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Dozens of people are reporting problems claiming the subsidy — and it’s not even Trump’s fault.
Eric Walker, of Zanesville, Ohio, bought a Ford F-150 Lightning in March of last year. Ironically, Walker designs and manufactures bearings for internal combustion engines for a living. But he drives 70 miles to and from his job, and he was thrilled not to have to pay for gas anymore. “I love it so much. I honestly don’t think I could ever go back to a non-EV,” he told me. “It’s just more fun, more punchy.”
But although he’s saving on gas, Walker recently learned he’d made a major, expensive mistake at the dealership when he bought the truck. The F-150 Lightning qualified for a federal tax credit of $7,500 in 2024. Walker was income-eligible and planned to claim it when he filed his taxes. But his dealership never reported the sale to the Internal Revenue Service, and at the time, Walker had no idea this was required. When he went to submit his tax return recently, it was rejected. Now, it may be too late.
Walker is not alone. Dozens of users on Reddit have been sharing near-identical stories as tax season has gotten underway — and it’s only early February. It is unclear exactly how many EV buyers are affected. What we do know is that it will be up to the Trump administration’s Treasury Department to decide whether any of them will get the refund they were counting on — the same administration that wants to kill the tax credit altogether.
The problem dates back to a change in the process for claiming the tax credit. For the 2023 tax year, dealers had until January 15, 2024 to report eligible EV sales to the IRS. For 2024, however, the IRS introduced a new, digital reporting system and new deadlines. Starting in January 2024, if a customer bought an eligible vehicle and wanted to claim the tax credit, dealerships were required to file a report within three days of the time of sale to the IRS through a web portal called Energy Credits Online.
This change coincided with another: Buyers now had the option to transfer the credit to their dealership instead of claiming it themselves. The dealer could then take the value of the credit off the price of the car and get reimbursed by the IRS. This was voluntary on the dealerships’ part, and many opted in. By October, more than 300,000 EV sales had used this transfer option, according to the Treasury Department. But apparently there were also many dealers who didn’t want to bother with it. And at least some of them never bothered to learn about the online portal at all.
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Charlie Gerk, an engineer living in the suburbs of Minneapolis, bought a Chrysler Pacifica plug-in electric hybrid in February after his wife had twins. Unlike Walker, Gerk knew all about the workings of the tax credit, and he wanted to get his discount up front. But the dealership he was working with — a smaller, family-run business — had not gotten set up to do it. “He’s like, ‘We sell six EVs a year, we’re not going to take the time to sign up for that program,’” Gerk recalled the salesman saying. Gerk decided to claim the tax credit himself, and the dealership even gave him a few hundred bucks off the car since he’d have to wait a year to see the refund. He then emailed the dealership instructions from the IRS for reporting the sale through the online portal, and the dealership assured him it would submit the information. It sent Gerk a copy of form 15400, an IRS “Clean Vehicle Seller Report,” for him to keep for his records — except that the form was dated 2023. When Gerk inquired about it, the finance manager told him it was just because it was still so early in the year, and that they would make sure it got filed appropriately online.
Fast forward to one year later, and Gerk came across a post in the Pacifica Reddit forum from someone whose claim was rejected by the IRS because their dealer failed to report the sale. “I logged into my online dashboard for the IRS, and sure enough, the vehicle’s not there,” Gerk told me. “If it was filed appropriately, it would have shown on my online dashboard that I had an EV clean vehicle credit for 2024, and it’s not there.”
Gerk spoke to his dealership, which said it would look into the situation. He forwarded me an email exchange between the IRS and his dealership in which a representative from the IRS’ Clean Vehicle Team said it was probably too late to fix. “The open period for any unsubmitted time of sale reports is closed,” the staffer wrote. “We are expecting some Energy Credit Online (ECO) updates so contact us via secure messaging in the Spring for additional information.”
Some users on Reddit who, like Gerk, were aware of the reporting requirements when they bought their EVs, have shared stories about visiting more than a dozen dealerships before finding one that was registered with ECO and willing to file the paperwork. Others who didn't know about the rules have recalled inquiring about the tax credit at their dealership and being told they could simply claim it on their taxes. They only found out when they tried to submit their tax paperwork on TurboTax or another e-filing system and received an error message informing them that their vehicle is not registered in the IRS database.
