WHAT THE "BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL" MEANS FOR OUR ENVIRONMENT

Much of the reaction to the bill’s passage has justifiably been about the fact millions of lower-income people are about to see their health benefits disappear. I want to zero in here on what it means for our environment, particularly what an LA Times column headlined as “the slaughter of clean energy.”

Here is what the Inside Climate News website summarizes from the 887 pages of legislation. “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.”

It’s almost like watching one of those film noir classics that featured morally corrupted characters who seemed to have an insatiable appetite for a chance at revenge. In this case, to tear down anything positive that the Biden administration set out to do. The Inflation Reduction Act had resulted in $132 billion in private investment in clean energy manufacturing. The majority of these programs were going to “red states.” Take Texas, where solar power provides over 30 percent of the grid and wind power another 15 percent. Sure, gas-fired generation still leads with 35 percent but coal meets only 13 percent of the state’s electricity needs. States where the sun shines or the wind blows have been relying more and more on developing those sources.

Last month, President Trump wrote on social media that renewable energy tax credits were a “giant SCAM” and that wind turbines ”and the rest of this JUNK” are “10 times more costly than any other energy.” The truth is, even without tax credits, solar and wind are the cheapest sources of new electricity that we have. That’s why they comprised 94 percent of new power capacity in America last year.

Now millions of Trump supporters are likely to see their energy bills skyrocket over the next decade, while a lot of these same people swelter under dangerous heat waves. While flash floods recently ravaged part of Texas (tragically drowning more than two-dozen girls at a Christian summer camp), Western Europe’s beastly hot temperatures are igniting wildfires in tourist-heavy Greece and sweeping east to fuel street protests in Serbia.

It all makes even less sense once you realize that China’s clean energy boom is going global. In 2024, they installed more solar panels and wind turbines than the rest of the world combined. Their companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in countries from Brazil to Thailand. As the New York Times reported Saturday in a multi-page investigation, to China it’s not so much about climate change as economics and national security. “China, unlike the United States, doesn’t have much easily accessible oil or gas of its own, so it is eater to eliminate dependence on imported fossil fuels and instead power more of its economy with renewables.” That’s just smart money, not communist propaganda.

But ours is becoming a realm where not common sense, but see-no-evil prevails. Also last week, a federal website that presented congressionally mandat5ed reports and research on climate change was shut down, along with all five versions of a National Climate Assessment report. Until this happened, the website globalchange.gov made available over 200 different publications. Peter Gleick, a water and climate scientist who authored the first of these reports in 2000, says; “They’re public documents. This is scientific censorship at its worst….the modern version of book burning.”

Well, maybe the Pentagon will wise up and let some new Tesla come forward with a free-energy solution that they’ve been burying for years. One can always hope.