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.
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.
Progress made, progress lost?
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.
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.
