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The story of natural gas taxes and bans this election cycle is far more nuanced than that.
Berkeley, California and Washington State put the transition to all-electric buildings on the ballot last week, and in both cases, it seemed to fail the test. Voters in Berkeley overwhelmingly rejected a proposed tax on natural gas that would raise money for electrification projects. In one fell swoop, voters in Washington State repealed several of their nation-leading policies that encourage electric over gas appliances and barred cities and towns from passing similar policies in the future.
On the face of things, the results appear to show voters retreating from ambitious climate action and rejecting electrification — a concerning signal at a time when federal support for decarbonization is about to evaporate and state and local leadership to cut emissions will become paramount. But the specific circumstances behind each vote suggest that’s not the whole story.
The Berkeley proposal was submitted by a small group of activists who knew it was more ideologically driven than politically feasible, and it proved to be controversial even among diehard climate advocates in the city. The Washington State initiative slid onto the ballot just three months before the election and ultimately passed on a razor thin margin. The two cases offer distinct lessons andtakeaways, but to climate advocates, a budding backlash to electrification is not one of them.
The Berkeley proposal, otherwise known as Measure GG, was largely written by one person. Daniel Tahara is a software engineer at Tesla by day, and a climate activist by night with 350 Bay Area, a local chapter of the national climate advocacy group 350.org. For the past few years, he’s been animated by a question that I, too, am frequently asking: How are most people going to afford the steep cost of retrofitting their homes to use electric appliances?
To Tahara, finding an answer became more pressing last year when the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, a regional authority that regulates pollution, approved rules to phase out the sale of gas appliances. Starting in 2027, Berkeley residents will no longer be able to purchase a new gas-fired water heater if their old one fails — they’ll have to go electric. The rule applies to gas-fired furnaces and boilers in 2029. “We've got a lot of old buildings,” Tahara told me. “They would need a lot of electrical work to support new appliances, and people just don't have the money for it.”
His solution was Measure GG, an ordinance that would have imposed a tax of $2.96 per therm of natural gas used by buildings larger than 15,000 square feet. The estimated $26.7 million per year raised by the tax would go into a fund to help everyone else in town pay for electrification retrofits.
Tahara rallied a number of local environmental and community groups around the idea, but he did not have the support of the bigger non-profits and advocacy orgs that work on electrification policy in California, including the Building Decarbonization Coalition, Rewiring America, RMI, the Sierra Club, or the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"Any large blanket tax hike without input from those it would impact, no plans for a managed transition to the new fees, and no analysis on who is most likely to benefit or be burdened is likely to face real challenges with voters,” Alejandra Mejia Cunningham, the senior manager of building decarbonization for the NRDC, told me via email. “It is very important for tax-based policy proposals to be robust and thoroughly socialized."
I also talked to several Berkeley-based electrification supporters who voted no on Measure GG. Tom Graly, who chairs a local electrification working group, told me part of the reason the policy proved so controversial is that it singled out some of the city’s most beloved institutions, such as the Berkeley Bowl supermarket, a local chain, and the Berkeley Repertory Theater. The theater estimated the tax would cost it up to $69,000 per year, while converting off of gas would cost millions. “This well-intentioned ballot measure with its immediate implementation would be very harmful to our struggling organization,” Tom Parrish, the theater’s managing director said in a statement for the “No on GG” campaign.
Tahara based the tax on estimates for what’s called the “social cost of carbon,” or the projected economic damage that every additional ton of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere will cause. But the number Tahara chose was on the high end — more than double the number the Biden administration uses when it weighs the costs and benefits of new regulations on carbon. If passed, the tax would more than double the cost of using natural gas in large buildings. He said some national groups gave him feedback on the proposal, like phasing in the tax over time and building in more exemptions, which he might consider for a future version. But he and his partners on the measure wanted to preserve their core thesis, which was that climate damages are already happening and are unaccounted for.
“I think part of our responsibility as local activists is to put out new ideas, to push the status quo,” he said. “I don’t think there’s been a lot of that that’s been happening in the last couple years.”
In Tahara’s view, the measure failed because the opposition campaign had a lot more money, and because even though Berkeley is often called the birthplace of the electrify everything movement, there’s still a lot of people in town who are completely unaware of the harm natural gas causes to the climate and to public health. On that, Graly agreed. “There's a huge education gap,” he said. “People just don't think about hot water. They turn on the faucet and the water is hot, and they're happy.”
