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The IRA won’t last a decade. Its funding starts running out at the end of September. So here is what individual Americans might want to do over the 165 days.
You may recall the amount of sweat, anguish, and resolve it took to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. There were the amazing young people of the Sunrise Movement, who channeled the energy of Greta’s worldwide outburst into the offices of Nancy Pelosi, energizing the 2020 primary race and then—in a remarkable display of political maturity—turning that energy into legislative sausage making. There was the steady morphing of the Build Back Better bill into ever-more compromised climate legislation, and then the widespread conviction that even that would not pass. Until at the last minute Joe Manchin agreed, as long as it was larded with yet more gifts for the fossil fuel industry. And with that Congress took its first real action on climate in the 35 years it’s been an issue.
It was supposed to be a steady source of funding that would last a decade, giving this energy transition time to find its feet, and giving the U.S. a foothold in the fight with China to determine the future. But in the course of a few months the White House and the fossil-funded GOP Congress have overturned all that except the extra gifts to the fossil fuel industry. (Antonia Juhasz provides the best account yet of all the excruciating details in Rolling Stone.)
The IRA won’t last a decade. Its funding starts running out at the end of September—if you’re in the market for an electric vehicle, that has to be done now. (And there may be some excellent lease deals). And if you’re even considering getting solar on your home, that needs to happen by the end of the year if you want the tax credit.
Normally we talk about these things as political questions—but today I asked a few experts to share their take on what individual Americans might want to do over the 165 days.
This summer and this fall are the right times to work with a trusted local provider to get your project up. If nothing else, it’s a good way to disappoint the GOP and their fossil fuel friend group.
Here’s Cindy del Rosario-Tapan, from the very experienced Solar United Neighbors (who are sponsoring a webinar later this week to go over the same ground and more)
My old 350.org colleague Phil Aroneanu has been hard at work at Climate United trying to protect what they can of the IRA funding. He breaks it down a little further:
If you're hoping to put solar on the roof of your home, and you want to own the system (not lease it), the 30% residential clean energy tax credit (25D) will sunset at the end of 2025, 10 years sooner than what was written into the Inflation Reduction Act.
If you own a business or nonprofit, or work at a school or city government agency and want to install solar OR you want to lease a solar array for your home rather than own it outright, you'll need to get started as soon as possible to qualify for the up to 60% investment tax credit (48E) and bonuses available. Onerous restrictions will kick in by the end of 2025 making it more difficult to claim the tax credits for projects that aren't yet under construction—and the Trump administration just released an Executive Order that will add even more red tape to these tax credits.
If you're hoping to buy and electric vehicle, the tax credits expire on September 30, and if you're planning to install heat pumps, windows, or take other energy efficiency measures, most of those tax credits expire at the end of the year.
And here’s Andrea Karelas from RE-Volv, a group that helps nonprofits go solar. (He’s also the author of the excellent Climate Courage), who analyzes it from the point of view of an average homeowner or project sponsor
So basically, before the big terrible bill, thanks to the IRA, if you went solar in the U.S., you got an Investment Tax Credit for your system worth 30% of the value (for storage as well) as a base amount and that credit would have been in place through 2032. So if your solar system cost $10K, you'll have $3K less taxes to pay next April, so essentially your system is only $7K. Then there are bonus adders that stack based on certain criteria. If your project is in an "energy community" (which basically is a place that has been historically impacted by fossil fuel production, or has many people working in energy production), you get an extra 10%. If you are in a low to moderate income community you are eligible for a 10-20% adder (but those are first come first serve). And if your equipment is made using majority domestic content (which is basically impossible) you'd get another 10%. So the solar ITC for residences (25d) or non-residential (48e) start at a minimum of 30% savings. If someone qualified for all the bonus adders, it would be 70% covered by the ITC. Many of our projects, for example, get 40 or 50% because they are in an energy community and serve an LMI population.
Now, thanks to the big terrible bill, the residential credit (25d) will expire Dec 31 2025. So basically your system price goes up by a minimum of 30% if you don't have it fully installed before January 1 2026. (And you could be missing out on up to 70% of the system cost covered if you qualify for the bonus adders.)
Now, the nonresidential credit (48e) on paper looks like it gets a better deal because you can theoretically get project construction started a year from when the bill was signed (so July 4 2026) or get it completed by the end of 2027. BUT they also added requirements regarding Foreign Entities of Concern to limit the use of Chinese parts or equipment that are so unworkable that it makes the ITC unusable, even with these extended timelines. The FEOC requirements kick in January 1 2026. So in essence, nonresidential projects now also have a December 31 2025 deadline.
All of this would be easier to navigate with devoted help from blue state officials: Here, for instance, is some good advice from NYSFocus on how New York Gov. Kathy Hochul could help, and some excellent analysis along the same lines from Noah Ginsburg. But I think the bottom line is clear—this summer and this fall are the right times to work with a trusted local provider to get your project up. If nothing else, it’s a good way to disappoint the GOP and their fossil fuel friend group.
While you’re doing that, of course, we also need to be standing up for clean energy in general. That’s why we’re hard at work on SunDay.
