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A personal account of the final act in the fight to pass the United States’ first comprehensive climate law
One year ago, the Inflation Reduction Act became law, throwing the full financial might of the federal government behind the clean energy transition and forever changing the fight against climate change.
Recent polling finds that too few recognize the historical significance of the hundreds of billions of dollars the law invests to make clean energy cheaper for American households, businesses, and industries.
Even fewer people appreciate just how close we came to losing it all.
This is a personal account of the final days of the fight to pass the nation’s first comprehensive climate law, and of how the Inflation Reduction Act remarkably arose from the ashes of near-defeat.
On July 14, 2022, just over a month before eventually becoming law, the budget bill that would eventually become known as the Inflation Reduction Act died. Again.
That evening, Senator Joe Manchin, the coal-state Democrat from West Virginia, called Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to tell him he was done with the long-simmering inter-party negotiations striving to craft a budget bill that could unite all 50 Democratic senators and pass the evenly divided Senate. The stubborn hold-out had already dashed progressive dreams multiple times in the year and a half since the 117th Congress gaveled into session, including dealing the killing blow to the House-passed Build Back Better Act in December 2021.
The news was a shock. Less than two weeks earlier, over the Fourth of July weekend, I was told by Senate staffers party to the budget negotiations that a deal was imminent. They told me to prepare the REPEAT Project, a Princeton University team that I lead and that assesses the impacts of federal energy and climate policies as they are debated, to stand by to run the numbers on a new bill.
But in July 2022, inflation was running at nearly 9% and gasoline prices were over $5 per gallon in many parts of the U.S. Then we got one bad report on the rate of inflation after another, prompting Manchin to say he could no longer support any additional government spending that might further fuel inflation.
Manchin called Schumer on July 14 to say he could no longer continue negotiations, and that he would not support legislation that included any clean energy or climate spending — leaving only a slimmed-down bill focused on health care left in play.
"DEVASTATING... utterly SENSELESS!" I tweeted at the time, using REPEAT Project modeling to illustrate the massive climate gap we would have faced, had that been the end of the story.
Courtesy of the REPEAT Project at Princeton University's Zero Lab
And it really did seem like the end.
The tone I heard from Senate staffers that day was very different from the several prior ‘false demises’ of the budget negotiations we had all endured. They were despondent. “I feel like I just wasted the last six years of my life,” one staffer texted me on July 14. So did I.
The next day, Manchin issued an ultimatum: Either Democrats could quickly pass a “skinny” budget bill focused only on health care or they could wait a few weeks to see if inflation improved and try negotiating a larger package in August.
The problem: Basically no one thought inflation would meaningfully cool that quickly, and there was only a few weeks left to pass a law before the August recess, after which Congress would go into full campaign season and nothing would pass.
The game clock was winding down.
Then President Biden threw in the towel. He issued an official statement vowing to keep the climate fight up via executive action but urged the Senate to quickly pass a bill focused only on health care.
Schumer appeared poised to do just that, and a caucus meeting for Senate Democrats was set for the following Tuesday to discuss how to move forward. Since Congress only gets one shot at a budget reconciliation law per fiscal year, if they ended up passing a bill without any climate package, it was game over.
I had been working to advance federal climate policy since 2008. I lived through the demise of the last serious effort to pass a federal climate law in 2009 and 2010. I knew how rare these windows of opportunity to pass meaningful legislation are. And we’d just blown a once-in-a-decade chance. Would we have to wait until the 2030s for our next shot? Could we even survive another decade with the United States standing on the sidelines of the global climate fight?
By July 16, I had apparently had enough time to go through the various stages of grief, arriving at bargaining (or perhaps denial). “It’s just not okay to end like this, with Manchin walking away from the deal and the rest of the caucus just quietly accepting that!” I wrote in a text to a key Senate staffer. “There’s got to be at least a dozen [Senate] members who are furious and could be unwilling to accept that in the end, right?”
“Working on it 😄,” the staffer replied.
And just like that, while many gave up and others fumed, staff from just a handful of Senate offices and a rag-tag group of allied individuals and advocacy groups got back to what we’d been doing since the start: doggedly working the problem to find some way to passage.
Even then, I had very little faith our efforts would succeed. I just knew that the game clock had a few seconds left on it, time enough to run a couple more Hail Mary plays, and I wanted to be able to look my kids in the eye some day and say, “We failed, but we truly tried everything we could.”
