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President Biden’s climate law gets a political stress test.
For the first time since it passed last summer, the Inflation Reduction Act — President Biden’s flagship climate law — is facing a threat of repeal.
The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has proposed essentially rolling back the law in their opening bid on negotiations with the White House to extend the government's borrowing limit and prevent a calamitous default. The GOP's proposal, called the Limit, Grow, and Save Act, would raise the debt ceiling for a year while slashing trillions in federal spending over the next decade.
While the Republican bill proposes deep cuts across the board, it takes a cleaver to Biden’s climate policy. Folding in the Lower Energy Costs Act, the first bill that the new GOP majority put on the floor, the act would repeal more than two dozen of the IRA’s clean-energy tax credits, including subsidies for renewables and electric vehicles. It would also defund programs meant to open new factories in the United States and gut climate-friendly programs popular with Republicans, such as generous subsidies for nuclear energy and hydrogen production.
Now, let’s get this out of the way: Neither the bill nor the negotiations around it are likely to repeal the IRA. Yet for the next few days or weeks, the IRA will likely appear to be in danger as nobody will quite say it’s safe out loud.
The Republican bill’s chief importance is as a piece of political posturing: Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy hopes to demonstrate that he has 218 votes to raise the debt ceiling and pass a budget, any budget, through his disorganized and dramatic caucus. Then he can open more serious negotiations with President Biden and Senate leaders about the debt ceiling and the year’s budget.
But to get there, he’ll have to keep the GOP’s right flank on his side first. McCarthy and House Republican leadership didn’t even want to include the IRA repeal in the Limit, Save, and Grow Act, but included it because the far-right House Freedom Caucus demanded it. That means House leadership must look completely serious about its intent to repeal.
At the same time, climate advocates must now mobilize around the IRA to demonstrate its importance to the public and prevent the Biden administration from sacrificing it in negotiations.
More broadly, though, this moment is a test for a few competing hypotheses about whether the IRA can survive — and about the future of climate policy in America.
To the set of political scientists, climate activists, and energy experts who championed the law, repealing the IRA would be so damaging to Republicans as to be unthinkable. That’s because Republicans’ constituents are, for now, reaping much of the IRA’s economic rewards. Up to two-thirds of green-energy investment nationwide is happening in GOP congressional districts, according to Politico. The all-important swing state of Georgia leads the country in clean-energy and electric-vehicle investments, forming the heartland of a new, vaguely banana-shaped “Battery Belt” that stretches across the largely Republican Southeast. Even beyond that region, Speaker McCarthy’s California district is one of the top two districts nationwide for utility-scale solar, wind, and battery plants.
This wasn’t an accident. The IRA is a product of the Democratic Party, so it was, yes, meant to do all those old-school Democrat things — encourage unionization, boost wages, and help revitalize the old industrial Midwest. But it was written by Democrats who see the party’s future in the Sunbelt suburbs and who prioritize decarbonization above other political goals. They knew — they couldn’t help but know — that much of the law’s investment would flow to the manufacturing centers of the American South and Southwest, where “Right to Work” laws restrict worker power and corporate-friendly policies reign.
On the other side, a set of critics allege that Republicans’ attack on the IRA doesn’t need to make political sense. Kate Aronoff, a New Republic staff writer who has been guardedly skeptical of the law, argued last week that House Republicans don’t care about the political fallout of killing the IRA because they’re protected from virtually any type of political fallout at all, thanks to gerrymandering, their deep-pocketed corporate donors, and a sharply conservative Supreme Court. In that view, the attempts to secure the IRA by appealing to Republicans’ constituents is futile: The party will simply do what it wants.
At stake here is a deep but important disagreement about the IRA. The flagship law aims to cleave fossil-fuel interests from the rest of the corporate bolus: to make it so attractive for banks, carmakers, electric utilities, steelmakers, manufacturers, and everyone else to decarbonize that they had no choice but to do so.Can that happen? Will that happen? This is the question on which the IRA’s advocates and its climate-friendly critics disagree. It is also is the question on which the fate of the IRA — and American climate policy — turns.
