After House passes budget resolution, it’s prime time to defend the IRA
By Dana Nuccitelli, CCL Research Coordinator
Earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution, which directs all the committees in the House to either spend or cut certain amounts from their budgets for the next 10 years. The Energy & Commerce Committee, for example, was directed to cut $880 billion in spending. The question each committee now has to answer is: What spending do they cut?
This means we’re in a new stage of our push to protect the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate and clean energy measures. Speaker Mike Johnson has said he wants to “use a scalpel and not a sledgehammer” to cut the IRA’s clean energy investments, and so it’s our job to help him direct that scalpel away from the most important climate provisions of the bill.
Clean energy tax credits from the IRA are already driving jobs and investment in communities around the country, and the tax credits for clean electricity in particular are responsible for about half of the law’s potential climate pollution cuts. It’s up to us to make sure Republican lawmakers are crystal clear on the value of the clean energy tax credits — and that they shouldn’t be sacrificed at any point in the budget reconciliation process.
We at CCL have created a database listing the clean energy projects bringing benefits to districts all around the country. It was recently updated to include more data and projects. I gave a Citizens’ Climate University training to educate CCL volunteers about what’s in the database and how to use it for our IRA defense lobbying efforts. Watch the full training here or read on for a recap.
What’s in the IRA
The IRA included lots of different provisions to cut our climate pollution, but according to various modeling efforts, its clean electricity tax credits are the most important. They’re responsible for almost half of the bill’s climate pollution cuts:
We want to preserve as many IRA climate provisions and pollution cuts as possible, but the clean electricity tax credits are particularly critical. A recent analysis estimated that repealing them would also raise Americans’ electricity bills in 2040 by about 10%. See our Data to Defend the IRA training page for further information.
Why are the clean energy tax credits at risk?
Extending all of the tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would cost around $4.5 trillion. Many congressional Republicans don’t want to add trillions more dollars to the national debt, which already exceeds $36 trillion, and so they’re looking for ways to pay for those tax cut extensions. That’s the motivation behind proposals to repeal the IRA, which has a total price tag close to $1 trillion.
But IRA-funded projects have created a tremendous amount of investments and manufacturing jobs, especially in districts represented by Republican members of Congress. That’s because big facilities like solar and wind farms and manufacturing plants require a big chunk of available, affordable land, often in rural areas, whose residents tend to vote for Republicans. And Republican-led states also tend to offer generous state and local tax incentives to encourage business development.
And many congressional Republicans have said that we should keep some particularly beneficial IRA clean energy provisions. We at CCL want to use our evidence-based lobbying efforts to help inform our members of Congress about which provisions are the most important.
What’s in our IRA database?
The CCL Research team created a database of IRA-funded projects by state and congressional district, which will provide useful data for grassroots and grasstops lobbying efforts. The database currently includes three sources of information:
- E2’s tracking of clean economy projects. This source compiles public announcements of new and expanded clean energy projects. Because it relies on these announcements, E2’s data is best at capturing big projects like new manufacturing and utility-scale energy facilities, but it can miss smaller, less-flashy projects. It includes data from 40 states and about 40% of all congressional districts.
- Rhodium and MIT’s Clean Investment Monitor. This source tracks relevant new clean energy and manufacturing facility investments. It’s more comprehensive in terms of including new clean electricity generation facilities like solar and wind farms. As a result, it includes data from all 50 states and over 80% of congressional districts.
- Wellesley College’s Big Green Machine. This source compiles solar, wind, battery, and EV manufacturing and supply chain facilities that should all qualify for IRA tax credits. It does not include electricity generation facilities, and so is smaller, but includes projects in some districts that are not included in the other two sources.
Grist also has a map of IRA grants and loans. Those are good to know about, but not so relevant for CCL’s lobbying efforts because they’ve already largely been disbursed, whereas the tax credits we’re focusing on are ongoing and thus a potential target of the budgetary scalpel.
Check out the database at cclusa.org/defend-IRA-data and make sure you know the local benefits in your area. You can download a copy by going to File → Download → Microsoft Powerpoint. We recommend that you examine the projects in your district and/or state listed in all three databases, and research them to learn more and make sure the information is all accurate and up to date so that you’re maximally prepared for your lobbying in defense of the IRA!
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