Part of that work involves the solar industry reinventing itself for the world past subsidies—which is not impossible. Its old model won’t work without federal support, but that’s not necessarily the end: Solar flourishes without much in the way of subsidy elsewhere, in places like Australia, because they’ve evolved a lower-cost business plan. Permitting reform is key (and a key focus of SunDay), as Ryan Kennedy makes clear in this piece from PV Magazine just yesterday:
Permit applications can cause delays of two to six weeks or more, causing a poor customer experience and higher project cancellation rates. Permitting also drives up costs. In New Jersey, for example, permit approvals and related barriers add an estimated $3,800 to $4,500 to average project costs. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) said the cost could be in excess of $6,000 to $7,000 for an average project.
New Jersey regulators, among other states, recently passed legislation to require automated permitting for residential solar, cutting timelines and costs. Tools like the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SolarApp+ can facilitate permitting in your jurisdiction, and DOE provides technical assistance for implementing the tool.
Birch estimates an average U.S. installation could shed $0.98 per W from automated permitting fixes alone.
Since that hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t make the immediate blow any easier. As Aroneanu says:
Multiple recent analyses of the budget bill estimated that cutting clean energy and manufacturing tax credits will scale back solar and other renewable generation capacity by up to 72% in the next decade, raise household electricity prices up to $290, trigger the closure or cancellation of 331 solar and storage factories, and erase $286 billion in local investment in American communities, killing 760,000 jobs in the process.
Make no mistake: The Trump administration is doing everything in its power to try to kill clean energy.
Still, it seems impossible that American ingenuity won’t start to figure out some ways, especially since the rest of the world is surging confidently ahead. (Here, somewhat randomly, are updates from Turkey, Africa, and of course China). As Karelas says:
We know solar is the cheapest form of electrons ever created. Last year 90% of new generation built in the U.S. was clean energy, 78% of it solar. (No wonder they're coming after it this hard.) There are some in the residential space who are trying to make the most of the situation by saying, “Look, the industry had a nice cushion with these tax credits for many years.” Tax credits also made project financing more complicated—there's a world where the solar industry bounces back from this after cutting costs, streamlining various processes, and will be stronger than ever… So, light at the end of the tunnel, but definitely a terrible blow.
Our job is to magnify that (sun)light, shorten that tunnel, and not fall any further behind the rest of the world than we have to. So, to work on all fronts!
We know what we must do to address the climate crisis, so why aren’t we doing it?
In the summer of 2023, researchers “binge-watched 250 of the most-rated movies” of the past 10 years for climate research purposes. A mere 13% of films made mention of climate-related disasters, some more seriously and others “offhandedly” in dialogue. In contrast, since the rise of Hollywood as the center of entertainment over a century ago, more than “2,500 war-themed movies and TV programs have been made with Pentagon assistance.” Why does the Pentagon partner with Hollywood? And why does Hollywood glamorize war at the expense of the planet?
The Pentagon provides multimillion dollar equipment (tanks, planes such as F-35 fighter jets which cost over $80 million dollars, aircraft carriers) and personnel to operate them, giving movies an air of realism at no cost to the filmmaker or director. Partnering with the military obliges Hollywood directors to accept significant script changes by the Department of Defense, telling directors “what to say—and what not to say.” In the end, movies portray the U.S. military as a force for good in the world and nuclear weapons (in our hands) as critically needed for national security. They use racist stereotypes of Asians and Africans while portraying U.S. soldiers as noble in purpose and making it appear that U.S. wars “are fought to spread freedom, democracy, and human rights.” They hide the profit motives of Hollywood and the self-serving motives of the Pentagon, which are public approval for their existence and mission, gaining public acceptance of war thus attracting new recruits. And the result is: Hollywood glamorizes war for greed at the extreme expense of the planet.
War is a driving force in the climate crisis, with the Pentagon being the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world powering fighter jets, warships, and 800 military bases. Perversely the U.S. used sustained influential effort to keep the military’s impact on climate out of the 1997 Kyoto protocol counting process. And consequently, there is silence on U.S. military emissions and the climate crisis.
Even before U.S. President Donald Trump’s nihilist administration cut staff and the budget from our key climate agencies NOAA and NASA while furiously promoting oil and coal, we were in trouble with our injured Earth.
Furthermore, the damage to the world’s economy from fossil fuels has been massively underestimated, according to Timothy Neal and colleagues’ recent research. To date it has been thought to be mild to moderate, they stated, the flawed assumption being that damage to a country’s economy is caused within a country by extreme weather and it doesn’t account for how flooding in one country, for example, affects food supply in another. The team found that “if Earth warms by more than 3°C by the end of the century, the estimated harm to the global economy jumped from an average of 11% (under previous assumptions of isolated damage) to 40%,” devastating the livelihoods of a huge part of the world.
