With Republicans Claiming the Senate and Possibly the House, Congress Expected to Reverse Course on Climate

The prospect of future climate legislation in Congress looks much darker following Tuesday’s election, when voters chose to send Donald Trump back to the White House and flipped control of the next Senate to his Republican Party.

That change also leaves President Joe Biden’s signature climate law—the Inflation Reduction Act, the nation’s largest single investment in reducing climate-warming pollution—on newly uncertain ground.

Control of the House of Representatives remained up in the air a day after more than 138 million Americans went to the polls in a bitter race where climate concerns took a back seat to issues such as immigration and the cost of living—even though the climate crisis affects both.

The outcome in the House could either supercharge the agenda of Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax,” or serve as a check on a president who revived an old “drill baby drill” slogan.

While speculation swirled Wednesday about how Trump would govern, he will need Congress to help him put much of his agenda in place. His first term was largely focused on boosting fossil fuels.

Political observers said they were expecting more of the same with voters sweeping incumbent Democratic senators aside in Ohio (Sherrod Brown), Montana (Jon Tester) and, most likely, Pennsylvania (Bob Casey). The New York Times had called the race for Casey’s GOP challenger, Dave McCormick, though Casey had yet to concede. Meanwhile, in West Virginia, the state’s Republican Gov. Jim Justice claimed retiring former Democrat Joe Manchin’s seat, eliminating the Democrats’ razor-thin majority. 

The Republicans will have at least 52 of the 100 senators, with Senate races in the battleground states of Michigan, Nevada and Arizona still too close to call.

The Inflation Reduction Act, IRA for short, could prove difficult to roll back in part because certain of its elements belatedly won favor among some Republicans in Congress. But momentum could stall or be lost on everything from electric vehicles to clean hydrogen production, battery manufacturing and wind and solar power generation. These are all segments of a new lower-carbon economy that the IRA has begun to boost through hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives, loans and grants.

The IRA was never designed to meet the country’s full challenge presented by global warming, which has contributed to deadly and costly climate and environmental disruption that is projected to worsen in the years ahead. Scientists have said that more congressional action will be necessary to tackle the climate crisis and meet U.S. obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which seeks to hold the rise in global temperatures to under 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

That’s a goal United Nations officials now say may not be possible as greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb. And Trump has said he intends to pull the country out of the treaty.

“The climate provisions of the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act gets us part of the way—a 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030—to meeting our obligations under the Paris Agreement,” Michael Mann, one of the nation’s most prominent climate scientists, said in an email. “But they don’t get us all of the way there. 

“That means that we’ll need congressional support to build on the IRA, for example, through something like a clean energy standard which penalizes utilities that don’t meet targets for reduced fossil fuel dependence,” said Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. 

That, Mann said, won’t be possible to get through Congress without Democratic control of both the House and the Senate.

The IRA’s “Unsettled” Future 

The delicate political balance began to tip earlier this year when Manchin opted to refrain from testing his chances at re-election, given his state’s sharp political turn to the right. He first announced he would retire and later broke from the Democrats entirely in May when he registered as an Independent. He will be replaced by Justice, a coal operator and businessman whose full-throated support for fossil fuels is among his trademarks. 

Manchin also defended the coal industry in the nation’s second-leading coal-producing state, but he voted with Democrats on the IRA, which passed with no Republican votes.

Gina McCarthy, the former White House national climate advisor to Biden and a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said Wednesday that the nation’s shift toward a clean energy economy is now “unstoppable,” in part because of the IRA’s strength.

“Keep in mind that the bulk of these clean energy projects are operating or under construction in Republican districts,” she said of IRA-backed projects. “That means many—if not most—Republican members of Congress have been joining hundreds of business leaders at ribbon cuttings and groundbreaking ceremonies. Because it is undeniably true that the IRA is good for businesses and good for all Americans, any attempted rollback of the IRA is a fool’s errand.”

Indeed, in August, 18 House Republicans wrote to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), requesting he not cut clean energy tax credits in the IRA next year.

But Wednesday, lawyers and lobbyists participating in a press conference hosted by Bracewell, a lobbying and law firm that represents an array of energy interests, said the future of the IRA was clearly unsettled with Tuesday’s election results. It’s too early to know what parts of it might stay, be jettisoned or changed, they said.

“Trump will be coming in with a two-fisted view of what he wants to do,” said Timothy Urban, who leads the Bracewell tax policy practice. 

“It is undeniably true that the IRA is good for businesses and good for all Americans, any attempted rollback of the IRA is a fool’s errand.”

— Gina McCarthy, former White House national climate advisor

Repeal of the IRA provisions will come up in the context of a larger budget reconciliation bill, which will have an array of funding and tax provisions, he pointed out. Members will be “faced with horse trading and being called in by a chairman and told you can either have your EV tax credit, or you can have a $2,000 deduction for every man, woman and child in your congressional district, or you can have a lower tax rate for the middle class or something.”

