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Asthe Senate struggles to pass its version of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill that squeaked through the House of Representatives by a single vote, it’s increasingly likely that tax credits and programs for clean energy projects won’t survive.

Fossil fuel industry lobbyists and fringe political figures have argued that the policies that helped create the fastest increase in renewable electricity generation in U.S. history are wasteful and unnecessary, even as oil and gas drillers continue to qualify for their own federal incentives. Setting aside benefits that large-scale wind, solar and battery storage project create in terms of reducing climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions, scrapping the credits created by the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will have a devastating impact on jobs and economic development in much of the U.S., particularly Republican-leaning states that have been the top beneficiaries of those projects.

The revised bill that could be voted on in the Senate today quickly phases out nearly all existing clean energy credits by as early as 2027, and even adds a new tax on large solar and wind projects. It’s worse than an earlier draft that the American Clean Power Association had said would “increase household electricity bills and threaten hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country.”

If passed and signed into law, the legislation could result in the loss of 790,000 clean energy jobs by the end of the decade, according to an estimate by Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan climate policy think tank. “Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Florida and Georgia stand out as the biggest losers from IRA repeal due to their poor combination of lost jobs........

© Forbes