“We passed a major milestone over the weekend: the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That piece of legislation — which curtailed the wind and solar tax credits, ended incentives for electric vehicle buyers, and terminated a lot of green industrial policy — was signed into law on July 4, 2025. It also formally ended the era of decarbonization and climate policy experimentation that began when the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act roughly three years earlier.
“Now we’re far enough out to begin assessing the Trump law’s impact. And a fascinating new report, published today by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, argues that the damage … is not as bad as one might fear — at least in the electricity sector.
“The power sector has retained most of the quantifiablebenefits associated with Biden’s climate law and Environmental Protection Agency rules, the new report asserts, and about two-thirds of the reductions in heat-trapping pollution expected under Biden’s policies will still happen under Trump’s. The report is called “Glass Half Full,” but its author, Lily Bermel, told me that her own conclusions went even further: “It’s not barely half full,” she said. “It’s like three-quarters full.”
“We had the exclusive on the new report at Heatmap — check out our full story for more coverage, including interviews with critics of the analysis. Bermel also joined me on our Shift Key podcast to discuss her findings and what they suggest for the future of climate policy.
“But in this more discursive space, I want to address head-on a question I think Bermel’s report raises: Was the Inflation Reduction Act worth it?If two-thirds of the emissions cuts expected under President Biden’s policies are going to happen anyway (at least from the power sector), what was the point of those policies?”
