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From the source to the registers.
The term “heat pump” refers to any system that can extract heat from a colder space and transfer it to a warmer one. For example, refrigerators use heat pumps to remove heat from inside the fridge and expel it into your kitchen. Air conditioners use heat pumps to remove heat from inside the house and dump it outside. In this guide, the phrase “heat pump” refers specifically to HVAC equipment that is capable of both heating
and cooling the air inside a home. In other words, we’re talking about air conditioners that can also run in reverse, pulling heat from outside on a winter day and pumping it inside.
We’ve created this guide because when it comes to getting off fossil fuels, it does matter what you replace them with. Climate advocates tout electric heat pumps because they can create two to three times more heat per unit of energy than other heating equipment. Electric resistance heating, by contrast, is extremely wasteful, and if people start installing those systems en masse, that could actually increase emissions in the near term and make it more difficult to decarbonize the economy in the long term. By getting a heat pump, you won’t just be cutting emissions, you’ll be reducing the cost of cleaning up the electric grid because we’ll need less electricity overall.
That said, a poorly designed or installed system can negate many of the benefits that heat pumps have to offer. Whether you’re reading because you want to cut emissions, or save money on energy, or take advantage of the steady, quiet comfort heat pumps provide, it’s essential to do your homework and find a good contractor to work with. In this guide, we’ll cover how to know when it’s the right time to get heat pumps, the basics of understanding what your options are, common misconceptions about heat pumps, how to find and vet contractors, and more.
Larry Waters is the founder and president of Electrify My Home, a heating and air conditioning contractor in Northern California that specializes in heat pumps. Waters has worked in the HVAC industry for more than 40 years.
D.R. Richardson is the co-founder of Elephant Energy, a Boulder, Colorado-based startup that helps homeowners in Colorado and Massachusetts electrify by using building science and proprietary software to ensure good system design, and by managing all aspects of the project.
Jake Marinis the senior emerging opportunities manager for VEIC, a clean energy nonprofit that administers Vermont and D.C.’s energy efficiency programs among other decarbonization work across the country. Marin ran VEIC’s HVAC program for nearly 8 years and was recently given a “Champion of Energy Efficiency” award for his pioneering work bringing heat pumps to Vermont.
There are many, many kinds of electric heat pumps used for space heating and cooling. At a high level, there are two main categories that homeowners can typically choose from:
Within each of these are a handful of installation options:
The above designs aren’t mutually exclusive. You can install a system that’s fully ducted, fully ductless, or a combination of both. You can also combine a heat pump system with a fuel-burning furnace or boiler, known as a dual-fuel system. If aesthetics are important to you, there are also companies like Quilt that offer versions that can better integrate into the look of your home.
“Ductwork in unfinished space is easy. Ductwork in finished space is so expensive and hard that we typically don't recommend it,” said Richardson.
Heat pumps also come in models with different “speeds” or “stages”:
There are also some technical specifications to be aware of, such as seasonal efficiency ratings:
The highest rated SEER2 device may have a lower HSPF2 rating, while the highest rated HSPF2 device may have a lower SEER2 rating.
Finally, heat pumps also come in many different sizes. Having a properly sized system is one of the most important factors for ensuring your heat pumps run efficiently and last a long time.
A good contractor will be able to walk you through different system designs and equipment options to find the answer that’s best suited to your house, your goals, and your budget.
“There’s a lot of companies out there that offer just what they have in the catalog and their salespeople can’t sell anything outside of that,” Waters told me. “That means the customer is going to get matched with that cookie cutter option if they go with that company. So how to choose a contractor is one of the most important things.”
Many people are used to setting their HVAC systems to different temperatures at different times of day — one temp for the morning and evening, another for when they leave for work, and another for bedtime. This makes sense with many furnaces and air conditioners because they’re usually designed to cycle on, blast hot or cold air at full capacity until they achieve the temperature you want, and then turn off, so turning down the system when you’re not home can save a lot of energy. But the most efficient “variable speed” heat pumps work differently — they use a lot of energy to reach a certain temperature, but once they hit it, they sip small amounts of energy to maintain it. Experts say a “set it and forget it” approach will give you the most efficient performance and the most consistent energy bills.
“Don’t worry about the number,” says Marin. “Just find your comfortable temperature, and then leave it alone, forget it’s even there.”
