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Sparks

The Biden Administration Is Unleashing $20 Billion for Green Banks

Yet another Inflation Reduction Act program launches today.

Money and cute critters.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Vice President Kamala Harris and EPA administrator Michael Regan are in Charlotte, North Carolina this morning to announce the award of … wait for it … $20 billion dollars for climate mitigation and adaptation projects. This is the official launch of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was part of the Inflation Reduction Act — in fact, it is the single largest and most flexible program in the IRA. (The remaining $7 billion is earmarked for “Solar for All,” a separate initiative that will launch later this year.)

The money will go to eight organizations and help “create a national clean financing network for clean energy and climate solutions.” The awardees include:

  • The Coalition for Green Capital, a nonprofit that got $5 billion to help leverage a network of green lenders. More than 50% of its work under the grant will be aimed at low-income communities.
  • Rewiring America, which will share a $2 billion award with four other housing and community-building groups, including Enterprise Community Partners, LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation), Habitat for Humanity, and United Way to create a national financing program to decarbonize housing. The initiative will focus 75% of its investments in low-income and disadvantaged communities.
  • Community Preservation Corporation, a U.S. Treasury Department-certified community development financial institution and part of an umbrella coalition known as the Climate United Fund. Together with other nonprofit financial institutions, it will receive nearly $7 billion to lend to traditionally underserved populations, including rural and Tribal communities.

The general idea is to funnel the money into green lending programs, colloquially known as “green banks,” that will offer low-cost loans and other financing options for consumers, community organizations, businesses, and local governments. Projects financed through the fund could do everything from residential electrification, to green public transit, to solar on schools, to storm water management.

EPA anticipates the awardees will mobilize $7 of private capital for every $1 of federal funds — a total investment of nearly $150 billion. Each of the winners will get access to their share of the funding in the next six months, and will have until 2031 to use it.

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Sparks

Trump’s OMB Pick Wants to Purge the Government of ‘Climate Fanaticism’

Re-meet the once and future director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.

Russ Vought.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

President-elect Donald Trump spent the Friday evening before Thanksgiving filling out nearly the rest of his Cabinet. He plans for his Treasury secretary to be a hedge fund manager who’s called the Inflation Reduction Act “the Doomsday machine for the deficit”; he’s named a vaccine safety skeptic to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and his pick to head the Department of Labor is a Republican congresswoman who may want to ease the enforcement of child labor rules if confirmed.

And — in one of the most consequential moves yet for America’s standing in the fight to mitigate climate change — Trump also named Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The decision comes as no surprise — Vought served as deputy director of the OMB under Trump in 2018 and took over the top job in 2019, serving until the end of Trump’s first presidency. The strategic communications group Climate Power had been sounding the alarm on his potential return to the office since this spring, which included sharing their research on him with me.

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Trump’s Treasury Pick Called the IRA ‘the Doomsday Machine for the Deficit’

Meet Scott Bessent.

Scott Bessent.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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In contrast to the quick and instinctive picks for major posts like secretary of defense, secretary of state, and attorney general (albeit, two picks for that job), Trump deliberated on the Treasury pick, according to reports, cycling through candidates including Bessent, long the frontrunner for the job, his transition chief Howard Lutnick, private equity titan Marc Rowan, and former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh.

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Ditching the Paris Agreement Will Throw the U.S. Into COP Purgatory

This would be the second time the U.S. has exited the climate treaty — and it’ll happen faster than the first time.

Donald Trump and the Eiffel Tower.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As the annual United Nations climate change conference reaches the end of its scheduled programming, this could represent the last time for at least the next four years that the U.S. will bring a strong delegation with substantial negotiating power to the meetings. That’s because Donald Trump has once again promised to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty adopted at the same climate conference in 2015, which unites nearly every nation on earth in an effort to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius.

Existentially, we know what this means: The loss of climate leadership and legitimacy in the eyes of other nations, as well as delayed progress on emissions reductions. But tangibly, there’s no precedent for exactly what this looks like when it comes to U.S. participation in future UN climate conferences, a.k.a. COPs, the official venue for negotiation and decision-making related to the agreement. That’s because when Trump withdrew the U.S. from Paris the first time, the agreement’s three year post-implementation waiting period and one-year withdrawal process meant that by the time we were officially out, it was November 2020 and Biden was days away from being declared the winner of that year’s presidential election. That year’s conference was delayed by a year due to the Covid pandemic, by which point Biden had fully recommitted the U.S. to the treaty.

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