Lily Bermel is a visiting fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
When President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, much of the climate world declared America’s energy transition dead. The law rescinded most of the grants and loans from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act and phased out the wind and solar tax credits — just as the Trump administration rolled back regulations on fossil fuels.
But the obituaries were premature, at least for the power sector. Yes, the administration’s policies will result in less clean energy and higher prices. But the energy transition was never a creation of statute. It’s driven by technological innovation, market forces, geopolitical competition and national security imperatives. The direction is settled, and policy sets the pace.
New research I authored, published at MIT, confirms this: Averaged over the coming decade, about three-quarters of the clean electricity capacity that would have been added under the IRA and power plant regulations trajectory will still get built. And just over two-thirds of the power-sector emissions reductions will still occur.
That’s an important finding for the climate community’s strategy. Its instinct, when it wins back power, is to restore what was lost. But that mindset deserves scrutiny.
My report demonstrates that the IRA, for all it delivered, subsidized mature technologies that the market would have deployed anyway. It underinvested in reliable clean power and never touched the supply-side barriers that throttle both.
Moreover, the context that produced the IRA — enthusiasm to combat climate change, cheap money and jobs-first policy — is gone. Today’s politics revolve around soaring energy demand, exhausted fiscal capacity and affordability. Lawmakers will face hard trade-offs across policy priorities.
So what should be the goals of the next era of climate policy? My analysis points to four answers.
First, comprehensive bipartisan permitting reform is the single-most important action to unleash clean energy. Nothing else compares. Permitting hurdles are taxes that jack up costs for projects — and often kill them. Princeton University’s Jesse Jenkins warned years ago that the slow rate of transmission build-out would forfeit over 80 percent of potential emissions reductions under the IRA. It has only slowed since.
Predictable permitting — meaningful deadlines, rightsized judicial review and focused analysis — accelerates clean energy growth and raises the ceiling on how much can be built. Plus, such reforms require little-to-no public spending. Fail to take a deal this Congress, and the next climate-friendly administration will inherit no tools for moving fast.
Second, resist the reflex to extend the wind and solar tax credits. These subsidies do not make electricity rates more affordable for the households and businesses that pay them, nor are they the savior to boost deployment. They treat symptoms and leave the disease — a reward for the projects that survive the ordeal of permitting and interconnection.
My analysis finds that in 2031, the first year after the final credit-eligible projects come online, solar capacity will trail the IRA and regulations trajectory by only 2.5 years. Credit extension is an expensive purchase for a modest good with an uncertain political shelf life.
Renewables can withstand the credit phasedown. Demand growth, not the tax code, is the strongest incentive. With batteries, these mature, cost-competitive technologies make up 93 percent of annual capacity additions. The Trump administration has created near-term headwinds for those industries, but it cannot repeal the tailwinds that drive record deployment.
Third, be honest about reliability requirements during decarbonization. The grid needs power that is always available, and gas is the only cheap source that can provide it today. My report highlights an inconvenient truth: The fossil fleet doesn’t shrink even as renewables grow.
So the goal should not be to block gas, but to manage it. Pursue carbon-reducing measures such as a methane fee and intensity-based standards — policies the oil and gas industry generally backs. Meanwhile, disincentivize new off-grid gas generation, which typically serves a single entity such as a data center. Keeping such power connected to the grid would force it to compete with clean electricity while injecting much-needed capital into grid modernization.
Fourth, go all-in on “clean firm” technologies — geothermal, advanced nuclear, carbon capture and fusion. What ultimately supplants gas is not another solar farm but always-available clean power. These technologies have bipartisan support for non-climate reasons: They are reliable, price-stable and less geography-constrained, and the world would be eager to import them.
But all are mid-commercialization and therefore must be top investment priorities. Their demand signal already exists — hyperscalers have signed deals supporting around 16 gigawatts of nuclear and geothermal — but their preserved tax credits offer neither the revenue certainty nor the capital needed to scale. Low-cost loans from the Office of Energy Dominance Financing, in addition to first-of-a-kind grant programs, merit increased funding next Congress.
These four recommendations share the same fiscal logic: Stop spending public money on mature energy technologies and direct it toward the grid and innovation needed for deep decarbonization. Policies should be measured not by the ambition they promise but by the results they deliver. No actions are mutually exclusive. The question is one of trade-offs, effectiveness and durability.
The climate community should build on what survived a Republican trifecta, not resurrect the playbook that got killed. The charge now is not restoration, but construction. Build the wires, build the renewables waiting on the sidelines, build the clean power plants. Everything else is marginal.