Initiative 2066 in Washington State was a wide-ranging proposal to both roll back existing policies and preempt future ones. It was so wide-ranging, in fact, that its opponents believe it’s illegal under the state’s “single subject” rule for ballot measures, and they plan to fight it in court.
If the measure stands, it will invalidate the state’s nation-leading residential and commercial energy codes that strongly incentivize builders to forego gas hookups. It will remove a provision in state statute that requires Washington’s energy codes to gradually tighten toward zero-emissions new construction by 2031. It will repeal key parts of a law the state legislature passed earlier this year that require Washington’s biggest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to consider alternatives to replacing aging gas infrastructure or building new gas pipelines. And it will ban cities and towns from passing any local ordinances that “prohibit, penalize, or discourage” the use of gas in buildings.
The initiative was one of four put on the ballot by Let’s Go Washington, a group bankrolled by hedge fund manager and multimillionaire Brian Heywood, and had the Building Industry Association of Washington as its primary sponsor, alongside a number of other pro-gas, pro-business, and realty groups.
There’s no doubt 2066 is a significant setback in the state’s progress toward cutting carbon emissions. But when I asked climate advocates in Washington how they were interpreting the outcome, they pointed to a handful of reasons why they weren’t too concerned about public sentiment around decarbonization.
First, the vote was incredibly close, with just over 51% of voters checking “yes.” Second, another initiative Let’s Go Washington put on the ballot — 2117, which would have repealed the state’s big umbrella climate law that puts a declining cap on emissions — unambiguously failed, with 62% voting “no.” Third, they argue the split reflects confusion about what 2066 would do.
The “yes on 2066” campaign sold it as a measure to “protect energy choice” and “stop the gas ban,” warning that otherwise utility rates would increase and the state would force homeowners to pay tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit their homes. There are kernels of truth to the messaging — the state’s building codes seriously limit developers’ ability to put gas hookups in new construction without outright banning them. The new law affecting Puget Sound Energy is primarily a planning policy that requires the utility to consider alternatives to gas infrastructure, but it doesn’t force anyone to get off gas, and regulators are likely to approve only those alternatives that save ratepayers money.
“I think voters were responding to a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering,” said Leah Missik, the Washington deputy policy director for Climate Solutions, a regional nonprofit that helped spearhead the “no on 2066” campaign. She emphasized that it was put on the ballot in July, giving groups like hers only a few months to drum up their response to it, whereas they knew about 2117 for over a year, and thus had a lot more time to educate voters on what that initiative would do.
The confusion probably also wasn’t helped by the fact that the policies 2066 repealed were incredibly wonky, dealing with building codes and utility planning.
“I think that given all of those headwinds, the fact that about half of Washingtonians still voted against initiative 2066 is a testament to how popular climate action is in the state,” Emily Moore, the director of the climate and energy program at the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, told me.
Sightline didn’t campaign for or against the measure, but Moore had some takeaways from the vote. She said environmental groups spent a lot of their energy countering the narrative that there was a gas ban, which may have inadvertently reinforced the idea. One lesson for the future might be to put more emphasis on the benefits of electrification, like the fact that heat pumps provide both heating and cooling and half of the state doesn’t currently have air conditioning. The other anti-climate measure, 2117, may have failed so decisively because Washington’s emission cap policy has raised more then $2 billion in funding for projects that people are already seeing the benefits of, like free transit passes.
“Likely a no vote on that one felt like getting to keep good things,” she told me. “I think we have more to do to show that getting off of gas means getting good things too.”
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Removing the subsidies would be bad enough, but the chaos it would cause in the market is way worse.
In their efforts to persuade Republicans in Congress not to throw wind and solar off a tax credit cliff, clean energy advocates have sometimes made what would appear to be a counterproductive argument: They’ve emphasized that renewables are cheap and easily obtainable.
Take this statement published by Advanced Energy United over the weekend: “By effectively removing tax credits for some of the most affordable and easy-to-build energy resources, Congress is all but guaranteeing that consumers will be burdened with paying more for a less reliable electric grid.”
If I were a fiscal hawk, a fossil fuel lobbyist, or even an average non-climate specialist, I’d take this as further evidence that renewables don’t need tax credits. The problem is that there’s a lot more nuance to the “cheapness” of renewables than snappy statements like this convey.
