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Of all the imaginative ways to die in New York City — getting pushed in front of a subway car, flattened by a falling a/c unit, clocked by an exploding manhole cover, etc. — perhaps the unlikeliest is Death By Toxic Black Mold.
That hasn’t stopped me from thinking about it ... all the time. Every New Yorker seems to know someone who’s discovered the inky starbursts in their building and had months of migraines, runny noses, and sore throats snap into horrible clarity. Toxic black mold. With a name like that, how could you not be terrified?
Fungi have been a little more top-of-mind lately, though, because they’re everywhere.
I mean that beyond the literal sense that “fungi are everywhere,” which they also are: We’ve found them in Antarctica, gnawing through Shackleton and Scott’s century-old huts; at the bottom of the ocean, in multi-million-year-old mud; on antiseptically clean hospital walls; and at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Naturally, they survive “surprisingly well” in space.
Over the past decade or so, fungi have begun to infest our stories as well. This is particularly true of horror and sci-fi, including HBO’s recent The Last of Us adaptation, which expands on the 2013 game’s fungal zombie backstory. In 2017, Star Trek: Discovery introduced the idea that the whole universe is connected by mycelia, a concept explained to viewers by the fictional astromycologist Paul Stamets — not to be confused with Eldon Stammets, the mushroom-obsessed serial killer from season one of Hannibal (2013), nor the real mycologist Paul Stamets, after whom both characters were named (Bryan Fuller, a Stamets superfan, worked on both shows). Other memorable fungal sightings in fiction include Mike Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts (2014); multiple Jeff VanderMeers but perhaps most obviously Annihilation (2014, with a film adaptation in 2018); Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020); and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020) — though there are many more. Taking a full inventory, it can almost seem as if, over the course of about a decade, writers collectively realized fungi are the perfect monsters: efficient, unknowable, hungry.
On the one hand, of course. We’re repelled by mold and mushrooms for the same reason we’re disgusted by rats or insects: They are symbols of death, disease, and decay, a reminder that in the end, we’re nothing more than fleshy neighborhoods for “postmortem fungal communities.”
But if there is something primordial about our fungus revulsion, there is something obtuse about it, too. Our lives have been entangled with fungi’s for as long as we’ve been human. The oldest dental records ever studied, belonging to cannibalized 50,000-year-old Neanderthals, indicate ancient hominids ate “primitive penicillin,” possibly for the same medical purposes that we use the mold-derived antibiotic today. Otzi the Iceman was wearing Birch polypores on a leather thong around his neck when he died. Some (admittedly fringe) scientists even believe mushrooms were the spark that set our Homo erectus ancestors on their journey to the higher consciousness of Homo sapiens.
What, then, soured in our multi-millennia-long human-fungus relationship to make us — as mycologist David Arora puts it — the “fungophobic society” we are today? The medical community’s acceptance of germ theory, and our modern obsession with cleanliness, are components, surely.
There is another possibility, too: The closer we’ve looked at fungi, the stranger they reveal themselves to be, and the richer and more possible our wildest fictions become.
Mushrooms might seem to sprout abruptly and at random. But in truth, they’re just the visible fruiting body of a much larger subterranean organism. Great speculative fiction works much the same way: While a story can appear to have sprouted from nothing, it’s been fed, just below the surface, by a tangle of science, headlines, and current events.
In the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945, for example, fiction warped the horrors of nuclear science for films like Godzilla (1954), Them! (1954), and Tarantula (1955). And after the moon landing in 1969, Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Alien (1979) all wondered who else might be up there?
When it comes to mycology, though, science is still getting started. Fungi didn’t even become their own taxonomic kingdom until 1969; before then, scientists just thought they were really weird plants.
Westerners have long approached fungi with suspicion. “The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and colour never matched before … Death sprang also from the water-soaked earth,” Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in Sir Nigel (1905-06), using fungi as an ominous mood-setter. Edgar Allen Poe wasn’t a fan either: “Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior” of the House of Usher, he wrote in 1839, “hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves.” Folk explanations posited that mushrooms shot from the ground where lightning struck, and “a vast body of Victorian fairy lore connected mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills, and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland,” explains Mike Jay in The Public Domain Review.
