A ‘Glass Half Full’ Isn’t Enough to Fight Climate Change

In just its first three years, the Inflation Reduction Act had historic impacts on the U.S. energy mix, spurring 115 gigawatts of new, clean generation — enough to power more than 20 million American homes.

The law was also living up to its promise to be the largest climate action in U.S. history, with projections that it would lead to up to 500 million metric tons of greenhouse gas reductions from the power sector alone a year by 2035. Then Trump returned to power and backed Republicans in Congress as they used their One Big Beautiful Bill Act to repeal many of the IRA’s most potent climate policies.

An analysis published last month by MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research argues that in spite of these losses, “the glass is half full.” Clean power is still thriving, the report argues, regardless of the attacks on solar and wind and on efforts to address climate change.

When I look at the data, however, I see a glass much more than half empty.

The repeal of the key IRA tax credits and other Trump administration policies will result in 637 fewer gigawatts in added clean energy over the next 15 years and cost the average American household $4,500, according to modeling by Energy Innovation.

Axing the tax credits also results in the U.S. losing up to 85% of the projected emissions reductions from the IRA by 2035. This is the case even though many wind and solar projects will continue to claim tax credits through 2030, meaning that as time goes on, the losses will get steeper.

My own analysis, released Tuesday, finds that the Trump administration’s policies would result in the loss of up to 540 gigawatts of clean energy over the next decade — 40% of all the new power expected to be built before Trump took office. In total, the U.S. stands to lose more than $700 billion in net power sector investment. Over the next decade that will mean a half-million fewer clean energy jobs, $230 more on the average utility bill, and 600 million metric tons of additional carbon emissions a year, essentially doubling the power sector's climate footprint in 2035.

This debate is crucially important as we think about how to set durable policies once a president who dismisses climate change as the “greatest con job ever perpetuated” finally leaves office for good. Given the crisis before us, we cannot accept progress in half-measures. Whether you see the glass as half full or half empty, it’s simply not enough. The next administration will need to build on the success of the IRA to make sure we make up for the time and scale we have lost under Trump.

The Backdrop

For longtime advocates of clean energy like me, we are in the best of times and the worst of times.

Buoyed by a stunning reduction in the cost of utility-scale solar (81% since 2009) and onshore wind (50%), and by the boost from tax credits, clean energy development in the U.S. is surging. The country added more wind, solar, and battery storage in the last five years than it had in the previous century, delivering record-breaking amounts of clean energy each year after the IRA passed. The power sector plans to add more new power capacity in 2026 than it has ever built in the nation’s history, with 93% of it coming from solar, wind, and battery storage.

And yet, with the One Big Beautiful Bill, less than half of the wind, solar, and battery projects predicted under the IRA will likely be built over the next decade — up to 59 gigawatts per year instead of up to 131 gigawatts, according to a peer-reviewed study published in Nature Reviews Clean Energy. That means the loss of enough electricity to power tens of millions of homes a year by the 2030s.

Add the administration’s other harmful actions to cancel offshore wind leases, enact tariffs that have made development prohibitively expensive, and delay approvals of even routine permits, and the impacts skyrocket. Altogether, Trump’s energy agenda is set to cost the average American household $4,500 more on their energy bills over the next 15 years, according to Energy Innovation’s analysis. Because gas turbines are in short supply, ending the solar and wind tax credits “directly increases system costs by making the only thing available more expensive,” it concluded.

The Actual Emissions Outlook

It’s worth taking a moment to explain why this outlook is so much worse than “more than half full.”

The MIT paper compares expected power sector emissions in 2035 to a baseline of 2021. In one scenario it looks at the outlook under pre-Trump policies, including both the IRA and new emissions standards enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency that Trump is moving to undo versus what is expected now.

This approach is a departure from how policy impacts are best measured. In standard practice, modelers compare policies against a “business-as-usual” scenario, i.e. the current policy landscape, not an arbitrarily chosen past year.

The Nature Reviews Clean Energy meta-analysis did exactly this, comparing the Big Beautiful Bill not only to the IRA but also to a “No IRA” baseline to isolate the impact from these policies. The conclusion: Economy-wide, the GOP tax law eliminates between 67% and 85% of the emissions reductions projected under the IRA, bringing us back nearly to the No IRA world.

Even with the static comparison used by MIT, the year chosen can change the picture substantially. While MIT’s analysis chose 2021, the latest Energy Innovation analysis started from 2025, the most recent full-year data. Using 2025 as a baseline, the researchers found that federal policies enacted since January 2025 will result in 56% fewer emission reductions over the next 15 years.

To be clear, that is not 56% of the emission reductions due to the IRA, but rather 56% of all emission reductions expected due to policy and baseline trends. Losing more than half of our nation’s progress is a heavy blow.

Pace and Scale

To some degree, the MIT paper is not contesting this conclusion. The “Glass Half Full” paper’s author, Lily Bermel, says the underlying economic trends are a reason that restoring the tax credits wouldn’t be the most effective use of political capital. She argues that solar and wind are now “mature” technologies, and that “the energy transition’s direction is set by technology costs and demand growth, while policy shapes its pace and scale.”

However while wind, solar and batteries are now a low-cost resource and the dominant source of new power, we still aren’t building as much or as fast as we need to.

Renewables come with a wide array of public benefits: They reduce energy prices, volatility risk, and dependence on foreign fuels; they cut emissions and local pollution; and they promote American jobs and manufacturing. Peer-reviewed research has concluded that the U.S. needs to build twice as much wind and solar per year over the next decade as currently projected given the risks of climate change. That’s a wide gap between what the market is delivering and what the public needs. Government incentives and standards remain key to filling this gap.

We also can’t ignore the affordability crisis facing many American households today. While wind and solar are low-cost, mature technologies that lower electricity prices and rates due to minimal operating costs, building these facilities at scale involves large upfront costs that tax credits can help mitigate. Tax credits make clean energy technologies more competitive and reduce utility bills by moving these costs from households to the federal government.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Bermel built on her analysis to make four concrete policy recommendations. Instead of reestablishing tax credits for solar and wind, Congress should push through permitting and transmission reforms and support for “clean firm” technologies such as nuclear (a technology that has been available at commercial scale since the 1950s) and geothermal power, she argued.

The answer to our predicament is to “build,” she writes, echoing a refrain that the Natural Resources Defense Council has been highlighting recently as well. But Bermel says these measures should be done instead of reinstating the tax incentives for solar and wind.

That’s the wrong place to start.

Given the surging demand for electricity, growing costs of climate change, and skyrocketing electricity bills across the U.S., a new Congress will need to address many issues at once. We will need measures to speed approvals for new transmission lines and get grid operators like PJM to connect more power to their grids. We will also need emissions standards and tax incentives, expanding on the incredibly successful tax credits for solar and wind to make sure enough low-cost, affordable clean energy gets built. And we will need other tax and trade policies to ensure all of this is driving American-made manufacturing.

That’s a lot to tackle, but given the climate destruction we’ve seen this summer from Oregon to Ontario and far, far beyond, we cannot settle for just a few sips of progress when we need a full pint. And, importantly, voters support these actions and reward lawmakers who take them. Leaders in Washington shouldn’t shrink from the challenge just because the failing Trump administration wants to pretend it is all a hoax.