So we got back to work.
So how did we get Manchin back to the negotiating table?
From my limited perspective, three things worked.
First, the concern that climate spending would stoke inflation was bogus. The budget deal under negotiation was doubly paid for, raising twice as much new revenue as it spent. What’s more, the spending plan was estimated to be in the ballpark to $30 to $50 billion per year spread over a decade, or less than 1% of our roughly six trillion dollar federal budget.
The climate spending was peanuts, and any honest macroeconomist would say that the budget deal would have a mild, fiscally contractionary effect at best or no effect on inflation at worst. Plus, the proposals specifically took aim at two key drivers of inflation: health care costs and energy costs.
Either Manchin was honest in his inflation fears but misappreciating the issues, or he was trying to give himself cover to scuttle the bill.
Our so-called “Never Give Up Caucus” took him at face value. To address his inflation concerns, allies succeeded in getting inflation-hawk-in-chief Larry Summers, the conservative leaning Penn-Wharton Budget Model team, and the deficit hawkish head of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget to tell Manchin (and the press) that the deal would cut the deficit and not raise prices.
Second, the many vested interests that stood to gain from the clean energy package were mobilized and pushed Manchin hard not to leave them high and dry.
This was always a key part of the political strategy of the clean energy package: rather than focus on pricing carbon emissions and making fossil energy more expensive (as Congress had attempted in 2009), the budget bill would instead provide a wide-ranging set of direct subsidies — tax credits, grants, loan programs — to make climate-friendly technologies cheaper and help build up manufacturing of clean energy components in the U.S. Concentrated beneficiaries create organized power to back the bill. That was the theory, and it was time to put it to the test.
The pressure campaign to get Manchin back to the table was “across the board,” according to National Wildlife Federation CEO Collin O’Mara, who was one of the most dogged and effective organizers during those pivotal final days.
Executives from renewable energy companies reminded Manchin that billions of dollars of investment were at stake.
The United Mine Workers of America pushed Manchin not to walk away from his promise to create a permanent trust fund for miners suffering from black lung disease, which the budget bill would do.
In my personal estimation, the most effective voices were probably from those sectors Manchin had styled himself as personally championing as chairman of the Senate Energy Committee: carbon capture, nuclear power, hydrogen, and advanced manufacturing.
A senior executive with a utility operating in Appalachia reportedly told Manchin: “We know coal plants are ultimately going to close. What is going to replace them? What are the jobs? What are we transitioning to? In this case, we are going to explore hydrogen, new nuclear and get manufacturing in the state.”
Manchin received incoming pressure to pass a bill from the Carbon Capture Coalition, oil companies like BP with big plans to invest in hydrogen, and Nucor, the nation’s largest steel maker, which planned new investments in West Virginia in part to supply growing demand for steel for burgeoning renewable energy industries.
Utilities like Constellation and Duke reminded Manchin that this law was our best shot at preserving the nation’s existing nuclear fleet, which provides about a fifth of our electricity without contributing to air pollution or climate change.
Bill Gates, who has invested in nuclear and energy storage startups, called Manchin personally. And executives at a Gates-backed battery company with plans for a West Virginia manufacturing hub explained to Manchin’s staff how the bill’s incentives would accelerate their growth trajectory.
Third, a few key senators that Manchin personally trusted or respected, including John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Chris Coons of Delaware, Tina Smith of Minnesota, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, reportedly pressed him with direct personal appeals.
I imagine their pitches either made the political case — did Manchin really want to send his party into the midterms having utterly failed on their domestic policy agenda? — or a personal one, emphasizing the opportunity to secure his legacy and the admiration of his grandchildren.
I don’t think we should discount the importance of these personal appeals. At the end of the day, senators are humans too. They crave the respect of their colleagues (at least those they admire). And everyone wants to be the hero of their own story, not the villain.
Which of these (or other parallel efforts I don't know about) pushed Manchin back to the table? Who knows what went through his mind in the end. But somehow, against virtually all expectations, it worked.
We didn’t know it until later, but by as early as Tuesday, July 19, Manchin and Schumer, with just a couple key aids each, began meeting in secret somewhere in the Senate offices and got back to work.
No one else had any idea this was happening.
Like others working to save the bill, I spent the next week continuing to talk to press, allies, congressional staff, etc., marshaling talking points and data, mobilizing various interests to pressure Manchin, and doing everything we could to convince the stubborn senator to make a deal that would get a climate package into law. Little did we know, he was already back at it.
