Warbler’s Wisdom: Environmental Impacts of the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’
by Jocelyn Hartley
If you’ve been keeping up with the news about the 2025 federal budget bill, dubbed the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’, you’ve probably heard that it will reduce eligibility for welfare programs like SNAP food assistance and Medicaid. What you may not have heard is that the bill, which passed the House of Representatives by only a single vote, contains provisions that would cause substantial harm to the environment and the booming clean energy industry. Here are some takeaways of the budget bill’s environmental impacts:
Eliminates or renders unusable: clean energy tax credits, home energy efficiency tax credits, electric vehicle tax credits, and residential solar tax credits
Allows fossil fuel industry to essentially BUY permits for natural gas pipelines from the Department of Energy instead of going through the normal channels of approva
Read more about the bill’s environmental impacts here.
The bill in its present state would definitely bring big change to the clean energy industry and climate-change mitigation efforts. But how might the bill’s environmental impacts affect you directly? The bill would:
Raise your household energy bill–read about the cost of clean vs. coal based energy here.
Reduce jobs in the clean energy industry, which have been increasing at twice the rate of other industries. Read about the clean energy job growth here.
Speed up the rate of climate change, which is bringing disasters to more people every year
Fortunately, the bill has yet to become law, and there are steps you can take to oppose its environmentally harmful provisions:
Write to your senators, Mark Kelly (contact him here) and Ruben Gallego (contact here), telling them what measures you’d like to see taken to protect clean energy and public lands in this bill. The bill has yet to pass the Senate and they could help change its course.
Write to US House Representative Juan Ciscomani here. Ciscomani had originally pledged to oppose the clean energy tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, but then voted in favor of the clean energy gutting version of the bill. That one vote allowed the bill to pass the house. Let Ciscomani know you want to see clean energy protected in the final version.