By Chris Talgo
While Americans, and much of the world, closely watch the events unfolding in Iran and Israel, the U.S. Senate is putting the final touches on its version of the “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill, which President Trump hopes to sign into law by the Fourth of July.
On June 21, Trump posted to Truth Social, “I HATE ‘GREEN TAX CREDITS’ IN THE GREAT, BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL. They are largely a giant SCAM. I would much prefer that this money be used somewhere else, including reductions. ‘Anywhere’ would be preferable!”
Trump is spot on. However, he failed to mention that the primary source of the green tax credits he is referring to was President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Earlier this year, The Heartland Institute published a policy study titled “The High Costs of Climate Scams: Assessing the Green Giveaways in the Inflation Reduction Act,” which found that “the true price tag of the IRA’s green subsidies” could exceed $907 billion.
This figure is roughly three times more than the $369 billion estimate from the Biden administration.
The IRA’s Investment Tax Credit and Production Tax Credit “for ‘clean’ electricity storage and generation makes up $131 billion of the IRA’s $392 billion in green tax credits, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).”
It also provides $37 billion in tax credits for “clean energy and efficiency incentives such as home retrofitting of windows, insulation, and high efficiency appliances,” $19 billion for “low carbon ‘clean’ fuels,” $14 billion to incentivize people to buy new electric vehicles, and “$37 billion in tax credits allocated toward the retrofitting or construction of certain energy manufacturing facilities.”
On the direct spending side, the IRA allocated “$21 billion for agricultural and forestry conservation,” “$11 billion on energy efficiency programs,” “$5 billion … on industrial decarbonization projects,” “$10 billion [for] rural electric cooperatives to invest in renewable energy,” and “$27 billion [for] the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), also known as the ‘Green Bank,’ which prioritizes ‘disadvantaged communities’ through ‘environmental justice.’”
Green Energy Fail: Solar Power Company Sunnova Files for Bankruptcy
It also must be noted that the IRA was touted by Biden and the media as a bill designed to specifically combat inflation, hence its name. But even “Biden acknowledged the IRA had ‘nothing to do with inflation’” and called the bill "the most significant action…taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history."
“Windmills, and the rest of this ‘JUNK,’ are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world, is destroying the beauty of the environment, and is 10 times more costly than any other energy,” Trump added on June 21. “None of it works without massive government subsidy (energy should NOT NEED SUBSIDY!). Also, it is almost exclusively made in China!!! It is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!”
Once again, he hit the nail on the head.
Despite decades of government subsidies beginning with the Carter administration, wind and solar simply cannot deliver consistent and affordable energy.
The Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFCOE) is the best way to measure the total cost of energy because the widely used Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) fails to include hidden costs, like the fact that solar and wind power plants require thousands of miles of new transmission lines so they can deliver electricity to distant customers, which substantially increases the total cost.
According to a recent policy study by The Heartland Institute, the LFCOE “using the relatively wind-friendly and solar-friendly geography of Texas as a baseline … in dollars per megawatt-hour: natural gas $40, coal $90, biomass $117, nuclear $122, wind $291, solar $413.”
As we just saw in Spain and Portugal, a large grid powered primarily by wind and solar is also dangerous because these intermittent sources depend on local weather conditions and are therefore incapable of supplying consistent amounts of baseload energy that meets demand.
Unfortunately, as the American Energy Alliance notes:
Power outages have increased by 93 percent across the United States over the last 5 years—a time when solar and wind power have increased by 60 percent. Texas, who leads the nation in wind generation, and California, who leads the nation in solar generation, have had the largest number of power outages in the nation over those 5 years.
Lastly, Trump is right; massive windmills and acres of solar panels are terrible for the environment, and their production perpetuates slave labor while enriching and empowering China.
Sometime soon, the Senate will take a floor vote on its altered version of the House’s big, beautiful bill. For now, the best we can do is speculate on the fate of the IRA subsidies in the Senate version. Then, both chambers must compromise and pass one unified bill.
In spite of this uncertainty surrounding the final iteration of the bill, one thing is crystal clear: President Donald Trump wants the big, beautiful bill to apply the DOGE treatment to Biden’s wasteful, ugly green energy scam.
Chris Talgo ([email protected]) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
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