In fact, a little over a week later, on Wednesday, July 27, Manchin issued a statement that shocked everyone: He and Leader Schumer had reached a deal after all and were unveiling a full-fledged bill to be called “The Inflation Reduction Act.”
“The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 addresses our nation’s energy and climate crisis by adopting commonsense solutions through strategic and historic investments that allow us to decarbonize while ensuring American energy is affordable, reliable, clean and secure,” Manchin wrote.
The full text of the bill dropped later that evening, and we were blown away to see how much of the original climate package from the ill-fated Build Back Better Act was retained by this new legislation.
The deal contained roughly $370 billion in estimated climate and clean energy spending, an historic package. All the key tax incentives were still in the proposal, including credits for clean electricity, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. Major grant programs were funded at similar levels. Even a new fee on methane pollution from the oil and gas sector had survived. In fact, a tax credit for U.S. clean energy manufacturing had even been expanded, apparently at Manchin’s request, to support production of batteries and their components and the mining and processing of critical minerals.
Rather than lose it all, we were poised to win nearly everything we’d hoped for.
“Holy shit. Stunned, but in a good way,” wrote Senator Tina Smith, a tireless advocate for the climate package, on Twitter. “$370B for climate and energy … BFD.”
It took us a couple weeks to run the numbers, but once we did, REPEAT Project estimated on August 4 that the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA (pronounce it like your friendly Uncle Ira!), would cut emissions by about one billion metric tons per year in 2030 and retained about 80% of the cumulative emissions reductions of the larger Build Back Better package.
Courtesy of the REPEAT Project at Princeton University's Zero Lab
IRA could get the United States to about 42% below our peak historical emissions by 2030, we estimated at the time. (REPEAT Project’s latest updated analysis published last month revises 2030 emissions under IRA to 37-41% below peak.) That was still short of the target of 50% below peak levels that President Biden had committed the country to on the world stage, but the proposed legislation was a true game changer that gave us a fighting chance to hit that goal.
After the Manchin-Schumer deal dropped, we were off to the races.
Manchin shifted from the package’s chief obstacle to its chief spokesperson, stumping for the bill on Fox and haranguing senators on the floor alongside Schumer to get IRA passed during an exhausting, overnight “vote-a-rama.” After a 16-hour process where Republicans proposed amendment after amendment to be shot down one by one by a united Democratic caucus — plus a little last minute drama wherein Kyrsten Sinema nearly killed the bill to save private equity firms billions in taxes — the Inflation Reduction Act passed the Senate at 3:17 PM on August 7, 51-50, with Vice President Harris casting the deciding vote.
The House passed IRA in turn on August 14, and President Biden signed it into law two days later. The rest, as they say, is history.
We’re still writing that history, but it’ll be forever changed by passage of the landmark law. And we almost lost it all.
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The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.
The federal government is poised to put solar and wind projects through strict new reviews that may delay projects across the country, according to a widely circulating document reviewed by Heatmap.
The secretarial order authored by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Gregory Wischer is dated July 15 and states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Burgum’s office and Interior’s Office of the Deputy Secretary.
This new layer of review would span essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction on a project can commence — a milestone crucial for being able to qualify for federal renewable energy tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists more than 68 different activities newly subject to higher-level review, including some basic determinations as to whether projects conform with federal environmental and conservation laws, as well as consultations on compliance with wildlife protection laws such as the Endangered Species Act. The final item in the list sweeps “any other similar or related decisions, actions, consultations, or undertakings” under the order’s purview, in case there was any grey area there.
In other words, this order is so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage. In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.
“This is the way you stall and kill projects. Intentionally red-tape projects to death,” former Biden White House clean energy adviser Avi Zevin wrote on Bluesky in a post with a screenshot of the order.
The department has yet to release the document and it’s unclear whether or when it will be made public. The order’s existence was first reported by Politico; in a statement to that news outlet, the department did not deny the document’s existence but attacked leakers. “Let’s be clear: leaking internal documents to the media is cowardly, dishonest, and a blatant violation of professional standards,” the statement said.
Interior’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heatmap about when this document may be made public. We also asked whether this would also apply to transmission connected to solar and wind. You had better believe I’ll be following up with the department to find out, and we’ll update this story if we hear back from them.
Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted — Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.