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A year ago, America broke with a history of failure.
Today is the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s climate, health care, and tax law. The president is having a celebration at the White House, and seemingly every major newspaper and TV network is marking the occasion by looking back and forward.
I have spent the past year — and, frankly, the past years — covering the IRA. I covered the IRA long before it had its final, silly name. I stayed up all night in the Capitol to watch the Senate pass the law, and I went back a week later to see the House of Representatives pass it. I will be thinking about this law for a long time.
And a year on, what remains most astonishing to me is that the law exists at all.
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Scientists have known about the risk of climate change for more than a century — Svante Arrhenius, the great Swedish chemist, first warned that carbon pollution could raise global temperatures in 1896 — but for much of that time, the threat remained intellectual and far-off. That changed in the 1960s and 1970s, as researchers built the first computer models of the global climate, and it became clear that human-induced warming would happen on politically meaningful time scales.
Yet uncertainty remained. And the Reagan administration, dominated by anti-environmentalist ideologues, did not address climate change when it might have.
But climate change did not really make itself felt as a major political issue in the United States until 1988, when the NASA scientist Jim Hansen warned a Senate committee that the planet had now begun to warm. Arguably it did not emerge as an international issue until 1992, when representatives from around the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit.
For the next 30 years, the United States did not have a climate policy. The world’s hegemon and the flagbearer of democracy did not have an answer to the chemical crisis brewing in its atmosphere.
It was even worse than this, actually. Because not only did we lack an answer to solving it, but the United States was, in fact, the closest thing to a principal antagonist.
In the 1990s, the United States — its manufacturers, its railroads, its oil companies, its utilities, even its public-relations firms — originated the lie that climate change was somehow uncertain or made-up.
In 1997, the Senate voted 95-0 to block the United States from joining any climate treaty that mandated international emissions cuts.
In 2001, President George W. Bush — after promising to address climate change during his campaign — pulled out of negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol and announced a massive buildout of coal power plants. He began spouting denialism from the White House, telling reporters: “We do not know how much our climate could or will change in the future.”
Meanwhile, Germany was rolling out its generous solar subsidies, which would ultimately trigger massive cost declines in the price of solar power.
In 2005, the Bush administration fought a lawsuit that would have forced them to acknowledge that greenhouse gases are a form of pollution.
The European Union, meanwhile, was launching its massive carbon-pollution market.
A year later, the Supreme Court finally forced the issue and told the Environmental Protection Agency to study carbon dioxide. (It quickly found that greenhouse gases were, of course, a form of pollution, essentially forcing it to regulate them.) But Bush’s staff blocked the EPA by refusing to open its emails.
In 2009, the new administration only brought some relief. Barack Obama and John McCain had each promised to address climate change during the campaign, but Obama’s sweeping climate bill failed in the Senate. McCain did not help him revive it.
Through the 2010s, Obama implemented a piecemeal climate policy through regulation, encouraging tighter fuel standards for cars and trucks. He also helped secure the first truly global climate treaty, the Paris Agreement.
But he did not succeed in passing a comprehensive climate policy through Congress. Nor did he restrict carbon pollution from power plants before he left office.
And then President Donald Trump was elected. He pulled out of the Paris Agreement and renounced climate change as a “hoax.” He rolled back Obama’s climate rules. Trump seemed to revel in global warming and even framed carbon pollution as a positive good — because, after all, it was just one more way to own the libs.
Thirty years went by like this. For 30 years, this was the highest-profile failure of American politics. We were poisoning the world and doing almost nothing about it. And in fact our leaders often recklessly — joyfully! — made climate change worse.
Which is not to say that every rejected policy was perfect or that America was entirely feckless. Federal tax credits began encouraging wind and solar power in the 1990s and 2000s; American cities and states became some of the world’s most aggressive carbon regulators. But America as a whole remained negligent and idle.
That ignominy changed a year ago today. The Inflation Reduction Act is not perfect, and while it generously supports the technologies and tools needed for decarbonization, it contains no mechanism to mandate carbon cuts. It could still be undone by corporate greed or future maladministration. But it is a climate law and it could decarbonize much of the economy.
Fighting climate change will require countless difficult decisions and trade-offs. It will make us do hard things — technically, politically, even ecologically. But for 30 years, America refused even to do the easy things. That changed a year ago today. I am grateful for this climate law. It is not enough, it must not be enough, but it is far more than I once thought I might see.
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A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.