“Renewables are cheap and they’ve gotten cheaper, but that doesn’t mean they are always the cheapest thing, unsubsidized,” Robbie Orvis, the senior director of modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, told me back in May at the start of the reconciliation process. Natural gas is still competitive with renewables in a lot of markets — either where it’s less windy or sunny, where natural gas is particularly cheap, or where there are transmission constraints, for example.
Just because natural gas plants might be cheaper to build in those places, however, doesn’t mean they will save customers money in the long run. Utilities pass fuel costs through to customers, and fuel costs can swing dramatically. That’s what happened in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe swore off Russian gas, and the U.S. rushed to fill the supply gap, spiking U.S. natural gas prices and contributing to the largest annual increase in residential electricity spending in decades. Winter storms can also reduce natural gas production, causing prices to shoot up. Wind and solar, of course, do not use conventional fuels. The biggest factor influencing the price of power from renewables is the up-front cost of building them.
That’s not the only benefit that’s not reflected in the price tags of these resources. The Biden administration and previous Congress supported tax credits for wind and solar to achieve the policy goal of reducing planet-warming emissions and pollution that endangers human health. But Orvis argued you don’t even need to talk about climate change or the environment to justify the tax credits.
“We’re not saying let’s go tomorrow to wind, water, and solar,” Orvis said. “We’re saying these bring a lot of benefitsonto the system, and so more of them delivers more of those benefits, and incentives are a good way to do that.” Another benefit Orvis mentioned is energy security — because again, wind and solar don’t rely on globally-traded fuels, which means they’re not subject to the actions of potentially adversarial governments.
Orvis’ colleague, Mike O’Boyle, also raised the point that fossil fuels receive subsidies, too, both inside and outside the tax code. There’s the “intangible drilling costs” deduction, allowing companies to deduct most costs associated with drilling, like labor and site preparation. Smaller producers can also take a “depletion deduction” as they draw down their oil or gas resources. Oil and gas developers also benefit from low royalty rates for drilling on public lands, and frequently evade responsibility to clean up abandoned wells. “I think in many ways, these incentives level the playing field,” O’Boyle said.
When I reached out to some of the clean energy trade groups trying to negotiate a better deal in Trump’s tax bill, many stressed that they were most worried about upending existing deals and were not, in fact, calling for wind and solar to be subsidized indefinitely. “The primary issue here is about the chaos this bill will cause by ripping away current policy overnight,” Abigail Ross Hopper, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, told me by text message.
The latest version of the bill, introduced late Friday night, would require projects to start construction by 2027 and come online by 2028 to get any credit at all. Projects would also be subject to convoluted foreign sourcing rules that will make them more difficult, if not impossible, to finance. Those that fail the foreign sourcing test would also be taxed.
Harry Godfrey, managing director for Advanced Energy United, emphasized the need for “an orderly phase-out on which businesses can follow through on sound investments that they’ve already made.” The group supports an amendment introduced by Senators Joni Ernst, Lisa Murkowski, and Chuck Grassley on Monday that would phase down the tax credit over the next two years and safe harbor any project that starts construction during that period to enable them to claim the credit regardless of when they begin operating.
“Without these changes, the bill as drafted will retroactively change tax policy on projects in active development and construction, stranding billions in private investment, killing tens of thousands of jobs, and shrinking the supply of new generation precisely when we need it the most,” Advanced Energy United posted on social media.
In the near term, wind and solar may not need tax credits to win over natural gas. Energy demand is rising rapidly, and natural gas turbines are in short supply. Wind and solar may get built simply because they can be deployed more quickly. But without the tax credits, whatever does get built is going to be more expensive, experts say. Trade groups and clean energy experts have also warned that upending the clean energy pipeline will mean ceding the race for AI and advanced manufacturing to China.
Godfrey compared the reconciliation bill’s rapid termination of tax credits to puncturing the hull of a ship making a cross-ocean voyage. You’ll either need a big fix, or a new ship, but “the delay will mean we’re not getting electrons on to the grid as quickly as we need, and the company that was counting on that first ship is left in dire straits, or worse.”
A new subsidy for metallurgical coal won’t help Trump’s energy dominance agenda, but it would help India and China.
Crammed into the Senate’s reconciliation bill alongside more attention-grabbing measures that could cripple the renewables industry in the U.S. is a new provision to amend the Inflation Reduction Act to support metallurgical coal, allowing producers to claim the advanced manufacturing tax credit through 2029. That extension alone could be worth up to $150 million a year for the “beautiful clean coal” industry (as President Trump likes to call it), according to one lobbyist following the bill.