Other studies on drought find that increasing evaporation from rising temperatures due to global warming has disrupted the global water cycle in vast regions of North and South America, Africa, East and Central Asia, and Europe. Some regions would need 10 years of significantly above average rain to recover from long periods of drought. The southwest U.S., for example, has been drying out for 30-40 years—a megadrought, hemorrhaging groundwater, threatening its food security and economy. “About 40% of the contiguous U.S.” are in some stage of drought. Expected hotter temperatures and prolonged die-off of trees are the recipe for future wildfires. After a drought for a year or two, scientists would see recovery. No longer: “Drought is a creeping disaster.”
James Hansen, an early and outspoken expert on the climate crisis, and colleagues have published the most critical warning to date. We are experiencing sudden global warming of 1.6°C, and temperatures will oscillate “near or above that level for the next few years.” Their warning is unvarnished: more powerful tropical storms, tornadoes, more extreme floods; intensity of heatwaves, increase in drought in places of dry weather. The polar ice melt and freshwater injection into the North Atlantic Ocean will increase and could slow down AMOC in the next 20-30 years—locking our coasts into sea-level rise of several meters. AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, circulates water from north to south and back in a long cycle within the Atlantic Ocean. This circulation also brings warmth to various parts of the globe and also carries nutrients necessary to sustain ocean life.
Another frightening factor in faster warming is the fact that the planet’s plants and soils peaked in their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide in 2008. “Natural sequestration of carbon dioxide is in decline: Climate change will accelerate,” concluded the authors of the study.
We are heading toward catastrophe, though it can be mitigated: Though solar is doubling every few years, energy demand is increasing faster and being met by fossil fuels. “Science is clear...: stop using fossil fuels, respect and protect Nature, use resources sustainably.” Why aren’t we doing it?
Even before U.S. President Donald Trump’s nihilist administration cut staff and the budget from our key climate agencies NOAA and NASA while furiously promoting oil and coal, we were in trouble with our injured Earth. Trump has accelerated our ecocide. But human societies have been created by us, our human-made problems can and must be unmade. We owe it to the billions of young people who inherit this Earth.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act may be putting profits ahead of people and the planet, but real climate leadership remains possible—and urgently needed—at the local level.
On July 4, as rescue teams searched for children swept away by flash floods in central Texas, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law—a legislative package that represents a catastrophic retreat from climate safety precisely when Americans need protection most.
The cruel irony was impossible to ignore: As the floodwaters rose in San Antonio, the federal government was rewarding fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis while pulling protection away from those in its path.
The OBBBA delivers a devastating one-two punch to American families. First, it guts the very programs designed to keep us safe from extreme weather. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster prevention funding faces a 40% cut. The National Weather Service—already dangerously understaffed—will see deeper cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that cost lives. Texas' recent floods tragically illustrated how staffing gaps in weather offices directly translate to preventable deaths.
Wildfire prevention efforts have already been halted by White House funding freezes ahead of peak fire season, and the OBBBA eliminates another $100 million in firefighting capacity. Meanwhile, toxic waste cleanups face defunding, exponentially increasing health risks for the 1 in 5 Americans living within three miles of contaminated sites.
By supercharging this growing insurability crisis, the act risks unleashing a climate-fueled version of the 2008 financial meltdown—but this time driven by underinsured climate risk, not subprime mortgages.
The social safety net that helps the most vulnerable disaster victims avoid permanent destitution is being shredded too. The act slashes federal assistance with energy bills by 34%, strips an estimated 6.2 million people of Medicaid, and denies over 3 million people food assistance—the largest Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cuts in program history.
Adding fuel to the fire, 350.org's analysis shows that oil, gas, and coal companies are set to receive over $200 billion in OBBBA handouts over the next decade. This includes bargain-basement royalty rates for extraction on public lands and the restoration of controversial tax loopholes. At the same time, OBBBA kneecaps renewable energy competition, forcing families to rely on expensive fossil fuels and pushing up annual utility bills by hundreds of dollars.
The math is simple: We need to halve fossil fuel emissions by 2030 to keep America livable. Instead, U.S. emissions will spike by 8-12%, making it less likely that other countries will agree to reduce their own oil and gas consumption, and driving more extreme weather.
Main Street and family farms will pay the price. Insurance companies rely on predictive weather data and disaster prevention programs that the OBBBA undermines. Premiums have already surged over 35% nationwide since 2020, with the steepest hikes in the places most exposed to extreme weather. State Farm and Allstate have withdrawn completely from fire- and flood-prone regions of California, Florida, and Louisiana.
By supercharging this growing insurability crisis, the act risks unleashing a climate-fueled version of the 2008 financial meltdown—but this time driven by underinsured climate risk, not subprime mortgages.
Fortunately, cities and states still hold powerful tools to fight back and build clean and safe futures for their residents.
Steps like these will help to protect communities from the worst of the climate chaos that OBBBA unleashes. They can also build national momentum that political parties will not be able to ignore come 2026 and 2028.
The OBBBA prioritizes fossil fuel profits over public safety and future generations' survival. But this story isn't over. While Congress may be putting profits ahead of people and the planet, real climate leadership remains possible—and urgently needed—at the local level.
Cities and states must lead now. Our lives depend on it.