This topic can be divisive among HVAC experts, but in most of the continental U.S., you should be able to find a heat pump solution that will heat your home efficiently on the coldest winter days. The key is that the system has to be sized correctly. Richardson’s company, Elephant Energy, works in Colorado, where he says they’ve had two years in a row with days that got down to -13 degrees Fahrenheit, “and our fleet of hundreds of heat pumps have cranked out heat to keep homes nice and warm on those coldest days.”
There still may be scenarios where you
want to keep your furnace as a back-up, even if it’s not strictly necessary.
If you’re switching from fuel oil, propane, or electric resistance heating, you’re pretty much guaranteed to save money on your bills with heat pumps. But if you’re switching from natural gas, it really depends on where you live.
Richardson says that for a lot of his customers in Colorado, making the switch from gas to inverter heat pumps is cost neutral — they end up paying a bit more for heating in the winter but less for cooling in the summer, since the heat pump is often more efficient than whatever air conditioning they were replacing. At the same time, those who don't have air conditioning to start with could end up paying a bit more year-round.
Do you…
Short answer: Hold off on a heat pump, invest in weatherization.
Long answer: You may have arrived at this guide because you’re interested in decarbonizing your home, but if you have a relatively new heating and/or cooling system, it could actually be worse, emissions-wise, to replace it, due to the embedded carbon that went into manufacturing that equipment. Unless you’re really desperate to replace your existing system for comfort or financial reasons (if you have electric resistance heaters, for example, switching to heat pumps could save you a lot of money, since they use about a third of the electricity), we recommend getting a bit more life out of it first.
In the meantime, put your enthusiasm for decarbonization into making your home more efficient. Insulating and air sealing your home before you get heat pumps will help you save money in the near term and get you the best results from heat pumps later on.
Short answer: Consider a dual fuel system
Long answer: If you really need a new air conditioning system but your heater still has a lot of life left in it, consider installing a heat pump to work alongside your existing furnace or boiler. That way, you’ll get efficient cooling capacity that will save you money in the summer, and you’ll also be able to cut down on your fossil fuel consumption in the winter. You can set the heat pump to warm your home until it gets down to a certain temperature outside, at which point your furnace or boiler will kick in. (Many heat pump models can operate in very cold temperatures, so having a backup heating system like this is not necessary, but it may be a good intermediate step in certain cases.)
Short answer: It’s the perfect time to think about heat pumps!
Long answer: HVAC equipment typically lasts for 15 to 20 years, so 10 years is probably the earliest you would want to start thinking about a replacement. It’s probably safe to wait a few years longer, but you definitely don’t want to wait until your existing system breaks to start your heat pump journey. A heat pump retrofit can be a months-long process, from finding contractors, to evaluating quotes, to refining your plan, to getting permits and scheduling the work. If you’re in an emergency situation where your boiler broke and you really need heat, you could be forced to settle for a less-than-ideal solution. At the very least, start your research now and consider weatherization upgrades.
Short answer: Get a mini-split!
Long answer: Ductless mini-split heat pumps are a no-brainer to provide heating and cooling to a single room or zone. They can be very affordable — and in some cases free — with rebates and tax credits. If you want to retrofit the rest of your home to use heat pumps down the line, this will help you get familiar with the technology and will not preclude you from adding more later — though it is helpful to tell your contractor that now so they can take it into account.
Heat pumps can be a major investment. If you just want to add heating or cooling capacity to one or two rooms, it can cost $5,000 to $7,000 per room, on average, before incentives, Richardson told me. A whole-home solution averages $20,000 to $30,000 before incentives, but depending on the home and the system design can go much higher.
Do you have some rooms that are hotter in the summer or colder in the winter than others and you want to make your home more comfortable overall? Or is your goal to get better air filtration and ventilation? Or do you simply want to get off fossil fuels? It will be helpful to think through what you want to achieve and communicate that to your contractor so they can take that into account when they design your system.
The federal government offers a 30% tax credit for heat pumps, up to $2,000, not including labor, for certain energy efficient models. (Note that you can only get the full tax credit if you have $2,000 or more in tax liability the year you install the heat pumps.) The credit can’t be rolled over to the next tax year, but you can claim it in multiple years. Your state energy office, city, or utility may offer additional tax credits or rebates.