In her piece, Aronoff notes that fossil-fuel companies donated 13 times more to politicians in 2018 than renewable companies did. I found that to be oddly encouraging: If money alone is the issue, then the fossil-fuel industry’s alleged grip on the GOP could loosen over time. (The gap is already narrowing: Oil and gas-affiliated groups gave about six times more than renewables groups did in the most recent election cycle.)
The far more dangerous possibility for the IRA is that Republicans cannot be won over with money or argument. The party may just vibe with fossil fuels. Lawmakers and officials might feel an ideological affinity for oil and gas that goes deeper than those fuels’ economic or security benefits. During President Donald Trump’s term, he sometimes seemed to speak about fossil fuels not as a necessary evil, but as a positive good. This sometimes verged on trolling, but that was the point too: for Trump, at least, that it triggered liberals only underscored its correctitude. If that view were to break out into the party at large, it would spell an end to any kind of bipartisan shift on climate policy.
Which is all to say: Republicans probably won’t repeal the IRA this week.
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Republicans are more likely to accuse Democrats, and vice versa, but there are also some surprising areas of agreement.
Electricity is getting more expensive. In the past 12 months, electricity prices have increased more than twice as fast as overall inflation — and the most recent government inflation data, released last week, shows prices are continuing to rise.
The Trump administration knows that power bills are a political liability. In a recent interview with Politico, Energy Secretary Chris Wright affirmed that power prices were rising, but blamed the surge on “momentum” from Biden and Obama-era policies. “That momentum is pushing prices up right now,” he said. But the Trump administration, he continued, is “going to get blamed because we’re in office.”
Is he right? Who do Americans blame for rising power prices?
It might not be who you think.
A new Heatmap Pro poll of more than 3,700 registered voters across the United States finds that Americans tend to look beyond national politics for at least some of the causes of electricity price inflation.
When asked who they blame for rising power prices, Americans are more likely to say that rising energy demand, their local utility, and their state government are to blame than they are to cite the Trump or Biden administrations.
Americans also blame extreme weather and the oil and gas industry at least somewhat for electricity inflation. Only then do they blame a national political party.
Beyond those, other trendy national topics made only a dent in how Americans think about rising power prices. About 28% of Americans said that the construction of new data centers bears “a lot” of the blame for spiking power prices. Forty-three percent of Americans said that the data center buildout should get “a little” of the blame, and about a quarter of Americans said data centers were “not at all” responsible.
The renewable energy industry, which President Trump has claimed is causing the surge, also failed to get much traction among Americans. More than a third of respondents said that renewables were “not at all” responsible for rising electricity prices, while 27% said that they bore “a lot” of responsibility. At the same time, Americans aren’t pinning the increase on tariffs: 40% of registered voters said that in their view, the new trade levies were not the cause of higher bills.
In general, Americans aren’t wrong to look to their state government when thinking about their power bills. Although many states participate in regional electricity markets, electricity is primarily regulated at the state level by public utility commissioners. States really do bear more responsibility for power prices than they do over, say, the price of a loaf of bread — or a gallon of gasoline.
No matter their self-reported political affiliation, Americans still tend to blame their state government, rising demand, and their local utility for rising power bills.
But there are trends. Democrats, of course, are far more likely to blame the Trump administration and Republicans — as well as tariffs — for electricity inflation. Republicans likewise blame the Biden administration and Democrats in much greater numbers.
Nearly 80% of Republicans say the renewable energy industry bears some amount of blame for rising prices, although only 36% of GOP respondents said it bore “a lot” of responsibility. But more than half of Republicans also allocated “a lot” or “a little” blame to the oil and gas industry.
Some causes seemed to unite respondents across the parties. Roughly the same share of Democrats, Republicans, and independents said that the buildout of new data centers was putting upward pressure on power prices.
Independent voters turned to the same big three explanations as other registered voters. But they were much more likely to blame Trump, tariffs, and the oil industry than Republicans were. Only a little more than a quarter of independents said that the renewable energy industry bore “a lot” of the blame for power price spikes as well.
In my reporting, I’ve found that surging investment in the local distribution grid — literally, the small-scale poles, wires, and transformers that get electricity to businesses and households — is the biggest driver of rising power prices. Extreme weather, higher natural gas prices, and — in some markets — rising power demand, especially from data centers, also play a role.
