Biden’s climate law is dead. The energy transition might not be.
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- The Inflation Reduction Act was repealed by Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" in July 2024 after less than three years, eliminating most clean energy and EV tax credits despite roughly two dozen Republicans initially wanting to preserve the incentives.
- U.S. climate trajectory has fallen off the IRA's 50%-emissions-cut-from-peak-by-2035 path and is back to the ~30% reduction achievable before the law, with emissions likely to stay flat through the end of the decade.
- The clean energy sector lost roughly $53 billion in wages and $20 billion in construction-period tax revenue from cancelled projects, per a pro-climate business group E2 analysis, with another $55 billion in annual output wiped out from killed battery and energy factories.
- The EV industry absorbed about half of all repeal-related job losses — more than 250,000 positions — as major automakers and battery startups scrapped U.S. factory plans even before Trump took office, citing soft demand and expected policy reversal.
- An MIT study finds roughly 75% of new clean power expected under the IRA will still come online without tax credits, with over 80% of large-scale solar and nearly all rooftop solar proceeding anyway; onshore wind is the clear loser, with roughly half of projected projects now vanishing alongside Pentagon roadblocks.
- Google inked a $1 billion deal for 1.4 gigawatts of Minnesota wind power to feed AI data centers, illustrating how surging tech demand is now doing more to prop up renewables than the repealed federal credits did.
Why it matters: The repeal killed the U.S. path to halving emissions by 2035 and erased over 250,000 EV manufacturing jobs, but solar keeps scaling on economics alone. AI data centers are now propping up wind power more than the IRA's tax credits ever did, putting the next bottleneck on Congress's stalled permitting-reform bill for new transmission lines.
