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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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On the budget debate, MethaneSAT’s untimely demise, and Nvidia
Current conditions: The northwestern U.S. faces “above average significant wildfire potential” for July • A month’s worth of rain fell over just 12 hours in China’s Hubei province, forcing evacuations • The top floor of the Eiffel Tower is closed today due to extreme heat.
The Senate finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday. The excise tax on renewables that had been stuffed into the bill over the weekend was removed after Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote. In her piece examining exactly what’s in the bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains that even without the excise tax, the bill would “gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules.” Debate on the legislation begins on the House floor today. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he doesn’t like the legislation, and a handful of other Republicans have already signaled they won’t vote for it.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week sent the White House a proposal that is expected to severely weaken the federal government’s ability to rein in planet-warming pollution. Details of the proposal, titled “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration,” aren’t clear yet, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly been urging the Trump administration to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which explicitly identified greenhouse gases as a public health threat and gave the EPA the authority to regulate them. Striking down that finding would “free EPA from the legal obligation to regulate climate pollution from most sources, including power plants, cars and trucks, and virtually any other source,” wrote Alex Guillén at Politico. The title of the proposal suggests it aims to roll back EPA tailpipe emissions standards, as well.
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So long, MethaneSAT, we hardly knew ye. The Environmental Defense Fund said Tuesday that it had lost contact with its $88 million methane-detecting satellite, and that the spacecraft was “likely not recoverable.” The team is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. MethaneSAT launched into orbit last March and was collecting data about methane pollution from global fossil fuel infrastructure. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas,” EDF said. “We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released. This capacity will be valuable to other missions.“ The good news is that MethaneSAT was far from the only methane-tracking satellite in orbit.
Nvidia is backing a D.C.-based startup called Emerald AI that “enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand.” Its goal is to make the grid more reliable while still meeting the growing energy demands of AI computing. The startup emerged from stealth this week with a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures and including funding from Nvidia. Emerald AI’s platform “acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data center,” Nvidia explains. A field test of the software during a grid stress event in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated a 25% reduction in the energy consumption of AI workloads over three hours. “Renewable energy, which is intermittent and variable, is easier to add to a grid if that grid has lots of shock absorbers that can shift with changes in power supply,” said Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s chief scientist and a professor at Boston University. “Data centers can become some of those shock absorbers.”
In case you missed it: California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday rolled back the state’s landmark Environmental Quality Act. The law, which had been in place since 1970, required environmental reviews for construction projects and had become a target for those looking to alleviate the state’s housing crisis. The change “means most urban developers will no longer have to study, predict, and mitigate the ways that new housing might affect local traffic, air pollution, flora and fauna, noise levels, groundwater quality, and objects of historic or archeological significance,” explainedCal Matters. On the other hand, it could also mean that much-needed housing projects get approved more quickly.
Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries today, and analysts are projecting a year-over-year drop somewhere from 11% to 13%.
Jesse teaches Rob the basics of energy, power, and what it all has to do with the grid.
What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?
On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This is the start of a new series: Shift Key Summer School. It’s a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, we try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s start with the joule. The joule is the SI unit for both work and energy. And the basic definition of energy is the ability to do work — not work in a job, but like work in the physics sense, meaning we are moving or displacing an object around. So a joule is defined as 1 newton-meter, among other things. It has an electrical equivalent, too. A newton is a unit of force, and force is accelerating a mass, from basic physics, over some distance in this case. So 1 meter of distance.
So we can break that down further, right? And we can describe the newton as 1 kilogram accelerated at 1 meter per second, squared. And then the work part is over a distance of one meter. So that kind of gives us a sense of something you feel. A kilogram, right, that’s 2.2 pounds. I don’t know, it’s like … I’m trying to think of something in my life that weighs a kilogram. Rob, can you think of something? A couple pounds of food, I guess. A liter of water weighs a kilogram by definition, as well. So if you’ve got like a liter bottle of soda, there’s your kilogram.