Putting aside the perversity of using a tax credit from a climate change bill to support coal, the provision is a strange one. The Trump administration has made support for coal one of the centerpieces of its “energy dominance” strategy, ordering coal-fired power plants to stay open and issuing a raft of executive orders to bolster the industry. President Trump at one point even suggested that the elite law firms that have signed settlements with the White House over alleged political favoritism could take on coal clients pro bono.
But metallurgical coal is not used for electricity generation, it’s used for steel-making. Moreover, most of the metallurgical coal the U.S. produces gets exported overseas. In other words, cheaper metallurgical coal would do nothing for American energy dominance, but it would help other countries pump up their production of steel, which would then compete with American producers.
The new provision “has American taxpayers pay to send metallurgical coal to China so they can make more dirty steel and dump it on the global market,” Jane Flegal, the former senior director for industrial emissions in the Biden White House, told me.
The U.S. produced 67 million short tons of metallurgical coal in 2023, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, more than three-quarters of which was shipped abroad. Looking at more recent EIA data, the U.S. exported 57 million tons of metallurgical coal through the first nine months of 2024. The largest recipient was India, the final destination for over 10 million short tons of U.S. metallurgical coal, with almost 9 million going to China. Almost 7 million short tons were exported to Brazil, and over 5 million to the Netherlands.
“Metallurgical coal accounts for approximately 10% of U.S. coal output, and nearly all of it is exported. Thermal coal produced in the United States, by contrast, mostly is consumed domestically,”according to the EIA.
The tax credit comes at a trying time for the metallurgical coal sector. After export prices spiked at $344 per short ton in the second quarter of 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (much of Ukraine’s metallurgical coal production occurs in one of its most hotly contested regions), prices fell to $145 at the end of 2024, according to EIA data.
In their most recent quarterly reports, a number of major metallurgical coal producers told investors they wanted to reduce costs “as the industry awaits a reversal of the currently weak metallurgical coal market,” according to S&P Global Commodities Insights, citing low global demand for steel and economic uncertainty.
There was “not a whisper” of the provision before the Senate’s bill was released, according to the lobbyist, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “No one had any inkling this was coming,” they told me.
But it’s been a pleasant surprise to the metallurgical coal industry and its investors.
Alabama-based Warrior Met Coal, which exports nearly all the coal it produces, reported a loss in the first quarter of 2025,blaming “the combination of broad economic uncertainty around global trade, seasonal demand weakness, and ample spot supply is expected to result in continued pressure on steelmaking coal prices.” Its shares were up almost 6% in afternoon trading Monday.
Tennessee-based Alpha Metallurgical Resources reported a $34 million first quarter loss in May, citing “poor market conditions and economic uncertainty caused by shifting tariff and trade policies,” and said it planned to reduce capital expenditures from its previous forecast. Its shares were up almost 7%.
While environmentalists have kept a hawk’s eye on the hefty donations from the oil and gas industry to Trump and other Republicans’ campaign coffers, it appears that the coal industry is the fossil fuel sector getting specific special treatment, despite being far, far smaller. The largest coal companies are worth a few billion dollars; the largest oil and gas companies are worth a few hundred billion.
But coal is very important to a few states — and very important to Donald Trump.
The bituminous coal that has metallurgical properties tends to be mined in Appalachia, with some of the major producers and exporters based in Tennessee and Alabama, or larger companies with mining operations in West Virginia.
One of those, Alliance Resource Partners, shipped almost 6 million tons of coal overseas. Its chief executive, Joseph Craft, andhis wife, Kelly, the former ambassador to the United Nations, are generous Republican donors. Craft was a guest at the White House during the signing ceremony for the coal executive orders.
Representatives of Warrior, Alpha Metallurgical, and Alliance Resources did not respond to a requests for comment.
While coal companies and their employees tend to be loyal Republican donors, the relative small size of the industry puts its financial clout well south of the oil and gas industry, where a single donor like Continental Resources’s Harold Hamm can give over $4 million and the sector as a whole can donate $75 million. This suggests that Trump and the Senate’s attachment to coal has more to do with coal’s specific regional clout, or even the aesthetics of coal mining and burning compared to solar panels and wind turbines.
After all, anyone can donate money, but in Trump’s Washington, only one resource can be beautiful and clean.