Some experts blame those drivers of higher bills on underlying failures — such as too little oversight from state-level regulators or excessive investment from utilities — that show up in this poll result. But just at a mechanical level, many Americans did cite some of the same causes that utility researchers themselves do. Most Americans, for instance, said that extreme weather and especially “investments in the local electric grid” are driving rising bills, although they didn’t assign it the same prominence that I would. About three quarters of respondents said that those causes bore “a lot” or “a little” of the blame.
Of course, just because rising grid spending, extreme weather, and higher gas prices have driven electricity inflation so far doesn’t mean that they will continue to do so. The Energy Information Administration projects that demand will keep rising, especially if the artificial intelligence boom continues. The Trump administration’s decision to hike taxes on electricity equipment — via tariffs and recent changes in President Trump’s spending bill — may eventually push up costs as well. So too will the Trump administration’s regulatory war on some types of new electricity infrastructure, including offshore wind farms and long-distance transmission lines.
Those policies may eventually hit voters — and their wallets. But right now, Americans aren’t looking at Washington, D.C., when thinking about their power bills.
The Heatmap Pro poll of 3,741 American registered voters was conducted by Embold Research via text-to-web responses from August 22 to 29, 2025. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.
Interested in more exclusive polling and insights? Explore Heatmap Pro here.
Current conditions: A prolonged heatwave in Mississippi is breaking nearly century-old temperature records and driving the thermometer up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit again this week • A surge of tropical moisture is steaming the West Coast, with temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than average • Heavy rainfall has set off landslide warnings in every major country in West Africa.
The Trump administration asked a federal judge on Friday to withdraw the Department of the Interior’s approval of a wind farm off the coast of Maryland, Reuters reported. Known as the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, the $6 billion array of as many as 114 turbines in a stretch of federal ocean was set to begin construction next year. Developer US Wind — a joint venture between the investment firm Apollo Global Management and a subsidiary of the Italian industrial giant Toto Holding SpA — had already faced pushback from Republicans. The town of Ocean City sued to overturn the project’s permits at the federal and state levels. When the Interior Department first announced it was reconsidering the permits in August, Mary Beth Carozza, the Republican state senator representing the area, welcomed the move but warned in a statement the news site Maryland Matters cited that opponents’ campaign against the project, known as Stop Offshore Wind, “won’t stop fighting until the Maryland offshore wind project is completely dead.”
It’s all part of President Donald Trump’s widening “war against wind” energy that kicked off the moment he returned to the White House and issued an order halting approvals for new offshore and onshore turbines. If you read the timeline Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo neatly charted out earlier this month, you’ll notice how quickly the administration’s multi-agency crackdown on wind power expanded, particularly after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4. The industry is just starting to push back. As I reported in this newsletter two weeks ago, the owners of the Rhode Island offshore project Revolution Wind that Trump halted unilaterally filed a lawsuit claiming the administration illegally withdrew its already-finalized permits. US Wind said it intends “to vigorously defend those permits in federal court, and we are confident that the court will uphold their validity and prevent any adverse action against them.”
EPA chief Lee Zeldin stands next to Vice President JD Vance. Megan Varner/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday proposed killing the long-standing program requiring thousands of facilities across the country to report the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gas they release into the atmosphere every year. Since 2010, the government has collected the data on emissions from coal-fired plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and other industrial sites, which now represents what The New York Times called “the country’s most comprehensive way to track greenhouse gases.”
