July 4 wasn’t just America’s 249th birthday. It also marked another triumph for President Trump, who inscribed his giant signature on the tax and spending legislation he had vigorously championed.
The vote was razor-thin, and not a single House or Senate Democrat voted Yea. Many of the Nay votes reflected false claims that the One Big Beautiful Bill would “gut America’s social safety net,” leaving millions without healthcare or food.
The Wall Street Journal and other analysts eviscerated those falsehoods. They noted that taxpayers should not have to keep paying the health and welfare tab for millions of able-bodied adults who don’t want to work or even volunteer.
However, the 887-page bill created numerous corporate, public sector, interest group, and other winners and losers. Families and small businesses will benefit in multiple ways. So will the energy industry.
More lease sales in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and Western states will ensure that America has decades more oil and gas, producing abundant, reliable, affordable energy and feedstocks for thousands of petrochemical products. The United States will add its surging exploration and production efforts to those in Brazil, Guyana and other South American countries.
That translates into millions of manufacturing and other jobs.
Electric vehicles are a major loser. The $7,500 tax credit subsidy for buying a new EV will mostly disappear after September 30, and decades of increasingly stringent fuel economy standards will come to a screeching halt. Manufacturers will no longer be compelled to make EVs, and buyers will find it harder to justify paying premium prices for them.
Moreover, California will no longer be able to impose mileage standards stricter than federal guidelines on other states. Carmakers can again make profitable models that consumers want.
Net Zero and “climate crisis” myths are losing their allure, except in Europe, where businesses and families will not be so fortunate.
Not surprisingly, climate alarmists say the legislation “largely erases the landmark investment” in “cleaner energy,” “climate justice,” and similar government programs, offices and staff that the Biden administration used to batter fossil fuels and economic prosperity.
Of course, as with Medicaid, their consternation is based on the false premise that the OBBB will exacerbate unprecedented manmade climate cataclysms, pollution and ecological destruction, with minorities, women and children affected worst.
In reality, the alarmists are upset that they’ve lost much of the control they had exerted over our lives, livelihoods, living standards and personal choices.
Naturally, though, not everything turned out the way we energy and climate realists hoped it would.
For example, subsidies for new wind and solar installations were to be terminated for projects not “placed in service” by the end of 2027. Language in the House-passed and Senate bills ensured that.
Then Senate leaders and a couple of clever lobbyists reminded us that people who love laws and sausages shouldn’t watch either being made. Shortly before the final vote, they devised provisions decreeing that “placed in service” wouldn’t apply to projects that have already begun construction, or that begin “construction” before July 4, 2026.
The sneaky gift to Big Wind and Solar means a company must commit a mere 5 percent of expected (and easily lowballed) total project costs to buying steel, wind turbine blades or solar panels, which can easily be sold if the project never gets off the ground. Then the company gets four years (to July 2030) to be “placed in service” and start generating electricity, intermittently, unpredictably, perhaps 50 hours per 168-hour week.
That entitles project investors to start collecting investment and production tax credits and other subsidies for 10 to 30 years. (The same clever paragraph stipulates that the Executive Branch cannot change the definition of “construction,” to get around this.)
Applicants and supplicants will be lining up in droves. This one little, last-minute revision is a recipe for financial, investment, regulatory, courtroom, electricity grid and consumer chaos. For sadists, it will be hugely entertaining; for lawyers, enriching; for normal people, panic-inducing.
Data centers, artificial intelligence, population growth and other demands require steady growth in dependable, affordable electricity. Hundreds of new wind and solar installations will ensure intermittent power, grid instability, repeated blackouts, and soaring electricity costs to pay for grid upgrades, transmission lines, and expensive, redundant backup power.
Add all the associated mining, pollution, habitat destruction, and death of countless birds, bats and other wildlife, and this one provision will prove costly indeed.
Big Wind and Solar will be feeding at the taxpayer and ratepayer trough for decades. The provision will mean jobs and profits for them, but layoffs and bankruptcies for businesses forced to purchase their pricey power.
Anyone with ideas for delaying “began construction” determinations past July 2026 should send them to President Trump, or present them to the nearest federal agency or courthouse.