Brits were especially revolted by the “pariahs of the plant world,” to the great disappointment of R.T. Rolfe, who penned a rousing 1925 defense titled Romance of the Fungal World. In Shakespeare’s day, it was questionable if mushrooms were even safely edible; “a hogg wont touch um,” warned Edmund Gayton in his 1695 Art of Longevity. Americans inherited this wariness — “the general opinion [in the U.S. is] all forms of fungus growth are either poisonous or unwholesome,” observed one cookbook writer in 1899 — though many were beginning to come around by the late 19th century, taking cues from the more adventurous eaters of France. Not every culture has been quite so squeamish: mushrooms have long been cultivated in Asia; are a staple of Eastern European, African, and Slavic cuisines; and Indigenous groups throughout the Americas have likewise long enjoyed all that fungi have to offer.
The reevaluation of fungi in refined English society came about almost entirely by accident, via the fortuitous contamination of Alexander Fleming’s staphylococci cultures by the genus Penicillium in 1928. Still, it wouldn’t be until the second half of the 20th century when fungus science really started to get weird — even weirder, you might say, than fiction.
Because the fungi, it appeared, were talking to each other.
When ecologist Suzanne Simard captured the public imagination by describing in a 1997 issue of Nature how trees use webs of underground fungi to communicate with each other, networks — conceptually — were already having a moment. The internet, and the “network of cables and routers” that comprised it, had been around since the 1970s, mycologist Merlin Sheldrake explains in Entangled Life, but when the World Wide Web became available to users in 1991, network science started informing everything from epidemiology to neuroscience. Nature tapped into this buzz by coining the “Wood Wide Web” on its cover to describe Simard’s research, and in doing so, mesmerizingly blurred science-fiction, tech, and biology.
The oft-quoted theory of the Wood Wide Web suggests that fungal threads called mycelium colonize root systems of forest trees, and in doing so, facilitate the exchange of defense signals and other “wisdom” by moving nutrients between plants. “Mother” trees, for example, can supposedly nurture samplings in their communities by shipping excess carbon via fungi. Reviewer Philip Ball went as far as to marvel in Prospect, after reading an account of these and other systems in Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, that “fungi force us to reconsider what intelligence even means.” (Sheldrake’s enthusiasm for the Wood Wide Web is more restrained; he uses it disparagingly to illustrate “plant-centrism in action”).
Ball wasn’t the only one awed, though. References to the “alien language” of fungi began popping up everywhere in popular science writing, as McMaster University’s Derek Woods has observed. Paul Stamets’ Mycelium Running helped bring Simard’s research to a more general audience in 2005, while Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (2015), and Simard’s own Finding the Mother Tree (2021) followed — not to mention “dozens of imitative articles,” TED talks, documentaries, and offshoot studies. As recently as last year, The Guardian was trumpeting that “Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’.”
Some scientists have since raised doubts about the Wood Wide Web, characterizing the research as potentially “overblown” and “unproven" — but it’s a good story, isn’t it? Not to mention a rich jumping-off point for writers who were paying attention to the headlines. One can trace a line directly from Simard’s research, through Stamets’ amplification, straight to Bryan Fuller’s mycelium plane in Star Trek: Discovery.
Yet the phenomenon, as described, sounds far more Edenic than the terrifying, often sentient, man-eating, mind-controlling, city-conquering fungi that have overwhelmingly appeared in modern sci-fi and horror. Is today’s fungal antagonist just a product of those centuries of folk superstitions? Or is something else in the zeitgeist making our skin crawl?
Let’s return, for a moment, to the ways I’ve imagined dying in New York City.
Though the chances of being taken out by a subway or an unsecured a/c unit are slim, they have, tragically, actually happened. But when you start to look into Deaths by Toxic Black Mold, the picture gets a lot murkier.
Few people, verging on none, have definitively died of black mold exposure. You wouldn’t know that, though, from the headlines of the early aughts, which are peppered with celebrity lawsuits over mold, culminating in TMZ tying the mysterious 2009 and 2010 deaths of Clueless actress Brittany Murphy and her husband to mold inhalation (ultimately disproven by their autopsies).
But mold hysteria didn’t originate in Beverly Hills. It comes from Ohio. In the mid ’90s, 12 babies in Cleveland died of lung hemorrhaging and the main suspect was an outbreak of black mold allegedly brought on by unusually heavy rains. CDC investigators found all of the afflicted infants lived in homes with bad water damage, and, in many cases, those homes also had Stachybotrys, a moisture-loving black mold. Soon, stories linking the fungus to the deaths were making national news.
