If Democrats win control of Congress in this fall’s elections, they will try to restore and expand tax credits for wind, solar and other renewable energy that President Trump and Republicans largely eliminated last year, Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, said on Wednesday.
The party would also seek to strip the oil, gas and coal companies of more than $18 billion in new tax incentives enacted in Mr. Trump’s sweeping tax measure, he added.
Unless Democrats win veto-proof majorities in both chambers of Congress, which would require landslide victories nationwide this fall, such motions are not likely to become law.
Still, Mr. Schumer, of New York, cast the plan as part of a strategy to lower costs for consumers as the opposition party tries to tap into anxieties about the cost of living, particularly energy prices. Those costs were already high before the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, which has caused prices to surge.
“We have to just build more clean energy,” Mr. Schumer said, arguing that offers the least expensive source of new electricity generation.
The senator said he would prioritize a bipartisan effort to make building new infrastructure easier, work to increase the amount of energy available on the grid, upgrade the nation’s transmission lines and make sure data centers “pay their fair share” of taxes and energy infrastructure costs, an idea that the Trump administration has also recently embraced but which Democrats have criticized as insufficient.
“Trump’s attacks on clean energy, and the price spikes it has caused for American families, is a unique opportunity to expand our movement,” Mr. Schumer said in a speech on Wednesday evening to the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group.
“We can bring new voters and allies into the fight for a cleaner environment by showing how clean energy is affordable energy,” he said in prepared remarks.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, criticized the plan.
“It is idiotic of Democrat leaders to double down on Joe Biden’s unpopular, costly and failed Green New Scam,” Ms. Rogers said in a statement, referring to the Inflation Reduction Act, a law creating billions of dollars in clean energy tax incentives.
“These are the exact same policies that created an energy crisis which skyrocketed gas and electricity prices,” she added.
The Biden administration oversaw record oil and gas production but sought to restrict future fossil fuel use and bolster the manufacturing and consumer adoption of wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, and other low-carbon technologies. Emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main driver of climate change, which is heating the planet to a dangerous extent.
The Trump administration has increased oil and gas development even more. It has also moved to eliminate virtually all federal policies and funding to help renewable power, even beyond the repeal of clean energy tax credits in Mr. Trump’s major policy bill last summer.
In a series of unprecedented moves, Trump appointees have tried to rescind permits for five offshore wind farms already under construction. On Monday, administration officials announced that the government would reimburse nearly $1 billion to the French energy giant TotalEnergies if it abandoned its plans to build wind farms off the East Coast.
Mr. Schumer said he would not support a future Democratic president taking similar actions against the oil and gas industry. He also said he would recommend that Democrats approach climate change regulations differently than they had in the past.
The Biden administration imposed aggressive restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from automobile tailpipes, as well as from coal and gas-fired power plants and oil and gas wells. The Trump administration repealed those policies. and then tried to make it impossible for future presidents to regulate greenhouse gases by renouncing the Environmental Protection Agency’s legal authority to tackle climate change.
States led by Democrats are suing the Trump administration to restore that authority. But even if they do win, Mr. Schumer said a future president should emphasize spurring clean energy development rather than blocking fossil fuels.
“The ability to make solar and wind cheaper has changed a little bit the outlook on regulation,” he said. “You don’t just have to stop things. You can encourage good growth that also reduces emissions.”
Instead, he argued the party should focus on consumer costs. For data centers, for example, he said Democrats should support building facilities that use clean energy and pass legislation to ensure that electricity bills will not rise when they are built.
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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