Then I want to move it over a meter. So I have a distance I’m displacing it. And then the question is, how fast do I want to do that? How quickly do I want to accelerate that movement? And that’s the acceleration part. And so from there, you kind of get a physical sense of this. If something requires more energy, if I’m moving more mass around, or if I’m moving that mass over a longer distance — 1 meter versus 100 meters versus a kilometer, right? — or if I want to accelerate that mass faster over that distance, so zero to 60 in three seconds versus zero to 60 in 10 seconds in your car, that’s going to take more energy.
Robinson Meyer: I am looking up what weighs … Oh, here we go: A 13-inch MacBook Air weighs about, a little more than a kilogram.
Jenkins: So your laptop. If you want to throw your laptop over a meter, accelerating at a pace of 1 meter per second, squared …
Meyer: That’s about a joule.
Jenkins: … that’s about a joule.
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
If the Senate reconciliation bill gets enacted as written, you’ve got about 92 days left to seal the deal.
If you were thinking about buying or leasing an electric vehicle at some point, you should probably get on it like, right now. Because while it is not guaranteed that the House will approve the budget reconciliation bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday, it is highly likely. Assuming the bill as it’s currently written becomes law, EV tax credits will be gone as of October 1.
The Senate bill guts the subsidies for consumer purchases of electric vehicles, a longstanding goal of the Trump administration. Specifically, it would scrap the 30D tax credit by September 30 of this year, a harsher cut-off than the version of the bill that passed the House, which would have axed the credit by the end of 2025 except for automakers that had sold fewer than 200,000 electric vehicles. The credit as it exists now is worth up to $7,500 for cars with an MSRP below $55,000 (and trucks and sports utility vehicles under $80,000), and, under the Inflation Reduction Act, would have lasted through the end of 2032. The Senate bill also axes the $4,000 used EV tax credit at the end of September.
“Long story short, the credits under the current legislation are only going to be on the books through the end of September,” Corey Cantor, the research director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. “Now is definitely a good time, if you’re interested in an EV, to look at the market.”
The Senate applied the same strict timeline to credits for clean commercial vehicles, both new and used. For home EV chargers, the tax credit will now expire at the end of June next year.
While EVs were on the road well before the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, what the new tax credit did was help build out a truly domestic electric vehicle market, Cantor said. “You have a bunch of refreshed EV models from major automakers,” Cantor told me, including “more affordable models in different segments, and many of them qualify for the credit.”
These include cars produceddomestically by Kia,Hyundai, and Chevrolet. But of course, the biggest winner from the credit is Tesla, whose Model Y was the best-selling car in the world in 2023.
Tesla shares were down over 5.5% in Tuesday afternoon trading, though not just because of Congress. JPMorgan also released an analyst report Monday arguing that the decline in sales seen in the first quarter would accelerate in the second quarter. President Trump, with whom Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an extremely public falling out last month, suggested on social media Monday night that the government efficiency department Musk himself formerly led should “take a good, hard, look” at the subsidies Musk receives across his many businesses. Trump also said that he would “take a look” at Musk’s United States citizenship in response to reporters’ questions about it.
Cantor told me that he expects a surge of consumer attention to the EV market if the bill passes in its current form. “You’ve seen more customers pull their purchase ahead” when subsidies cut-offs are imminent, he said.
But overall, the end of the subsidy is likely to reduce EV sales from their previously expected levels.
Harvard researchers have estimated that the termination of the EV tax credit “would cut the EV share of new vehicle sales in 2030 by 6.0 percentage points,” from 48% of new sales by 2030 to 42%. Combined with other Trump initiatives such as terminating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program for publicly funded chargers (currently being litigated) and eliminating California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act that allowed it to set tighter vehicle emissions standards, the share of new car sales that are electric could fall to 32% in 2030.
But not all government support for electric vehicles will end by October 1, even if the bill gets the president’s signature in its current form.
“It’s important for consumers to know there are many states that offer subsidies, such as New York, and Colorado,” Cantor told me. That also goes for California, New Jersey, Nevada, and New Mexico. You can find the full list here.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to include a higher cost limit for trucks and SUVs.