Two former Department of Energy staffers argue from experience that severe foreign entity restrictions aren’t the way to reshore America’s clean energy supply chain.
The latest version of Congress’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” claims to be tough on China. Instead, it penalizes American energy developers and hands China the keys to dominate 21st century energy supply chains and energy-intensive industries like AI.
Republicans are on the verge of enacting a convoluted maze of “foreign entity” restrictions and penalties on U.S. manufacturers and energy companies in the name of excising China from U.S. energy supply chains. We share this goal to end U.S. reliance on Chinese minerals and manufacturing. While at the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House, we worked on numerous efforts to combat China’s grip on energy supply chains. That included developing tough, nuanced and, importantly, workable rules to restrict tax credit eligibility for electric vehicles made using materials from China or Chinese entities — rules that quickly began to shift supply chains away from China and toward the U.S. and our allies.
That experience tells us that the rules in the Republican bill will have the opposite effect. In reality, they will make it much more difficult for U.S. companies to move supply chains away from Chinese control. The GOP’s proposed restrictions require every developer of a critical minerals project, advanced manufacturing facility, or clean energy power plant to sift through their supply chains and contracts for any relationship with a Chinese (or Russian, Iranian, or North Korean) entity. Using a Chinese technology license, or too many subcomponents, or materials produced in China — even if there are few or no alternatives — would be enough to render a company ineligible for the very incentives they need to finance and build new U.S. energy production or manufacturing facilities.
This would put companies in the position of having to prove the absence of Chinese entanglements (and guarantee that there will be none in the future) to qualify for tax credits, an all but impossible task, particularly given the untested set of new rules. Huge portions of the supply chain have flowed through China for decades, including 65% of global lithium processing and 97% of solar wafer manufacturing. American companies are already working to distance themselves from Chinese expertise and components, but the complex, commingled nature of global supply chains and corporate business structures make it infeasible to flip the switch overnight.
On top of that, the latest version of the bill would impose a brand new tax on any new solar and wind projects that have too much foreign entity “assistance,” while providing the Treasury Secretary carte blanche for determining what that might be. The result: An impossible bind, whereby the very sectors that need the most support to disentangle from China are now the ones most penalized by the new Republican “foreign entity” restrictions.
The fact is that China is ahead, not behind, in many energy sectors, and America desperately needs help playing catch-up. Ford’s CEO has called Chinese battery and electric vehicle technologies “an existential threat” to U.S. automaking. In energy supply chains for nuclear, solar, batteries, and critical minerals, China is not merely producing cheap knockoffs of American inventions, it is churning outcutting-edge battery chemistries, advancedmanufacturing processes, and high-speedcharging systems, all at lower cost. And at least until the Inflation Reduction Act enacted incentives for U.S. manufacturing and deployment, the gap between the U.S. and China waswidening.
These untested foreign entity rules will widen that gap once more. Since the start of the year, developers have abandoned more than $14 billion in domestic clean energy deployment and manufacturing projects, citing the uncertain tariff and tax policy environment, and that was before the new tax on solar and wind. New analysis from Energy Innovation finds that the latest version of the bill would reduce U.S. generation capacity by 300 gigawatts over the next decade — multiple times what we will need to power new data centers for artificial intelligence. Stopping clean energy projects in their tracks is also likely to trigger an energy price shock by constraining the very energy technologies that can be built most quickly. In the end we will cede not only our supply chains to China, but also our competitive edge in the race for AI and manufacturing dominance.
Fortunately, we have all the ingredients in this country already to achieve energy leadership. The U.S. boasts deep capital markets, a highly skilled manufacturing and construction workforce, a strong consumer economy driving demand, and, in spite of recent attacks, the world’s greatest universities and national labs. We simply need policy to provide a workable path for companies to invest with certainty, bring factories back to the United States, hire American workers, and learn to produce these technologies at scale.
With the Inflation Reduction Act’s domestic production incentives and supply chain restrictions, hundreds of companies stepped up over the past few years and made that bet, pouring billions of dollars into American supply chains. Should they be enacted, the reconciliation bill’s foreign entity rules would slam the brakes on all that activity, playing right into China’s hands.
There is a way to apply a set of carefully crafted restrictions to wean us off Chinese supply chains, but we cannot afford to saddle American energy with new taxes and red tape. If we scatter rakes across the floor for companies to step on, they will just throw up their hands and send their investments overseas, leaving us more reliant on China than before.