Reevaluations of the outbreak later cast doubt on the correlation. In 1999, the CDC walked back its initial assessment, citing “serious shortcomings in the collection, analysis, and reporting of data.” More skepticism followed: If Stachybotrys is common wherever there is water-damaged wood, why were only babies in the Cleveland area being affected? And how do you explain that some of the babies lived in homes where no Stachybotrys was ever found?
Still, the story stuck, and the link between black mold and a whole host of health problems, including many that remain completely unproven, took root in the public consciousness. Soon, everyone was suing over black mold. “A single insurance company handled 12 cases in 1999,” mycologist Nicholas Money writes in Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores; by 2001, “the company fielded more than 10,000 claims.” The Washington Post likewise observed in 2013 that “experts say mold is not more prevalent these days; instead, we are more aware of it.”
Hypochondriacs eyeing mildew spots on their bathroom ceilings weren’t the only ones reading about deadly mold, of course. Writers were, too. And now fungi had two strikes against them: They possessed a weird alien intelligence and they were dangerous.
Then came the possibility they could control our minds.
The parasitic fungal genus Ophiocordyceps is at least 48 million years old. It has likely survived as long as it has because of its stranger-than-fiction method of propagating: Ophiocordyceps spores infect an ant and “hijack” its brain, forcing it to abandon its colony, climb a high leaf, and affix itself there with a bite. The ant then dies, still clinging to the leaf with its jaws, and the fungus sprouts out of its body, raining spores down onto other unlucky ants.
Humans turning into, or being consumed alive by, fungi had long fascinated writers (see: “The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson from 1907, or Stephen King’s 1973 “Gray Matter”). But with our increased cultural awareness of Ophiocordyceps in the 21st century, fungal mind control went from being a revolting body horror trope to a plausible sci-fi starting point. Neil Druckmann, the creative director of The Last of Us, has said he learned about the fungus from a 2008 episode of BBC’s Planet Earth, and he went on to use it as the basis for the zombies in his 2013 video game.
Though Druckmann was an early adopter of Ophiocordyceps, the fungus didn’t exactly remain obscure. “Zombie fungi are not known to use humans as hosts. At least yet,” The Columbus Dispatch wrote in 2014 (and filed, cryptically, in its “how to” section). The X-Men comics introduced “Cordyceps Jones,” a “talking parasitic fungal spore, intergalactic casino proprietor, and notorious crime boss,” as a new villain in 2021. The New York Times even saw fit to inform its readers, “After This Fungus Turns Ants Into Zombies, Their Bodies Explode.” Try scrolling past that.
Through this process of scientific discoveries, eye-catching headlines, and a little exaggeration, it took only a handful of decades for fungi to make the leap from “pariahs of the plant world” to the perfect horror villain. The climate crisis will likely be a further creative accelerant. Thanks to intensified hurricanes and flooding, mold will be an ongoing issue in homes nationwide. Plus, fungi are nothing if not survivors, and some are already pushing past the climatological boundaries — and antifungals — that used to contain them.
Even The Last of Us added an explanation in the HBO adaption that the warming planet is what allowed Ophiocordyceps to evolve and make the leap from cooler-bodied insects to comparatively hot humans. The good news is, mycologists say this is all but impossible in real life due to the vast biological differences between humans and ants; the bad news is, a deadly fungal pandemic is absolutely possible and, shocker, experts say we’re not at all prepared for it.
At least, not institutionally. Fiction has already hashed out how Fauna vs. Funga could go in a hundred different ways. Sometimes, the fungus comes to us from outer space. Sometimes, it possesses alien sentience; other times, it just represents the indifferent efficiency of nature. Sometimes, it takes over our minds and turns us against each other. Sometimes, it brings us together to fight back.
Fiction is also beginning to wonder if those villainous fungi might just be our friends. Think of those universe-binding spores that connect us in Star Trek, or the fungal-facilitated hivemind in a popular Hugo Award-winning series, which likewise eludes a straightforward antagonist narrative. It only makes sense: If spores are intelligent colonizers, well, so are we. Maybe the next step will be to put our heads — or at least, our hyphae and neurons — together.
Because while science reveals fungi to be weirder by the day, it also further reinforces that we can’t live without them. They nourish us, heal us, relieve us, protect us, and one day, maybe, will save us.
And oh, how they entertain us.
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On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”