It’s important to learn about what’s available in your area before reaching out to contractors because some rebate programs require you to work only with approved partners. Also, the contractors you reach out to might not always be up to date on the latest incentive programs, so it’s a good idea to do some independent research and make sure you find someone who knows how to help you take advantage. There is, unfortunately, not yet any single directory where you can enter your zip code and find out about every possible rebate opportunity everywhere in the country, so it’s best to check multiple sources of information:
As with all home renovation projects, we strongly recommend getting at least threequotes from different contractors.
Heat pumps are common in some parts of the country, but in others it might be difficult to find a contractor who really knows their stuff. Dip your toes in a heat pump Reddit forum and you’ll find scores of homeowners asking what to do after a contractor told them that heat pumps don’t work and they should just stick with gas. Here are a few strategies for finding high quality heat pump contractors, in order of what we recommend:
Finding the right contractor is probably the most important decision you’ll make in this entire process, and it’s not uncommon to get quotes with wildly different recommendations. Here are some questions you can ask to help you get a sense of who really knows what they are talking about and is willing to go the whole nine yards to make sure you get a properly designed system:
Manual J is a formula that helps a contractor identify the right size HVAC system for your home. It requires taking detailed measurements throughout the building, inspecting your home’s insulation and other elements that will affect airflow and heat retention, and performing tests such as the “blower door” to assess how leaky your building’s envelope is. If you’re interested in using your ductwork or installing new ductwork, they should also perform a “Manual D” calculation. Waters told me that despite these calculations being industry standards, very few contractors actually go through the trouble of doing them. “What this does, it tells us exactly what size system I need for heating and cooling, and exactly how much air goes into each room,” he said.
Richards agreed, adding that you may want to ask what technology they use to size the system. “You need somebody who has a technology-driven tool that can actually measure the heating and cooling requirements of your home,” he says. “Are you doing a true Manual J, or are you sort of sticking your finger up in the air?”
If your contractor only works with one brand of equipment, you’re more likely to get a solution that’s convenient for them rather than one that’s custom designed for you.
Waters told me the registers — the vents that release air into a given room — are critical for occupant comfort. If your existing ductwork is designed to distribute air from a furnace, your registers may be designed to push air into the middle of the room. But with heat pumps, you want the air either pushed up toward the ceiling if the vents are down low or across the ceiling if they are up high, so that the house doesn’t feel drafty and you get proper circulation.
If you’re starting with heat pumps but you eventually want to electrify your stove, your clothes dryer, or your car, your home may need an electric panel upgrade or an electric service upgrade from the utility. What you don’t want is to put in heat pumps that eat up the rest of your home’s capacity and then have to deal with pricey upgrades down the line.
The Building Performance Institute and North American Technician Excellence are two organizations that train and certify contractors, auditors, and technicians in the latest building science and best practices. A certification doesn’t guarantee you’ve found the right contractor — it could mean they know a lot about installing heat pumps but still don’t know much about the models that work in the coldest climates, for instance. But it’s a helpful data point that shows they are investing in training.
After you’ve found a contractor or company to work with, settled on a system design, and secured financing, your installer is going to need to secure permits for the work. Then you’ll need to schedule the installation, which, depending on how busy your contractor is, can take several weeks to several months. The actual work should take one to three days, depending on how complicated it is.
Also — talk to your contractor about maintenance. Be sure to clean the filters regularly and do anything else they recommend to get the best performance and longest life out of your equipment.
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“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” contends Johannes Ackva of Founder Pledge.
Johannes Ackva likes a contrarian bet. Back in 2020, when he launched the climate program at Founders Pledge, a nonprofit that connects entrepreneurs to philanthropic causes, he sought out “surgical interventions” to support technologies that didn’t already enjoy the widespread popularity of wind turbines and solar panels, such as advanced nuclear reactors and direct air carbon capture.
By late 2023, however, the Biden administration’s legislative sweep was directing billions to the very range of technologies Ackva previously saw as neglected. So he turned his attention to shoring up those political wins.
The modern climate movement came into its own demanding that the world stop shrinking from inconvenient truths. But as polls increasingly showed the 2024 election trending toward Republicans, Ackva saw few funders propping up advocates with any influence over the GOP. Founders Pledge pumped millions into Deploy/US, a climate group where former Republican Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida served as the top adviser, which then distributed the money to upward of 30 right-leaning climate groups, including the American Conservation Coalition and the Evangelical Environmental Network.