The decision could have grave consequences for carbon capture and storage. Some had hoped Trump’s vision of unleashing fossil fuels might spur more investment in the technology to capture emissions before they enter the atmosphere and recycle the gas for industrial use or store it in wells underground. But the mix of hardware, pipelines, and storage sites remains so underdeveloped that the EPA in June said it’s “extremely unlikely that the infrastructure necessary for CCS can be deployed” by the 2032 deadline a previous Biden-era rule had set for equipping fossil fuel plants with carbon capture technology, E&E News reported at the time. Eliminating the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program hampers all the federal programs that rely on its data. That includes the carbon capture subsidy, known by its tax code section head 45Q, which Republicans recently dialed up in Trump’s reconciliation law. The rules for claiming the tax credit include filing technical details to the EPA’s emissions program. When Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer reached out to the EPA to ask whether gutting the database posed a setback for companies looking to claim the credits, an agency spokesperson pointed him to a line in Friday’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
In a flurry of deals on Sunday night, at least a half-dozen U.S. nuclear companies unveiled plans for new facilities in the United Kingdom as Washington looks to fill order books for its fuel makers and next-generation reactor companies and London looks to ramp up its atomic energy output. Among the deals:
The announcements add to what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called the “nuclear power dealmaking boom.” In a recent paper, policy experts at the center left think tank Third Way concluded that “the U.S. and U.K. are well-suited for further collaboration on nuclear, specifically SMR and Gen IV technologies,” and “could reduce deployment costs through learning rates and commissioning larger order books.”
Nearly a decade of bureaucratic tinkering at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission came to an end so abruptly it’s most succinctly captured in onomatopoeia: “Womp,” Harvard Law School’s electricity law program director Ari Peskoe wrote on X. “With one paragraph, FERC ends a 7.5-year effort to update its approach to reviewing proposed interstate gas pipelines.” The measure would have implemented a new formula for assessing the value of new interstate gas lines that would have weighted the environment more heavily than the existing methodology, which was written in 1999. But the push to modernize the criteria after three decades “was never a serious effort,” former FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee posted on X. “We got bullied into starting it and put on a show for years to hold protesters at bay. Just being honest. R and D led @ferc majorities both faked it.”
Ram has canceled its electric pickup truck, long expected to be a competitor to the battery-powered versions of the Ford F-150 and Chevrolet Silverado, InsideEVs reported. Parent company Stellantis said it would discontinue the 2026 battery-powered Ram 1500 REV “as demand for full-size battery-electric trucks slows in North America.” Rivals such as GM have seen a boom in EV sales in recent months, that is likely driven by the law Trump signed that rapidly phased out federal tax credits after this month. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote recently, August turned out to be the best month for EV sales “in U.S. history, with just over 146,000 units sold, comprising almost 10% of total car sales that month.” Ford is still investing in what is billed as a Model T moment for EV construction. And, as I have reported here in this newsletter, Tesla’s plunge in popularity — even with former customers — has opened up more of the EV market to other vendors.
Though Ram’s all-electric pickup truck turned out to be a non-starter, its extended-range battery electric truck, formerly known as the Ramcharger, will now take on the 1500 REV moniker with a 2026 launch date. As Heatmap contributor and Shift Key podcast cohost Jesse Jenkins wrote when the Ramcharger was announced, “The economics and capabilities of a range-extended EV thus make a lot of sense, especially for massive vehicles like the full-size trucks and SUVs so many Americans love. And they squash any concerns about range anxiety that might give buyers pause.”
Scientists have long sought an economical way to harness renewable power from waves. But as Julian Spector wrote in Canary Media: “The first rule of wave power startups is that they always fail. But a plucky company called Eco Wave Power is doing its best to prove that rule wrong, and it just notched an important win in Los Angeles.” The company this month installed a 100-kilowatt system on a concrete wharf in the port of Los Angeles, with seven steel floaters affixed to a central structure that bobs in the waves, “building up hydraulic pressure that gets converted to electric power by machinery in shipping containers on shore.” If the pilot pans out and Eco Wave gets a chance to bid on a larger area of the port, the technology could — at least in theory — generate power 90% of the time, supplying electrons at a capacity factor higher than almost any other energy source besides nuclear.
Why killing a government climate database could essentially gut a tax credit
The Trump administration’s bid to end an Environmental Protection Agency program may essentially block any company — even an oil firm — from accessing federal subsidies for capturing carbon or producing hydrogen fuel.
On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed that it would stop collecting and publishing greenhouse gas emissions data from thousands of refineries, power plants, and factories across the country.