Some blame the dealerships for misleading them and are wondering if they have grounds to sue. Others blame the IRS for not adequately informing customers or dealers about the rules.
“My frustration lies with the fact the IRS would even allow this to be an option,” Gerk told me. “If you’re going to allow the credit to be taken by me, I have to be dependent on my dealer doing the right thing?” (Gerk asked that we not share the name of his dealership.)
I spoke with a former Treasury staffer who worked on the program, who told me that the agency went to great lengths to educate dealerships about the new online portal and filing requirements, including hosting webinars that reached more than 10,000 dealerships and a presentation at the National Automobile Dealership Association’s annual convention in Las Vegas. The agency put up pages of fact sheets, checklists, and other materials for dealers and consumers on the IRS website, they said. But the IRS doesn’t have a marketing budget, and also relied heavily on NADA, the Dealership Association, for help getting the word out.
NADA did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls asking for comment. I also contacted several of the dealerships who sold EVs to buyers who are now having their tax credit claims rejected, none of which got back to me.
Many of the affected buyers are trying to get their dealerships to contact the IRS and see if they can retroactively report the sales, as Gerk did. Some are having more luck than others. When Walker contacted his dealership in Cleveland, Ohio, to see if there was anything it could do to help him, it still seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. Walker forwarded me a response from his dealership asking him if he had spoken to his accountant. “My sales desk is pretty insistent on that this is something your accountant would handle,” it said. (Walker did not want to disclose the name of his dealership as he is still trying to work with them on a solution.)
I reached out to the Treasury Department with a list of questions, including whether this issue was on its radar and what consumers who find themselves in this situation should do. The agency confirmed receipt of the request, but had not gotten back to me by press time. We will update this story if they do. There are reports on Reddit of EV buyers having a similar issue claiming the tax credit in 2024 for purchases made in 2023. Some filed their taxes without the EV credit and then submitted appeals to the IRS after the fact, with seemingly some success.
Buyers stuck in this situation have few other places to turn. Some Reddit users have posted about reaching out to their representatives, who offered to contact the IRS on their behalf. One challenge, as noted by the former Treasury staffer I spoke with, is that unlike the dealers, who have NADA, there is no consumer advocacy group for electric vehicle buyers who can engage with lawmakers and the Treasury and request a solution.
“I don’t necessarily need the money,” Walker told me. “It was just gonna go towards some more student loans — I’m just trying to pay down all of my debt as soon as possible. So I didn’t need it. But it would have been certainly something nice to have.”
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The administration can’t have it both ways on the Clean Air Act.
The Trump administration filed lawsuits this week against four states that are pursuing compensation from oil and gas companies for climate change-related damages. But Trump’s separate aim to revoke the government’s “endangerment finding,” the conclusion that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and should therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act, could directly undercut the legal basis for the suits.
In each of the cases, the Trump administration is arguing that the Clean Air Act preempts the states’ actions. But if the Environmental Protection Agency rules that the Clean Air Act does not, in fact, require the federal regulation of greenhouse gases, that argument could fall apart.
Two of the lawsuits target Vermont and New York for their new “climate superfund” laws that require the companies responsible for the greatest amount of emissions over the last three decades to pay into a fund supporting adaptation and disaster response. The Department of Justice is also suing Hawaii and Michigan to block them from suing fossil fuel companies for damages for climate change-related harms. Neither state had actually filed such a lawsuit yet, although both had expressed interest in doing so. (Hawaii went ahead and filed its suit on Thursday night.)
“I just want to start by saying that these lawsuits by the government are totally unprecedented,” Rachel Rothschild, an assistant professor of Law at Michigan State University, told me when we hopped on the phone. To her knowledge, never before has the federal government tried to preemptively stop a state from filing a liability case against companies.
In an executive order in early April, Trump had directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “stop the enforcement” of state climate laws and actions that “may be unconstitutional” or “preempted by federal law.” The order singled out lawsuits against oil companies as well as climate superfund laws, calling both a form of “extortion” and a “threat to economic and national security.”
Nevermind that climate change is a major threat to economic and national security, and states have filed these lawsuits and created these laws because they are scrambling to find ways to pay to address the unprecedented damages brought by the increasing severity of wildfires and floods.
