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Sparks

Can an Advertising Blitz Teach Americans What’s In Biden’s Climate Law?

No one knows what’s in the Inflation Reduction Act — but maybe $80 million can help.

President Biden.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A climate advocacy group is planning to spend $80 million on advertising in an effort to boost President Biden’s environmental bona fides ahead of next year’s election, The New York Times reports. Climate Power will use television and digital ads to remind — or, in many cases, educate — voters of Biden’s green credentials. “There is a huge swath of people who just don’t know anything,” Climate Power’s executive director, Lori Lodes, told the Times. “We need to make sure that the Biden coalition, the folks who got him into office in 2020, sees that he’s delivered on his promises. And he has.”

The assertion that many voters “just don’t know anything” on the issue squares with results from Heatmap’s own polling from earlier this year, which reveal that a majority of American adults — including 53% of Democrats and a whopping 73% of self-identified independents — know “not much” or “nothing at all” about the Inflation Reduction Act, the signature legislative and environmental achievement of Biden’s presidency.

Similarly, while 70 percent of respondents to a July Washington Post poll said that the next president should use the powers of government to combat climate change, 57 percent disapproved of Biden’s handling of the environment.

Some young voters are angry at Biden’s approval of the $8 billion Willow oil drilling project, but Lodes sounds unconcerned. “Climate activists are going to push and push,” she told the Times. “And you know what? The Biden administration need[s] to be pushed to do more and to go further. But at the end of the day, the reality is that he has done more than any other president in American history on climate.” And, of course, no matter how disappointed in Biden those activists might be, when it comes to climate, the likely alternative would be utterly disastrous.

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Sparks

Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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Green
Sparks

Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

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Sparks

Majority of North Carolina Voters Want to Keep the IRA, Poll Finds

The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.

A North Carolina sign and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.

The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)

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Green