If the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act’s green tax credits were a sports game, we’d be at halftime. The House passed a version of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” that cuts key green tax credits, and now the Senate has to decide whether the credits will be repealed.
During panel discussions and interviews at Sustainability Week USA, Economist Impact’s clean tech conference, clean energy consultants expressed frustration over recent setbacks, as well as determination to stay the course.
David Turk, deputy secretary of the Department of Energy during the Biden administration, said in his keynote that he wished Congress had passed the IRA earlier, so Republican districts could have seen the impacts sooner.
“The reason why I don’t think [the IRA] influenced that many Republican representatives—in fact, it influenced zero at the end of the day in terms of who voted, who threatened to vote against the package—was that it wasn’t the jobs already there and they were being pulled back,” Turk told the event’s audience. “It was just jobs that were coming there in a year or two, and it just makes it that much less compelling.”
Similarly, Bipartisan Climate Trust advisor Robin Millican said that “telling people you should fight for these things because it creates jobs” was an uphill battle, especially with Republican representatives voting along party lines. “It is really hard to do climate policy through the tax code,” she said, which is vulnerable to political swings.
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“What we’ve had is this very much boom and bust cycle where a tax credit is available and then it gets rescinded, and I think it’s really hard for industry to plan around that with certainty,” Millican said in a panel discussion.
Or maybe it was how the law was branded, Galvanize Climate Solutions’ Chief Strategy Officer David Livingston said: Something like “the Energy Freedom Tax Cut Act,” because in this situation, “semantics matter.”
No matter what, it’s not over, the credits are currently good law—and ClearPath CEO Jeremy Harrell said he actually feels optimistic about how things will play out in the Senate. ClearPath is a conservative clean energy organization.
“I just took the train from DC this morning. I think things are trending in a better direction on the Senate side,” Harrell said during a panel discussion. “You are going to see many of these [incentives] stay in place, particularly for key technologies that we know we need from a climate perspective.”
That’s because, according to Harrell, rising energy demand will drive the need for all forms of energy.
“We can build once we get out of this place,” he said, “and drive forward on things like permit reform that are going to be necessary to scale up new technology.”