Even before Trump took office, Rothschild said, the federal government had warned states that they were going to need to take more responsibility for preparing for and responding to increasing natural disasters. “[States] do not have the resources alone to address this problem,” said Rothschild. “These companies have engaged in an activity that causes external harms that they’ve not taken into account as part of their business practices, they’'re imposing all the costs of those harms on states and citizens, and they should be liable to help us deal with the resulting problems. That’s a very normal activity for tort suits.”
Dozens of states have filed similar lawsuits seeking damages from oil companies. (A Justice Department press release did not say why it was singling out states that had not taken any legal action yet rather than targeting those that had.) Many of these lawsuits have been stuck in a holding pattern for years, though. “Climate superfund” laws are a new legal strategy, modeled on the federal superfund program, that some states are testing to get oil companies to pay up.
The DOJ’s lawsuits claim that states cannot fine oil companies for their emissions because that authority lies with the federal government under the Clean Air Act. That argument is underpinned by the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, which stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gases are a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act, and therefore the EPA must determine whether these emissions pose a threat to public health. The court said that if the agency finds there is enough scientific evidence to say greenhouse gases are harmful, it must develop regulations to rein them in. EPA officially made this finding in 2009.
This was a big headache for Trump during his first term. He wasn’t allowed to simply repeal Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas rules — by law, he had to replace them. If he’s able to reverse the endangerment finding, however, he could undo climate protection rules and that would be that.
At the same time, he’d make oil companies much more vulnerable. “There is great concern that reversing the finding would open the door to a lot more nuisance lawsuits against all types of energy companies,” Jeff Holmstead, a partner with Bracewell, a lobbying firm, told E&E News. “It would eliminate one of the best arguments that oil companies have used to get lawsuits against them dismissed,” he added.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin will face an uphill battle in reversing the finding, as there is a mountain of scientific evidence that greenhouse gases cause dangerous climate change. But Zeldin may instead try to argue that the EPA did not consider the cost of addressing these emissions when it made the initial finding — and that the costs of reining them in outweigh the costs of emitting freely.
Legal experts are skeptical this argument will go anywhere, either. In 2012, the D.C. Circuit Court found that the EPA’s endangerment finding should be based on science, not economics. Cost-benefit analyses and other policy considerations are relevant if the EPA finds that greenhouse gases do, in fact, pose a threat, but they “do not inform the ‘scientific judgment’” that the law requires the EPA to make, the judge ruled. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn “Chevron deference,” a decades-long precedent that gave agencies broad authority to interpret their statutory mandates, could also hurt Zeldin’s case.
Rothschild, for her part, is confident that states’ superfund laws and tort suits are defensible regardless of what happens to the endangerment finding. These actions have nothing to do with the Clean Air Act, she argued, because they are not an attempt to regulate emissions. “They're trying to impose liability for local, environmental, and public health harms from past activities,” she said.
One thing is for certain: Between states’ lawsuits suing oil companies, oil companies’ countersuits, the DOJ’s new lawsuits against states, and probably future suits against any actions the Trump administration takes on endangerment, there’s going to be a whole lot of new case law about greenhouse gases over the next four years.
The fundamentals are the same — it’s the tone that’s changed.
At some point in the past month, the hydrogen fuel cell developer Plug Power updated its website. Beneath a carousel explaining the hydrogen ecosystem and solutions for transporting fuel, the company’s home page now contains a section titled “Hydrogen at Work.”
“Hydrogen is key to energy independence, providing clean, reliable power while reducing reliance on imported fuels,” the text in this new box reads. “Plug’s hydrogen and fuel cell solutions strengthen the energy grid and enhance national security, positioning the U.S. as a leader in the global energy transition.”
It is fairly ordinary website copy, but to a keen reader, the text jumps out as an obvious Trump 2.0 tell. Plug Power — like many green economy companies — has pivoted to meet the political and economic moment, where “energy independence” and “energy dominance” are in and “climate” and “sustainability” are out.
“I am actually shocked every time I look at the website of a climate tech company that still uses the language from 12 months ago, from four months ago — that doesn’t do them any good,” Peter Atanasoff, the managing director and vice president of Scratch Media and Marketing, which helps B2B technology companies and climate tech businesses achieve growth and recognition, told me.
The shift in language is more significant than just brands chasing the latest buzzwords.