The bipartisan gamble paid off. In April 2024, Founders Pledge received an anonymous $40 million donation to bolster its efforts. Now an anonymous donor has granted Founders Pledge’s climate fund another $50 million, Heatmap has learned.
Founders Pledge declined to say whether the money came from the same unnamed source or separate donors. But the influx of funding has “radically transformed our ability to make large grants,” Ackva told me, noting that the budget before 2024 came out to about $10 million per year.
“The word exponential is overused,” he said. “But that’s roughly the trajectory.”
Amid the so-called green freeze that followed the Trump administration’s rollback of climate funding, Founders Pledge has joined other climate philanthropies in stepping in to back projects that have lost money. When Breakthrough Energy shuttered its climate program in March, Founders Pledge gave $3.5 million to serve as the primary funding for the launch of the Innovation Initiative, started by former staff from the Bill Gates-backed nonprofit.
Ackva said his organization is looking to invest in climate efforts across the political spectrum. But Founders Pledge’s focus on right-of-center groups wasn’t an election-year gimmick.
“You can’t just divest from the eco-right after the election,” he said. “That’s not an authentic way to build a civil society ecosystem.”
As Republicans in Congress proceed with their gutting of green funding, including through Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, Ackva said it’s too soon to say whether the political strategy is paying off.
“If you think of grantmaking as making bets, some bets exceed others sooner, but that doesn’t make them bad bets,” Ackva told me. “Ultimately, philanthropy cannot define how a given policy goes. You can adjust the probabilities, maybe level the bets. But obviously it’s larger forces at play that shape how the One Big, Beautiful Bill gets made.”
The Senate may save or even expand parts of the IRA that support baseload power, e.g. nuclear and geothermal. But regardless, Ackva said, climate advocates are making a mistake training their focus so intently on the fate of this one law.
“It’s kind of the only thing that’s being discussed,” he said.
Meanwhile the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is set for reauthorization next fall. The Energy Act of 2020 is slated for renewal this year. And funding for the Department of Energy is up for debate as the White House now pushes to expand the Loan Programs Office’s lending authority for nuclear projects by $750 million.
“Those are things we would see as at least as important as the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ackva said.
Given those deadlines, Ackva said he expected other donors to press advocates for plans last year on how to sway Republicans toward more ambitious bills this Congress. But after former Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket last year, he said he’d heard from his grantees “that they were asked what they were going to do with a Harris trifecta.”
“Everyone was betting on Harris to win,” he said. “There’s a very strong ideological lean among climate funders to a degree that was frankly a little bit shocking.”
The partisan divide over climate wasn’t always so pronounced. In 2008, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, ran on a more ambitious decarbonization platform than what President Barack Obama proposed in the White House.
There are dueling — though not mutually exclusive — narratives about how the American climate movement over-indexed on one side of the political spectrum. Both stories start in 2010.
The version liberals and leftists will find familiar is one that blames fossil fuel megadonors such as Charles and David Koch for aggressively promoting climate denial among Republican lawmakers.
The version told by Ted Nordhaus, the founder of the Breakthrough Institute think tank where Ackva got his start years before joining Founders Pledge, starts with the failure of the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill to pass through Congress.
When the legislation “went up in flames in 2010,” Nordhaus told me, a bunch of environmental philanthropies hired Harvard professor Theda Skocpol to author a 145-page report on what triggered the blaze.
“The report concluded that the problem is we were too focused on the technocratic, inside-the-Beltway stuff,” Nordhaus summarized. “We needed to build political power so the next time there’s an opportunity to do big climate policy, we would have the political power to put a price on carbon.”
Out of that finding came what Nordhaus called the “two-pronged, boots-on-the-ground” era of the movement, which backed college campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and also efforts to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure such as the Keystone XL pipeline.
Reasonable people could debate the fiduciary merits of scrapping investments in natural gas companies or the value of blocking oil infrastructure whose cancellation spurred more shipments of crude on rail lines that face higher risk of a spill or explosion than pipelines. But once supporting fossil fuel divestment or opposing pipelines became the key litmus tests activists used to determine if a Democrat running for office took climate change seriously, the issue became more ideological.
“That made it impossible for any Democrat to become a moderate on climate, and made it impossible for any Republican to be a moderate on climate,” Nordhaus said. “The Republican Party has its own craziness and radicalism, but a bunch of that is negative polarization.”
