‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Set to Slash Through U.S. Climate and Justice Drive

In the end, President Donald Trump’s giant tax and spending plan rocketed past both fiscal hawks and social moderates in the House with no changes on Thursday.

The $4 trillion One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now ready to reach across the U.S. economy, slicing into every aspect of the national effort to address climate change and environmental injustice.

The 887-page legislation largely erases the landmark investment in cleaner energy, jobs and communities that a Democratic-led Congress made only three years ago in the Inflation Reduction Act. 

It stomps out incentives for purchasing electric vehicles and efficient appliances. It phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy. It opens up federal land and water for oil and gas drilling and increases its profitability, while creating new federal support for coal. It ends the historic investment in poor and minority communities that bear a disproportionate pollution burden—money that the Trump administration was already refusing to spend. It wipes out any spending on greening the federal government.

President Joe Biden’s team left office expressing confidence that his climate legacy was secure because most of the $132 billion in private investment in clean energy manufacturing spurred by his programs was going to Republican districts and states.

But Republican members of Congress who spoke out in favor of clean energy—enough members to make a decisive voting bloc in both House and Senate—refused to hold up Trump’s larger agenda for the cause. The strategy of insisting on “one big” bill, coupled with political threats against would-be foes (two of whom announced in the past week they would not seek re-election), turned out to be a winning one for the president.

Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the bill “a massive hit to both our clean energy economy, the US economy as a whole, and to our future from a climate perspective.”

David Shadburn, the legislative director at the League of Conservation Voters, said the environmental movement aims to make sure the public understands what was in the legislation and that those who voted for it are held accountable.

“We know that in the fight for clean air and clean water and a healthy environment that we can’t afford to stop fighting,” Shadburn said. “So we’re going to keep doing that, and we know that the public is on our side.”

Here are a few of the ways the bill will make it harder for the world’s largest historic contributor of greenhouse gases to cut its emissions and protect communities from the worst impacts of a warming world.

Slashing Incentives for Clean Energy

The…