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President Donald Trump got his “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” and a Fourth of July signing ceremony to boot. America got the removal of 11.8 million people from health insurance programs, tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy — and the dissolution of both longstanding and newly erected pillars of energy and industrial policy.
The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act is a law not of creation but destruction. It’s the antithesis of former President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which was ultimately pared down into the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. That law sought to push America toward the future, toward clean energy. This new law tethers the country to the past, to coal and oil and gas.
It eliminates a set of subsidies that have, over decades, helped solar and wind mature from niche technologies to cornerstones of our power grid. It scraps tax credits for rooftop solar, electric vehicles, and heat pumps, making it more expensive for the average person to buy these cleaner options. It threatens to pull the rug out from under manufacturers who, encouraged by the incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act, had chosen to build new factories to make products like solar panels and lithium-ion batteries in the United States.
Jobs will be lost. Energy will get even more expensive. Billions more tons of carbon dioxide will escape into the atmosphere, needlessly, trapping more and more heat under the lid of a planet that is already boiling over.
Though dozens of congressional Republicans voiced their support for various clean energy subsidies in recent months — and though Republican congressional districts benefit most from the manufacturing boom the incentives have created — Trump’s signature legislation ultimately faced almost no resistance. Browbeaten by the president, every GOP lawmaker who had signed onto letters supporting clean-energy incentives voted for the law, save one. That lone holdout was Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who had announced his retirement days before.
In effect, the new law repeals much of the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark law that was not only helping the United States reduce its carbon emissions, but also gave the country a much-needed injection of industrial policy. It was a rare, coherent attempt to marshal the might of the U.S. government to boost an industry — in this case, clean energy — deemed critical to national interests.
That policy was working.
After the law went into effect and introduced a new subsidy for clean-energy factories, the long-stagnant U.S. manufacturing and industrial base began to undergo a remarkable revitalization.
Firms unveiled plans to invest more than $100 billion to build solar-panel and EV and battery factories that would create an estimated 115,000 jobs. Construction spending on U.S. manufacturing facilities grew far faster than it has since the turn of the century. One major metal company announced plans to build the first new aluminum smelter in the U.S. in 45 years, the result of an ambitious Biden-era program that sought to power heavy industrial processes without fossil fuels. That same program spurred plans for futuristic new steel plants that would operate without coal. The Trump administration dismantled that program in May, and the fate of those projects remains unclear.
The Inflation Reduction Act greatly accelerated the development of clean energy. This trend was underway before Biden’s law went into effect, thanks to a pair of tax credits, one of which dates back to George H. W. Bush’s administration and the other of which to the second term of George W. Bush. Biden’s signature climate law took these existing policies and expanded them, turbocharging the already-rapid rise of renewables. The results speak for themselves: As of last year the U.S. now gets more electricity from wind and solar than from coal. Big grid batteries have helped Texas and California keep the lights on during heat waves.
Now, with the repeal of those and other incentives, it’s expected that the U.S. will plug somewhere between 57% and 72% less clean energy into the grid over the next decade. Because clean energy accounts for nearly all new electricity capacity built in the U.S., it’s unclear what, if anything, would fill in that gap. It won’t be new gas-fueled plants — turbine orders are severely backed up. The solar, wind, and battery projects that do get built will be more expensive because the clean-energy subsidies are now gone. Those higher costs will be passed on to households and businesses, exacerbating the energy inflation Americans are already dealing with.
The timing could not be worse. Around the country, demand for electricity is anticipated to grow at a pace not seen in years. One of the biggest drivers is the proliferation of data centers that underpin increasingly popular AI systems like ChatGPT — and can use as much power as a small city. Making energy scarce right when it’s needed most will put even more upward pressure on power bills. And without abundant electricity, the U.S. will struggle to compete with China on AI.
China already dominates all things clean energy, making and installing more of all its various forms than most other countries combined. The Inflation Reduction Act was meant to help the U.S. wrest some control back from China in those technologies. The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act will instead put the U.S. further behind on clean energy, and possibly AI too.
It’s difficult to square the destruction of these policies with Republicans’ stated priorities.
The GOP and Trump himself have repeatedly extolled the virtues of affordable and abundant energy. They’ve spoken about the need to bring manufacturing jobs back to America. They say they want to maintain economic competitiveness with China, and certainly want to come out ahead in the AI race.
And yet the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act will essentially eliminate the only industrial policy the U.S. had in place to enable it to accomplish those goals.
Maybe the fossil fuel money, which has flowed toward Republicans and Trump like an oil spill, explains this behavior. Or perhaps, as writers like Derek Thompson have suggested, all of this is simply about owning the libs. Certainly fear of crossing Trump forced Republicans to fall in line. He wanted badly to extend his tax cuts, and slashing clean energy will help pay for a tiny portion of doing so.
Some congressional Republicans have reasoned that solar, wind, EVs, and other forms of clean energy are mature enough to no longer need subsidies. It’s true that these technologies have come a long way, but fossil fuels continue to receive hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies in the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund. There are no signs that this spigot will be turned off. In fact, the GOP’s bill will toss one slice of the industry another $150 million each year in direct subsidies.
Whatever the reason, the effect is clear. The U.S. under Trump has hitched itself to fossil fuels, to combustion, to literally ancient forms of energy that more forward-thinking countries will be leaving behind in the coming decades. For reasons economical as much as ecological, the future will be dictated by clean energy.
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