despite uncertainties in the outlook, the share of electric cars in overall car sales is set to exceed 40% in 2030 under today’s policy settings. Uncertainty about the evolution of trade and industrial policy, downside risks to the economic outlook, and lower oil prices could affect EV uptake –but also car markets overall.  China continues to be the world’s EV manufacturing hub and is responsiblefor more than 70% of global production. Chinese EV export markets are diversifying as Chinese automakers makeheadway in Brazil, Mexico and Southeast Asia.

Iraq’s first solar-powered village begins operating by Patrick Jowett at PV Magazine. Iraq’s first fully off-grid solar-powered community, developed by the Rwanga Foundation, was inaugurated earlier this week. The Kulak solar village, located in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, will offer inhabitants round-the-clock electricity. Local press has reported the solar village features 195 solar panels that will provide power to 36 homes, a mosque, a school and a community hall. According to a statement from the Rwanga Foundation, solar-driven irrigation might also be possible, and there are plans to provide hands-on training programs in regenerative agriculture. Plans are to replicate the Kulak model across rural areas in Kurdistan and central Iraq before the end of the decade, with the foundation planning to work in partnership with regional authorities and international organizations.

WEEKLY BLUESKY SKEET

ECOPINION

Teddy Roosevelt would be ashamed of Doug Burgum. Modern Americans should be, too by Mike McFeely at InFORum. Burgum's latest headline-grabbing action was telling oil and gas executives that our public lands — national parks, national monuments, national forests, national grasslands — are nothing more than "assets" on a "balance sheet" that can be monetized to somehow eliminate our national debt. Translated: Burgum wants to lease or sell public lands for extraction and exploitation of their natural resources. Drill, baby, drill. Strip mine, baby, strip mine. Deforest, baby, deforest. Theodore Roosevelt, the president North Dakota politicians claim to worship, would be ashamed of Burgum. Modern Americans should be, too.

Why we should seriously consider vaccinating wild birds to control bird flu by Lynn C. Klotz at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Many countries already vaccinate poultry against bird flu. It’s been an effective strategy, but it’s not free from controversy. The United States has eschewed the practice over concerns that vaccinated birds might be able to spread the disease while themselves surviving an infection. Some countries restrict imports of vaccinated birds because of this risk. Facing the longest bird flu outbreak in US history, though, the Trump administration is considering inoculating flocks. But by now bird flu is out of the barn, so to speak. It’s infected nearly 500 species of wild birds and mammals ranging from foxes to zoo tigers. It’s time to consider another means of stopping its spread: vaccinating wild birds and, perhaps, other wildlife. By doing so, we will rescue large numbers of animals from a painful death, slow the transmission of infections, and reduce the probability of a pandemic in humans. These outcomes provide reason enough to vaccinate wildlife. Conceptually, a program to vaccinate wild birds wouldn’t be an entirely novel undertaking. Vaccinating wild animals was worked out for rabies many years ago.

 Related: As Bird Flu Spreads, Vaccine Shows Promise for Protecting Cattle

Why Can’t We Grow Healthy Food For A Sustainable World? By Carolyn Fortuna at CleanTechnica. In the cute new Jerry Steinfeld Netflix film, Unfrosted, a character is flummoxed by the 1960s cereal marketing wars. He suggests that the Kellogg company consider a new direction. Let’s create a healthy, sugar-free breakfast option for children, he says. The others look at him, stunned, then break out in over-the-top, hysterical laughter. Producing food today that is good for us is no laughing matter, but the need to be profitable holds back manufacturers from offering us wholesome choices. Are there ways to fix our damaged food system? We’re clearly immersed in a conundrum. Big Agriculture is responsible for most of the atmospheric carbon dioxide causing climate change. Their facilities are also threatened by it.But will Big Agriculture agree to change the way that they’ve been producing food for decades?

The FDA needs to go beyond synthetic dyes to make food safer by R. Thomas Zoeller at The New Lede. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently targeted synthetic dyes in food, calling on food companies to eliminate their use. But dyes are not the only harmful petroleum-based chemicals in our food. Plastics used for food packaging are full of petroleum-based chemicals added to make plastic the right color, to be stretchy or stiff, to be clear or opaque, or whatever else is needed. There are about 1,800 chemicals — nearly all derived from petroleum — that leach into food from packaging and other materials that store or process food. Phasing out petroleum-based food dyes is only the very tip of the iceberg when it comes to protecting people from petroleum-based chemicals in our food. If the Trump administration is genuinely interested in “making America healthy again,” there should be more interest in human health, and less interest in the companies that are making us “sicker, fatter and poorer”.

This city’s lead poisoning crisis should be a national scandal by Dylan Scott at Vox. For many months now, the city of Milwaukee has been grappling with a lead poisoning crisis that has forced at least four schools to temporarily close and dozens more to undergo rigorous inspections. It began on January 13, when Milwaukee first notified parents at one grade three to five school that a child had tested positive for high levels of lead in their blood. Local health officials determined the lead exposure did not occur at the child’s home, which left their school as the obvious culprit.  Normally, cities navigating such a crisis could depend on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for federal support. When the lead poisoning was first detected in January, at the tail end of the Biden administration, city health officials were immediately in contact with the CDC environmental health team, which included several of the country’s top lead poisoning experts, Milwaukee health commissioner Mike Totoraitis told me. A group of federal experts were planning a trip to the city at the end of April. But not anymore. In early April, the Trump administration denied Milwaukee’s request for support because there was no longer anybody on the government’s payroll who could provide the lead poisoning expertise the city needs.

Related: RFK Jr. fired all 26 experts in the CDC's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program

A new podcast asks: Are ‘radical’ climate activists really that radical? by Kate Yoder at Grist. In October 2022, two protesters with the group Just Stop Oil shocked the world by tossing tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s iconic “Sunflowers” in London’s National Gallery. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” said one of them, Phoebe Plummer, moments after the two soup-throwers glued their hands to the wall. The painting, safely behind glass, was unharmed. But the soup-throwers were ridiculed. Piers Morgan, the British media personality, called it an act of “childish, petty, pathetic vandalism.” Journalists and scientists warned that stunts like this would alienate people and undermine support for climate action. Just Stop Oil, however, didn’t change course. They spray-painted Stonehenge with orange powder, zip-tied themselves to soccer goalposts, and blocked rush-hour traffic in London, with hundreds getting arrested. A new podcast series digs into what drove these activists to pull these shocking stunts — and whether they actually work. In 2023, Alessandra Ram and Samantha Oltman, two journalists who met at Wired over a decade ago, quit their jobs to investigate every aspect of this story, from the street blockades and court drama to the money trail that supports disruptive climate activism. After they gained trust with activists, they embedded with Just Stop Oil, at one point observing how its members get trained for police confrontations (they “go floppy,” with their limp weight making it harder to get dragged out of the street). The podcast, “Sabotage,” landed in Apple’s top 40 podcasts and just wrapped up with its series finale last week.

OTHER GREEN STUFF

Musk’s Politics No Reason to Stop Buying Teslas, Minister Says • Trump’s USDA tried to erase climate data. This lawsuit forced it back online.• The U.S. Under Trump: Alone in Its Climate Denial • Trump Asked EPA Employees to Snitch on Colleagues Working on DEI Initiatives. They Declined.• Record Pace of Snowmelt in US West Threatens Another Drought • Trump’s “wins” on nuclear power are losses for taxpayers and public safety • Rising seas could displace millions, even with limited warming • Godfather of climate science decries Trump plan to shut Nasa lab above Seinfeld diner: ‘It’s crazy’ • Bezos Earth Fund picks 24 winners of climate and AI grants