The wide-ranging bill passed by the House last night will do many things: slash taxes, increase military and border spending, pare back Medicaid.
If enacted into law, it will also effectively gut the Inflation Reduction Act, the sweeping law signed by President Biden that was designed to reduce America’s planet-warming emissions and spur a domestic boom in clean energy.
A core part of the Inflation Reduction act was a series of tax credits that benefited companies working to produce clean energy and remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Those tax credits have already led many companies to increase their spending and create jobs, leading to more than $843 billion in investments announced over the last three years.
As I reported in March, a diverse coalition was seeking to protect the credits — not just Democrats and climate crusaders, but many Republicans and business groups, too. And as Brad Plumer and Lisa Friedman reported earlier this week, what was once considered by some the most important climate legislation in history had been framed by its supporters in Congress mostly in economic terms.
Among those who lead the charge was Rep. Andrew Garbarino, a Republican from New York who had organized a group of fellow conservatives to try and persuade congressional leadership and the White House that the tax credits were not part of the “green new scam,” as President Trump has said.
In the end, those efforts fell flat. Under the House bill, tax credits for low-emissions electricity sources such as wind, solar, batteries and geothermal would disappear entirely, with a small exception for companies that have started construction within 60 days after the bill becomes law and finish by the end of 2028.
It leaves in place a credit for biofuels while giving oil and gas companies new opportunities to expedite regulatory approvals.
Many senators have already indicated they want to see changes in the bill, suggesting that the House version is unlikely to be the final word on the matter. And some senators have expressed support for the clean energy tax credits.
But for now at least, the future of the Inflation Reduction Act is looking bleak, marking yet another front in the Trump Administration’s broad assault on climate policy.
N.I.H. cuts millions for research into climate change and public health
How does extreme heat affect Alzheimer’s patients? Do air purifiers help people suffering from chronic lung disease? What are the most cost-effective ways to protect communities from wildfire smoke and extreme heat?
When it canceled $450 million in National Institutes of Health grants and contracts to Harvard University last week, the Trump administration ended those research projects, as well as dozens of others focused on the connection between climate change, the environment and public health.
The field of climate and environmental health research has grown significantly over the past three decades as the consequences of rising global temperatures have become clear. Tropical diseases like dengue fever are now showing up in unfamiliar places; more frequent wildfires have meant more wildfire smoke in the air across the United States; and deaths from heat stress are on the rise.
The impact of the cuts
The cuts, which have come on top of $2.2 billion previously frozen by the administration because of its allegations that Harvard tolerated antisemitism and race discrimination on campus, have hit the field of environmental health studies particularly hard. The N.I.H. did not respond to a request for comment.
At Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 139 scientists have received termination notices affecting 204 contracts or grants, which is nearly all of the school’s direct federal grants, a spokeswoman said.
“This is heartbreaking for me,” said Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at Harvard who learned last week that the N.I.H. had wiped out about $10 million worth of grants for five studies she led.
“All of it, in one email, was gone,” she said.
Dr. Dominici has spearheaded some of the country’s leading research into the effects of exposure to pollution on older Americans and minority communities, which are often disproportionately exposed to toxic pollution. She has also led studies on the effects of rising temperatures resulting from climate change on children and teenagers.
Dr. Dominici, like most other professors affected by the cuts, has been scrambling to secure new funding. Even if she is successful, she said, years of work developing algorithms, analyzing them, and other research will have been lost.
“Even in the best situation, that magically these funds will come back, they’re not going to come back in time that will allow me to rescue the lab,” she said. “Lives will be lost.”
Research left unfinished
Other studies for which funding was eliminated include work on solutions to extreme heat in low-income communities and ways to bolster fish stocks in places where coral reefs are declining because of climate change.
Mary B. Rice, the director of Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, was leading a clinical trial to discover whether removing noxious particles from indoor air could help people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease breathe more easily.
The $2.5 million study, funded by the N.I.H., paid for air purifiers and medical evaluations of about 160 people, mostly older men and women and all former smokers, who suffer with moderate to severe breathing difficulty.
The five-year study was in its final stretch, scheduled to finish this year. But last week Dr. Rice learned that the Trump administration has pulled the plug on the grant, and is clawing back the approximately $500,000 not yet spent.
“I can’t imagine having to pick up the phone and tell any one of our participants that we are stopping the trial early. They entrusted me and my team to be able to carry out this research,” Dr. Rice said.
She called ending the funding midway through a study unethical, and noted that millions of dollars have already been invested in the work.
Petros Koutrakis, a professor of environmental studies at Harvard who is studying the effects of air pollution, including the emissions from burn pits on soldiers deployed during the second Iraq war, said that he fears for the future of the field.
Kristie L. Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington who studies the health risks of climate change, said the field was already poorly funded. The N.I.H. finally began to put an emphasis on funding climate change research during the Biden administration, she said, and eliminating more of it could have serious consequences for public health.
“Americans are dying from climate change,” Dr. Ebi said. — Lisa Friedman
By the numbers
6.7 million hectares
Loss of pristine rainforests reached 6.7 million hectares in 2024, nearly twice as much as in 2023, researchers at the University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute said in the annual publication of “The State of the World’s Forests.”
The world lost the equivalent of 18 soccer fields of forested land every minute, the researchers estimated. For the first time since record keeping began, fires, not agriculture, were the leading cause of rainforest loss, accounting for nearly half of the destruction. — Hiroko Tabuchi
More climate news from around the web:
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The Guardian highlights a study that finds that oil and gas companies in Colorado have pumped at least 30 million pounds of potentially toxic chemicals into the ground over the last 18 months without making required disclosures.
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The Tennessee Valley Authority applied for a permit to build a small modular nuclear reactor, Heatmap News reports, a potential milestone for a utility.
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David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series.
The post House Bill Would Derail Biden’s Signature Climate Law appeared first on New York Times.