The first Trump administration saw broad-based pushback from the business community against Trump’s more inflammatory positions, especially by consumer-facing brands that played to the pussy hat-wearing, brunch-and-protest attitudes of the time. The CEOs of Facebook (now Meta), Nike, and Google issued statements of disappointment when the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk even dropped out of the president’s business council over the decision. It was, needless to say, a very different time.
During Trump’s second term, he promised “retribution.” Many of the more moderate voices from his first administration are long gone, and there’s a palpable fear among nonprofits and businesses of drawing the wrong kind of attention from Washington, losing grant funding for saying the wrong thing. “The real trigger” for resulting differences in branding between the first and second Trump administrations has been “the change of tone and change of economic policy,” Atanasoff told me. “It is explicit opposition to any of these technologies."
The administration has launched an all-out assault not just on climate policy, but also on the very language of the energy transition. In a February memo obtained by E&E News, the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed 34 words to be erased from official documentation, including “global warming,” “carbon footprint,” “net zero,” and even “green.” As I’ve covered for Heatmap, farmers applying for Department of Agriculture grants have been encouraged to resubmit proposals with climate-focused language removed and “refocus … on expanding American energy production.” And at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists have quickly learned to pivot to talking about “air pollution” rather than emissions, contending with a banned-words list of their own.
Lobbyists and clean energy companies that want to be in the administration’s good graces have adapted, as well. That has changed the tenor of green business at large. Alexander Bryden, who runs the Washington, D.C. office of Browning Environmental Communications, told me over email that tweaking brand language is “typical after any change of administration, particularly when there are significant shifts in policy.” But especially for organizations in the public eye, “it’s more important than ever to highlight the historic and potential economic benefits of environmental solutions — and show how they are supported by, and benefit, people across the political spectrum.”
The actual fundamentals of green business haven’t changed, though. On the contrary, in the first quarter of 2025, venture capitalists and private equity firms invested more than $5 billion in climate tech startups in the U.S., a 65% increase from the same period a year earlier, according to PitchBook data. While there are certainly obstacles like supply chain uncertainty and tariffs to contend with, especially for clean energy manufacturing, on the whole “it’s still a great time to start a climate startup,” Tommy Leep, the founder of the software-focused venture firm Jetstream, told my colleague Katie Brigham last November. His caveat? “Just don’t call it a climate startup.”
Roger Ballentine, the president of the management consulting service Green Strategies and the chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Bill Clinton, explained this thinking to me. “It’s what I refer to as climate capitalism, which is the realization that by incorporating climate change and its risks and opportunities into your business strategy, you’re actually going to be a more successful, more profitable, and more competitive company,” he said. Even with the recent economic turbulence, “That hasn’t changed. That’s not going to change.”
Where you do see adjustments, however, is “around the edges,” per Ballentine. Companies are attempting to match the frequency of the administration and, in turn, the broader policy ecosystem — a frequency that tends to be aggressive, assertive, and heavy on words like “dominance” and “security.” It might also take the form of decreasing the volume at which companies had previously shouted their climate bona fides.
Anya Nelson, the senior vice president of public relations at Scratch M+M, said her team has also advised touting “American-made production” in brand messaging, and reframing copy to focus on “the positive impacts and immediate business benefits” of the companies, rather than more idealistic messaging about climate goals that may have had stronger resonance during the Biden administration.
At this point, you may have noticed that I haven’t quoted any corporate brand officers. That’s not because I didn’t try to talk to any. (Even Plug Power, my example at the beginning of this story, didn’t respond to a request for comment on the change in their messaging.) Though the sudden prevalence of terms like “energy dominance” becomes conspicuous once you start to look for them, no one wants to draw the wrong kind of attention from the administration. It’s part of a greater trend of clamming up that my colleagues and I have experienced across sectors in our reporting, and at a time when even the word “green” can give you a black mark, I can’t say I don’t understand.
Ballentine, the Green Strategies president, dismissed reading too much into how language itself changes under President Trump. “If yesterday a new technology company was touting itself as a climate solution, and now it’s touting itself as a way to achieve energy dominance — I don’t care,” he said.
His thinking was more pragmatic. “Good business remains good business,” Ballentine went on. “Around the edges, will things change? Yes. General belt tightening? Yes. Fundamental change of direction? No.”
