When it passed in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act was hailed by Democrats and environmentalists as the most important piece of climate legislation in American history.
But today, as House Republicans debate whether to repeal the hundreds of billions of dollars that the law provides for solar panels, electric vehicles and other technologies designed to fight global warming, supporters of the law rarely mention the planet.
Instead, the law’s defenders argue that the tax credits for battery factories or wind farms are creating manufacturing jobs around the country and will reduce electricity prices and help the United States to compete in an A.I. race against China.
It’s a sign of how quickly climate has faded from the national agenda under President Trump, who has dismissed the risks of global warming and has rooted out any mention of climate change among federal agencies.
“We’re no longer talking about the environment,” said Chad Farrell, the founder of Encore Renewable Energy, based in Vermont. “We’re talking dollars and cents.”
Mr. Farrell was among the solar industry leaders who met in Washington last week to lobby Congress to preserve many of the law’s clean energy provisions, saying they were essential for the U.S. economy.
The fate of the clean energy tax credits is being hotly debated on Capitol Hill. The most recent version of the House Republicans’ far-reaching domestic policy bill would quickly phase out the biggest incentives for technologies like electric vehicles, batteries, wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear reactors and restrict tax breaks for domestic manufacturing. Some conservative Republicans want to entirely repeal the Inflation Reduction Act.
On the other side, three dozen Republicans in the House and four in the Senate say they want to preserve at least some incentives, such as those for nuclear power or domestic manufacturing, to protect jobs and bolster U.S. energy security.
“We must ensure certainty for current and future energy investments to meet the nation’s growing power demand and protect our constituents from higher energy costs,” Representative Jen Kiggans, Republican of Virginia, wrote in a recent letter joined by 13 colleagues from her party. Ms. Kiggans has been a vocal supporter of a giant wind farm under construction off the coast of her district.
In their pitch to lawmakers, many renewable energy companies have cast their industries as essential for achieving national energy dominance, a goal repeatedly mentioned by Mr. Trump.
One common argument: America’s demand for electricity is soaring, driven by a boom in A.I. data centers, and it’s difficult to build enough gas-fired power plants to supply all the extra power that the nation needs. Adding more solar, wind and batteries could be the country’s best hope for averting energy shortages, since they are relatively quick to construct, proponents say.
“Maybe before it was tie-dye T-shirts and hugging trees, but today we are a mature energy sector and a critical part of energizing America,” said Constantino Nicolaou, the chief executive of PanelClaw, a solar company based in Massachusetts that supplies mounting systems for rooftop solar projects.
“Yes, we love the environment, but don’t look at us like the environmentalists,” Mr. Nicolaou said.
Other companies warn that thousands of good-paying manufacturing jobs could disappear if Congress repealed the tax credits. Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed, businesses have announced more than $843 billion in clean energy investments, from wind farms in Wyoming to battery factories in Georgia. More than three-fourths of that spending is expected to occur in Republican-controlled districts.
If Republicans phase out the tax credits, “nearly 300 U.S. factories — mostly in red states — could close or never open,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.
On Monday, the solar association released a report estimating that 292,000 jobs and $220 billion in local investments might be lost if Congress ended the tax breaks for solar power, while warning of blackouts and higher electricity bills.
The report does not mention climate change. It’s a marked contrast with 2022, when the solar association released an analysis showing that additional solar deployment brought on by the Inflation Reduction Act would offset more than 655 million tons of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is driving global warming.
Even many environmental groups defending the law now sound like a green-tinged version of the Chamber of Commerce.
Repealing the tax credits “means higher gas and electricity costs for struggling families and businesses, tanking the U.S. manufacturing resurgence and ceding leadership to China,” said Sara Chieffo, the vice president of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters.
Other companies, including makers of electric vehicles, are trying to persuade lawmakers that the United States could lose a technology race with China if the law were gutted.
“We can’t lose sight of the fact that the automotive industry is global, and consumers all over the world are increasingly preferring electric vehicles for a variety of reasons,” said Michael Tubman, director of federal affairs at Lucid Motors, a start-up manufacturing electric cars in Arizona. “The American auto industry is in fierce competition with foreign competitors, particularly Chinese automakers.”
The shift away from focusing on climate change is a throwback to an earlier era of clean energy politics, said Alex Trembath, the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research organization.
For many years, subsidies for new energy technologies like wind, solar and nuclear power had broad bipartisan support and were often renewed under Republican presidents, in part because they were seen as essential to accelerate technological innovation and improve U.S. energy security.
That changed during the Biden administration, when Democrats made fighting climate change a top political priority and dramatically expanded the tax credits as part of a push to quickly pivot the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels.
“Once all these tax credits started getting described as once-in-a-generation climate policy, that went a long ways toward turning Republicans away,” Mr. Trembath said. But in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, he has written, climate change looks less like a winning issue for Democrats.
Whether Republicans are swayed by the economic arguments for the Inflation Reduction Act remains to be seen. Conservative critics have pushed back hard, saying that clean energy subsidies could cost taxpayers trillions of dollars.
“The Inflation Reduction Act has ballooned into one of the biggest government boondoggles in history,” said Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative research group focused on energy. “That’s real money that could be returned to taxpayers, fueling private-sector innovation, job creation and consumer-driven growth instead of funneling taxpayer dollars into a narrow, government-directed vision of the economy.”
Some Senate Republicans have suggested phasing out the subsidies for wind and solar — on the grounds that those industries are mature and don’t need further help — while maintaining tax credits for earlier-stage technologies like advanced nuclear reactors or enhanced geothermal plants.
That could result in more planet-warming emissions. An analysis by the Rhodium Group, a research firm, found that repealing tax credits for electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels could lead to hundreds of millions of tons of extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere each year by 2035.
Yet others say that the broader effect that the tax credits would have on emissions has been overstated. That’s because many solar and wind projects across the country are currently being held up by delays in local permitting or regulations that make it difficult to build large transmission lines, blunting the law’s climate impact.
“There are a lot of reforms we could make that would have a much bigger impact on decarbonization than the I.R.A.,” said Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank. “In some ways the fight over subsidies has hijacked that conversation.”
Whatever happens to the Inflation Reduction Act, many supporters say it was a promising attempt at creating a durable climate policy in the United States.
Before the law, climate activists often favored restrictions and penalties, such as taxes on emissions from oil, gas and coal. But countries, like Canada and Australia, that enacted such policies later overturned them because they were unpopular.
The Inflation Reduction Act was designed to be a “carrot” rather than a “stick,” said Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who helped craft parts of the law. It led to investment, and that has made the policies stickier.
“Climate policy is hard,” Ms. Stokes said. “We’re trying to wean ourselves off a product that is represented by the most powerful industry on the planet.” But the tax incentives for clean energy, she added, still have a better shot at surviving “than anything else ever has.”
Referring to the law’s fate in Congress, Ms. Stokes said, “It’s not dead yet.”
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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