Trump bill takes a 'big, beautiful' bite out of US climate progress

The “big, beautiful bill” is expected to make a major dent in the U.S.’s climate progress, adding significantly more planet-warming emissions to the atmosphere.

Models of the legislation that have emerged since its passage earlier this month show that U.S. emissions will rise as a result of its implementation.

One from climate think tank C2ES found that U.S. emissions will be 8 percent more than they would have been otherwise as a result of the package.

“An 8% increase in our emissions is … still a massive amount of emissions,” said Brad Townsend, the group’s vice president for policy and outreach.

Townsend said that taking into account all of the efforts to reduce U.S. emissions over the last 20 years, the bill represents “rolling back a third of that progress with a stroke of a pen.”

“From an emissions perspective, this bill is a disaster,” he said. 

The Trump-backed measure both repeals spending aimed at reducing emissions that had been passed by Democrats and creates more opportunities for planet-warming fossil fuels.

Its most significant provisions repeal tax credits for climate-friendly energy technologies including wind and solar energy, as well as electric vehicles. 

These tax credits in particular were considered a massive step toward reducing emissions when they passed in 2022 as part of the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act. 

It also repeals programs that would have paid for low-carbon and anti-pollution projects, including in underserved neighborhoods.

On fossil fuels, the legislation includes tax breaks for oil, gas and coal and opens up more opportunities to drill on public lands and offshore.

Since President Trump signed the bill on July 4, several models have indicated that provisions such as these will take a bite out of efforts to reduce U.S. emissions. 

One model, from Princeton University, finds that without the “big, beautiful bill” the U.S. would cut its planet-heating emissions by 32 percent by 2035. With the bill, emissions are expected to only drop by 25 percent compared to where they were in 2005.

If Biden-era policies remained in place, including not only the tax credits but also regulations, emissions would drop between 40 and 44 percent, the model finds. 

A slightly more optimistic model from the Rhodium Group found that without the bill, emissions would be 31 percent to 51 percent lower in 2035 when compared to 2005. Now, they’ll only drop by between 27 and 44 percent during that period.

Ben King, the lead author of the analysis, said that this is a “pretty substantial difference” — saying it’s about 575 million extra metric tons of carbon dioxide in the year 2035 alone.

That’s the equivalent of putting an additional 134 million gas-powered cars on the road for a year.

The model projects that as a result of the bill, the number of new green energy projects on the grid between 2025 and 2035 will be 53-59 percent lower than it otherwise would have been.

The Biden administration set a goal of cutting U.S. emissions by at least half by 2030. The Trump administration has not set its own climate goals, and the president has repeatedly downplayed the impacts of climate change and sought to bolster planet-warming fossil fuels. 

Climate change refers to the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere, which is driven by human activities including fossil fuels and agriculture. This phenomenon makes extreme weather more frequent and intense.

Over the past few decades, U.S. emissions have been declining amid a shift away from coal-fired power. 

The bill passed around the same time that the U.S. is seeing instances of extreme weather including recent heat waves and devastating flooding that has killed more than 130 people in Texas.

While the U.S. is just one country, King noted that “every extra ton of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has some impact on the likelihood of extreme weather.”