When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, he called it “the most aggressive action ever, ever, ever to confront the climate crisis.”
Now, Republicans are poised to undo the law, and scientists are warning the result would increase the likelihood that the Earth will heat up by an average of 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of this century.
“We’re already in an era now where climate change is going to be increasingly dangerous,” said Jonathan T. Overpeck, a climate scientist and the dean of the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability.
That amount of warming — 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) over the course of a century — may sound small. But 2024, the hottest year on record, was the first calendar year where the global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and it delivered deadly heat, violent hurricanes, severe drought and devastating wildfires.
The Biden administration’s strategy to fight climate change consisted of tax breaks to nudge the country toward clean energy and away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is heating the planet, paired with strict limits on pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes.
That would have put the United States on track to cut emissions about 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, closer to the goal that scientists say all industrialized nations must meet in order to keep global warming within relatively safe limits. The United States is currently the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China. But it is the country that has pumped the most carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
“By exiting the I.R.A. and eliminating other regulations and laws designed to protect the climate, the United States is going to make itself and the world more vulnerable to dangerous climate change going into the future,” Dr. Overpeck said.
President Trump has denounced the Inflation Reduction Act as the “green new scam.” He wants Congress to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal support for solar, wind and other clean energy and use the savings to help make his 2017 tax cuts permanent while also increasing spending on the military and immigration enforcement. At the same time, his administration is weakening or erasing limits on greenhouse gas emissions and encouraging more production of oil, gas and coal.
“President Trump was given a mandate to roll back the radical climate policies that are burning a hole through taxpayers’ wallets and jeopardizing the American dream for future generations,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The administration is delivering,” she added.
On Monday, Senate Republicans unveiled their plan to achieve Mr. Trump’s goals, two weeks after the House passed a measure that would gut clean energy incentives entirely. The Senate version retains some support for technologies favored by conservatives, like nuclear power and geothermal energy, but still rapidly ends federal money for solar and wind power, electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel and more. It also increases some subsidies for fossil fuels.
The Senate proposal “achieves significant savings by slashing Green New Deal spending,” Senator Mike Crapo, Republican of Idaho, said in announcing it.
Democrats, economists and environmental advocates said pulling out federal support for clean energy would endanger more than $500 billion in planned investment in manufacturing of solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries — most of it in Republican districts — and put more than 400,000 jobs at risk. It would also make electricity more expensive, they said.
The Republican package would “cook the planet and increase prices,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii.
The United States has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 20 percent below 2005 levels, according to the research firm Rhodium Group, largely thanks to cheap natural gas displacing coal. The country’s emissions fell by just 0.2 percent in 2024, Rhodium found. But Biden-era policies were expected to accelerate the decline in the coming years.
That’s because the Inflation Reduction Act “put clean energy on sale and made it more economically attractive than conventional fossil fuels,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of energy systems engineering and policy at Princeton University.
But repealing the act would effectively stop the drop in emissions, according to early analyses from several groups, including the Princeton REPEAT project, Rhodium Group, Resources for the Future and the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
“We are not going to be transitioning to the energy of the future, and that means we’re going to emit a lot more carbon than we would have,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University.
Many scientists had hoped that states would step up efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as they did during the first Trump administration. But some are facing legal attacks and political pressure from Washington. Congress recently overturned California’s plan to eventually ban the sale of gas-powered cars, for example.
Mr. Jenkins said the outlook, in terms of aggressively fighting global warming, seemed “bleak.”
“I’d like to say there’s a silver lining here,” Mr. Jenkins said. “There isn’t much of one. We’re dismantling substantial portions of the most important climate policy the U.S. has ever passed.”
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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