To fund an effective “climate right,” Nordhaus said, Founders Pledge should seek out groups that don’t explicitly focus on the climate or environment at all.
“I’d be looking at which groups are all-in on U.S. natural gas, which has been the biggest driver of decarbonization in the U.S. over the last 15 years; which groups are all in and really doing work on nuclear; and which groups are doing work on permitting reform,” Nordhaus said. “That’s how you’re going to make progress with Republicans.”
I asked Ackva where the line would be for funding an eco right. Would Founders Pledge back groups that — like some green-leaning elements of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party or allies of France’s Marine Le Pen — support draconian restrictions on immigration in the name of reducing national emissions from the increased population?
“That would not be appropriate,” Ackva told me. “When we say we’re funding the eco right, like when we’re funding groups on the left or in the center, the things they are proposing don’t need to be exactly the things we will be prioritizing, but they need to be plausible, high-impact solutions.”
To Emmet Penney, a senior fellow focused on energy at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, it’s an obvious play. The green left that has long dominated climate policy debates “is premised on aggressive permitting and environmental law that makes it impossible to actually build anything useful toward addressing the things they’re most afraid of.”
“It’s become clear to anyone who wants to build anything that what the environmental left has to offer simply doesn't work,” he told me. “Naturally, more centrist organizations who might not even otherwise be slated as right-wing now look that way and are becoming increasingly attractive to people who are interested in building.”
On Senate committees, a public lands selloff, and energy investment
Current conditions: Southern New England will experience its hottest day of the year so far today, with temperatures around 90 degrees Fahrenheit • Record levels of Sargassum seaweed are overwhelming Caribbean resorts • Saharan dust has spread across most of Florida and will continue over the coastal Southeast through this weekend.
1. The Senate’s first pass at IRA repeal cuts huge climate programs ...
On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill. “At least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo wrote in her analysis of the contents — although there is one Environmental Protection Agency grant program, for reducing pollution at ports, that had been targeted in by the House bill and is absent from the Environment and Public Works Committee’s text. As in the House bill, the latest text eliminates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which the Trump administration has sought to kill with accusations of fraud, though it has yet to produce any evidence of impropriety.
Elsewhere in the Senate, however, some Republicans appear more friendly toward preserving at least some IRA tax credits. “I would be in the camp that doesn’t think we need [to do] a full repeal and instead can live with a circumscribed, narrower version of the existing IRA credits,” Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a member of the Finance Committee, said, as reported by Axios. Senator John Curtis of Utah published an op-ed in Deseret News on Wednesday in which he argued that “the right policy solution must navigate tax credits and regulatory reform in what I believe is central to America’s economic future, the planet and our national security: energy.”
2. … and a public lands sell-off is back on the table
Senate Republicans are reviving a plan to sell off public lands to fund President Trump’s tax cuts after their colleagues in the House thwarted a similar proposal, Senator Mike Lee of Utah told reporters on Wednesday. According to the senator, a new version of the plan will be included in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources’s pass at the bill, which will likely be made public on Monday, Bloomberg reports.
Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana helped lead the charge to kill the earlier version of the proposal in the House, although Lee added that his version would exempt Montana. Still — as I’ve reported — the plan would jeopardize as much as 500,000 acres of public land across Utah and Nevada alone. “These are the places people recreate with their families, they are places to hunt and fish, and they are held in trust for the American people to enjoy for generations to come,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement.
3. 2025 will be a banner year for energy investment, despite economic turbulence: IEA
Despite tariffs, trade wars, and economic uncertainty, the International Energy Agency anticipates a record $3.3 trillion investment in global energy in 2025, per a new report released Thursday. That represents a 2% rise from 2024. “The fast-evolving economic and trade picture means that some investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach to new energy project approvals, but in most areas we have yet to see significant implications for existing projects,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement about the findings.
Around $2.2 trillion of the total global investment is “going collectively to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice as much as the $1.1 trillion going to oil, natural gas, and coal,” the report says. Solar specifically is booming, with a forecast of $450 billion in investment by 2025. The overall picture represents an enormous reversal from a decade ago, when fossil fuel investments were 30% higher than electricity generation, grids, and storage. That said, the research also found that investment in grids — at around $400 billion per year — is “failing to keep pace with spending on generation and electrification,” mainly because of “lengthy permitting procedures and tight supply chains for transformers and cables.” Read the full report here.