The Trump administration argues that the scheme, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, costs more than $2 billion and isn’t legally required under the Clean Air Act. Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, described the program as “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”
But the program is more important than the Trump administration lets on. It’s true that the policy, which required more than 8,000 different facilities around the country to report their emissions, helped the EPA and outside analysts estimate the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
But it did more than that. Over the past decade, the program had essentially become the master database of carbon pollution and emissions policy across the American economy. “Essentially everything the federal government does related to emissions reductions is dependent on the [Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program],” Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me.
That means other federal programs — including those that Republicans in Congress have championed — have come to rely on the EPA database.
Among those programs: the federal tax credit for capturing and using carbon dioxide. Republicans recently increased the size of that subsidy, nicknamed 45Q after a section of the tax code, for companies that turn captured carbon into another product or use it to make oil wells more productive. Those changes were passed in President Trump’s big tax and spending law over the summer.
But Zeldin’s scheme to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program would place that subsidy off limits for the foreseeable future. Under federal law, companies can only claim the 45Q tax credit if they file technical details to the EPA’s emissions reporting program.
Another federal tax credit, for companies that use carbon capture to produce hydrogen fuel, also depends on the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. That subsidy hasn’t received the same friendly treatment from Republicans, and it will now phase out in 2028.
The EPA program is “the primary mechanism by which companies investing in and deploying carbon capture and hydrogen projects quantify the CO2 that they’re sequestering, such that they qualify for tax incentives,” Jane Flegal, a former Biden administration appointee who worked on industrial emissions policy, told me. She is now the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation.
“The only way for private capital to be put to work to deploy American carbon capture and hydrogen projects is to quantify the carbon dioxide that they’re sequestering, in some way,” she added. That’s what the EPA program does: It confirms that companies are storing or using as much carbon as they claim they are to the IRS.
The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is “how the IRS communicates with the EPA” when companies claim the 45Q credit, Cavanaugh said. “The IRS obviously has taxpayer-sensitive information, so they’re not able to give information to the EPA about who or what is claiming the credit.” The existence of the database lets the EPA then automatically provide information to the IRS, so that no confidential tax information is disclosed.
Zeldin’s announcement that the EPA would phase out the program has alarmed companies planning on using the tax credit. In a statement, the Carbon Capture Coalition — an alliance of oil companies, manufacturers, startups, and NGOs — called the reporting program the “regulatory backbone” of the carbon capture tax credit.
“It is not an understatement that the long-term success of the carbon management industry rests on the robust reporting mechanisms” in the EPA’s program, the group said.
Killing the EPA program could hurt American companies in other ways. Right now, companies that trade with European firms depend on the EPA data to pass muster with the EU’s carbon border adjustment tax. It’s unclear how they would fare in a world with no EPA data.
It could also sideline GOP proposals. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, has suggested that imports to the United States should pay a foreign pollution fee — essentially, a way of accounting for the implicit subsidy of China’s dirty energy system. But the data to comply with that law would likely come from the EPA’s greenhouse gas database, too.
Ending the EPA database wouldn’t necessarily spell permanent doom for the carbon capture tax credit, but it would make it much harder to use in the years to come. In order to re-open the tax credit for applications, the Treasury Department, the Energy Department, the Interior Department, and the EPA would have to write new rules for companies that claim the 45Q credit. These rules would go to the end of the long list of regulations that the Treasury Department must write after Trump’s spending law transformed the tax code.
That could take years — and it could sideline projects now under construction. “There are now billions of dollars being invested by the private sector and the government in these technologies, where the U.S. is positioned to lead globally,” Flegal said. Changing the rules would “undermine any way for the companies to succeed.”
Ditching the EPA database, however, very well could doom carbon capture-based hydrogen projects. Under the terms of Trump’s tax law, companies that want to claim the hydrogen credit must begin construction on their projects by 2028.
The Trump administration seems to believe, too, that gutting the EPA database may require new rules for the carbon capture tax credit. When asked for comment, an EPA spokesperson pointed me to a line in the agency’s proposal: “We anticipate that the Treasury Department and the IRS may need to revise the regulation,” the legal proposal says. “The EPA expects that such amendments could allow for different options for stakeholders to potentially qualify for tax credits.”
The EPA spokesperson then encouraged me to ask the Treasury Department for anything more about “specific implications.”