It might sound like branding agencies are encouraging companies to “play along” with the administration, but Nelson of Scratch M+M stressed that wasn’t what she was trying to say. At the end of the day, “your end goal is to be a viable company, right?” she said. “To be a thriving company that is going to change the world, first and foremost, you need to make sure you don’t go out of business.” The message might be more accurately summarized as “read the room.”
A report from Heatmap’s San Francisco Climate Week event with Tom Steyer.
Last Thursday at San Francisco Climate Week, Heatmap hosted an event with a lineup of industry leaders and experts to discuss the most promising up-and-coming climate tech innovations amidst a backdrop of tariff and tax credit uncertainty.
Guests at Heatmap's event, Climate Tech's Next Winners.Sean Vranizan
First up, Heatmap executive editor Robinson Meyer sat down with Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor and co-founder of Galvanize Climate Solutions, to explore the most promising climate technologies to scale. “No one's going to adopt new technologies to be nice,” Steyer noted. “They're gonna adopt new technologies because they're better, because they're a better deal, because they're cheaper or in some ways solve a pain point for the customer.” Steyer went on to emphasize that there is at least one “transformational and disruptive” idea for every six verticals in the climate industry — for example, measuring carbon sequestration in nature with machine learning andAI, a concept that was “literally unimaginable 5 years ago.”
Tom Steyer and Robinson Meyer.Sean Vranizan
As for the Trump-sized elephant in the room, Steyer encouraged climate tech startups to focus on “good leadership” as well as the willingness to adapt in this uncertain moment. “You’re gonna have hard times, and the world is going to change, and you’re going to have to figure out what to do,“ he said. Steyer also noted that all Americans, not only those working in climate tech, should understand the energy transition as a background condition of their careers. “If you want to be a screenwriter (...) be a screenwriter. But it’s really important that you put [the energy transition] into your screenwriting. If you‘re a banker (...) be a banker with an awareness of this issue. Bank the good stuff, not the bad stuff,” Steyer explained. He finished up the discussion with a remembrance of the late Pope Francis, a “tremendous human being for the planet.”
Sam D'Amico and Nico Lauricella.Sean Vranizan
Also on Thursday was a lightning talk between Nico Lauricella, Heatmap’s CEO and editor in chief, and Sam D’Amico, the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, which sponsored the event. D'Amico explained that in addition to being an induction stove, Impulse’s Cooktop is “a way to get battery storage into people's homes” — a “concept car” for using batteries in appliances to create a more decentralized grid. Lauricella and D’Amico also discussed the impacts of Trump’s tariffs on clean tech companies like Impulse, with D’Amico advising other founders in the room to build prototypes based on the supply chain and to make sure they have options in terms of where their products are manufactured so they can keep up with changing trade policies.
Impulse's high-power Cooktop on display at the event.Sean Vranizan
Lastly, Heatmap News staff writer Katie Brigham hosted a panel with Gabriel Kra, managing director and co-founder at Prelude Ventures, Clea Kolster, partner and head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, and Rajesh Swaminathan, partner at Khosla Ventures. The group spoke about the unique circumstances facing investors in the climate technology space, what their firms are looking for when investing in the newest climate innovations, and how AI fits into the picture.
Katie Brigham, Clea Kolster, Gabriel Kra, and Rajesh Swaminathan.Sean Vranizan
All three panelists acknowledged that it’s a delicate time for clean tech investors and companies alike. “Volatility and uncertainty are the enemies of running and planning a business,” warned Kra. The true cost of the tariffs is therefore extremely high, Kra explained. Kolster agreed that things are generally gloomy in the investment space, but also highlighted the technologies that are currently thriving. Carbon removal, she pointed out, “is going better than ever. Contracts are being inked right now, in the past few weeks.” The companies and technologies she’s excited about, Kolster added, are building “cheaper, better, faster,” as Steyer pointed out earlier in the evening.
Swaminathan added that there will always be a certain element of risk when it comes to investing in emerging technologies. “Clean tech companies have so many single points of failure,” he said. “And you have to prop up each part with the right leadership team. You have to have strong pillars so that [your company] doesn’t break.”
Guests following the discussion.Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Sean Vranizan
Guests at SFCW
Sean Vranizan
Thank you to our presenting sponsor, Impulse, as well as our supporting sponsor, V2 Communications, and our event host, IndieBio.