4. UK solar is having a record year due to unusually sunny spring
Carbon BriefSolar farms in the United Kingdom generated more electricity than ever before in the first five months of the year, according to a newly released accounting by Carbon Brief. The surge in solar energy was 42% higher than over the same period last year, growing from 5.4 terawatt-hours of electricity generated to a record 7.6 terawatt-hours. Carbon Brief credited the record output to the nation’s sunniest spring on record, although the publication notes it was also “aided by rising capacity, which reached 20.2GW in 2024, up by 2.3GW from 17.9GW a year earlier.” You can read the full report here.
5. ‘Atmospheric thirst’ is making droughts more severe: study
While extreme heat almost always has a climate change signal, the same cannot be said for droughts, which have different causes and feedback mechanisms that researchers are still working to understand. A new study published Wednesday in Nature has found that atmospheric evaporative demand — that is, the complex process of water evaporation into the atmosphere, also called “atmospheric thirst” — has increased drought severity by an average of 40%. Over the five years from 2018 to 2022, areas in drought have expanded 74% on average compared to the 1981 to 2017 period, with atmospheric evaporative demand “contributing to 58% of this increase,” the report further found. “We were very much shocked when we saw the results,” Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, told The New York Times.
“A large majority of new residential houses and buildings in Germany feature a heat pump as their main heating system,” according to government numbers reported by Clean Energy Wire. “The climate-friendly heating technology was installed in more than two-thirds (69.4%) of the 76,100 homes finished in 2024, a 5% increase compared to 2023.”
The Environment and Public Works Committee largely preserved the cuts made by the House, with one odd exception.
The Senate GOP began working through Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” budget reconciliation bill this week, and at least so far, it’s hardly deviating from the stark cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act that have already passed the House.
Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee released their section of the bill on Wednesday evening, and it retains many of the policy repeals and funding rescissions that were in the House version.
To be clear, it does not touch the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, the most controversial climate-related parts of the package. Their fate will be up to the Senate Finance Committee, which is not expected to release text for its section of the bill until at least next week. There has been no indication that Republicans in the upper chamber intend to fight for any of the myriad grant programs the IRA created.
Still, I’m looking closely to see if some of it might yet be saved. For example, there is, oddly, one Environmental Protection Agency grant program targeted by the House bill that is absent from this first text from the Environment and Public Works Committee: $3 billion to reduce air pollution at ports.
Here’s what is in the text.
The text published Wednesday would repeal and rescind funding for more than two dozen programs, most of which are administered by the EPA, the Department of Transportation, and the General Services Administration. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the now-infamous lending program for clean energy projects targeted by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as a wasteful, fraudulent scheme perpetrated by the Biden administration, is still on the out list. Same goes for funding for oil and gas producers to reduce their methane emissions, plus a related fee that would be levied on operators who did not reduce methane leakage below a certain threshold.
The full list of cuts:
The text would also rescind two new pots of money that were not touched by the House bill — funding for Endangered Species Act recovery plans, strategies developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help threatened species thrive again, and general funding for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to train staff, do environmental reviews, and improve stakeholder and community engagement.
Like the House bill, the Senate committee’s text includes instructions to repeal the latest update to the nation’s tailpipe emissions standards for cars. The regulations are required under the Clean Air Act and were strengthened under the Biden administration for model years 2027 through 2032, requiring automakers to sell an increasing proportion of electric vehicles over time.
It would not, however, repeal the latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (also known as the CAFE standards), which regulate how far a vehicle must be able to travel on a gallon of fuel and were targeted by the House bill.
This provision is one I’ll be watching closely, as Democrats are likely to challenge its inclusion. If Republicans want to pass the budget bill with a simple majority, they can only include policies that affect the federal budget, and as the Environmental Defense Fund told me, these standards are “regulations, not budgetary provisions.”
The text proposes the same pay-to-play permitting scheme that was in the House bill and would allow energy infrastructure developers to pay for expedited permitting. Like the House bill, it also asserts that environmental assessments made under this program “shall not be subject to judicial review.”
Coming up, we’ll be on the lookout for a text from the Energy and Natural Resources committee, which will reveal whether Senate Republicans have any interest in saving the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, administered by the Loan Programs Office, which provides essential support for the nuclear industry.