Urban predicted that industry groups and companies would have to lobby hard on Capitol Hill to keep IRA provisions in place.

“I’m still optimistic that much if not all of the IRA may be salvageable, but I think there’s a lot of work to be done,” Urban said. 

In Ohio, IRA Support Failed the Incumbent 

Across the country, climate, energy and environmental issues played varying roles in Senate races.

In Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown lost to Bernie Moreno, a Republican and former car dealer, despite voting for the IRA that gave tax breaks to a $3.5 billion Honda battery plant responsible for thousands of new jobs and the revival of local manufacturing.

Some Democrats had wistfully hoped that they could flip a Senate seat in Florida, where incumbent Rick Scott, a Republican who voted against the IRA, easily held off a formidable challenge from former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Democrat. The two candidates had vastly different views on the environment and climate in a state that’s been hammered by hurricanes and faces a major threat from sea-level rise. 

Scott, when he was governor of Florida, had reportedly banned Department of Environmental Protection staffers from using the words “climate change” or “global warming” in official communications or reports, making him a punchline of late-night comedians. Mucarsel-Powell had vowed that if elected she would pursue funding for climate-resilient infrastructure in Florida and told Inside Climate News she was especially concerned about communities that are struggling to endure climate impacts.

In a recent interview on CNN, Scott revealed that his views on the climate may be evolving, after Hurricane Helene pummeled Florida’s Big Bend region in September as a Category 4 storm before causing widespread devastation across the Southeast. Hurricane Milton followed less than two weeks later, making landfall in southwest Florida as a Category 3 storm. “Absolutely something is changing,” Scott told CNN. “What we’re going to do is, we’re going to figure out how to rebuild more resiliently.” 

In Pennsylvania’s Senate race, McCormick, the Republican challenger, sought to link Sen. Casey to high energy prices and Vice President Kamala Harris’ previous opposition to fracking. 

Casey, meanwhile, downplayed his climate bona fides as a key supporter of the IRA, choosing instead to focus on reiterating his longtime support for fracking. 

McCormick’s focus on energy prices was part of a larger strategy to reach voters with concerns about the economy and blame Biden’s policies, said Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 

McCormick was leading Casey on Wednesday by about 31,000 votes with an estimated 97 percent of votes counted. The Associated Press said at that point that Casey still had a small chance of victory, despite the Times’ call.

In Arizona, climate change received little attention in the race for Senate from either U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat and former Marine, or Kari Lake, a Republican and former TV personality, despite Arizona’s challenges with wildfires, drought and water supplies. 

More than 1 million votes were still being counted in that race Wednesday afternoon, with Gallego leading 50.4 percent to 47.6 percent.

But in neighboring Nevada, where Sam Brown was leading by several thousand votes over incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen, clean energy was a major dividing line, given the state’s ample public lands that are seeing a surge of development of renewable energy projects. 

Brown has called renewables “not for the benefit of Nevadans,” while Rosen has championed her work to pass laws like the IRA to fund the development.

“Sam [Brown] would have voted against all this investment that we’ve made in Nevada that’s bringing billions of dollars to our state,” Rosen said during last month’s debate. 

All Eyes Now on Uncalled House Races

It could take days or weeks to know the outcome of the power balance in the House. As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 40 races had not yet been called by The Associated Press. If Republicans retain control, there would be few checks on Trump’s plans.

David Konisky, associate dean of research at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs, said he expects that a GOP majority would advance “a really robust agenda around environment and climate” aimed at rolling back laws or regulations passed by Democrats. 

In addition to taking whacks at the IRA, he said he would expect Republicans to loosen regulatory requirements on projects that need to secure major permits.

Also, a Republican-controlled House will make it easier for Trump and Republican lawmakers to cut budgets of agencies like the EPA, or potentially privatize federal agencies like the National Weather Service, he said.

If Democrats could flip the House, “everything would have to be negotiated and the Democrats would then have a veto” on the Republican agenda, he said.

“That’s a huge difference and would kind of keep it a little closer to the status quo,” Konisky said.

U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-Ill.), who won re-election, said during the Bracewell call that Tuesday was a “sobering morning for us Democrats, and for myself.” She touted her own “all of the above” approach to energy, a term generally used to mean support for oil, gas and clean sources of power. 

“If we want to get to full decarbonization and energy economy, to get there will take some time,” she said.

She said Democrats might be able to work with Republicans around permitting reform, an issue with some bipartisan support. 

“I think we want to be building more,” she said. “We want to be building faster. We want to be building all of the above.”

But to scientists like Mann, any congressional slowdown is a major setback to the fight for a livable climate. He called a Trump victory “game over for climate action this decade. And Republicans holding even one of the two houses of Congress would constitute a major impediment for climate progress.”

Inside Climate News reporters Aman Azhar, Marianne Lavelle, Wyatt Myskow, Kiley Bense and Amy Green contributed to this report.