Collected Actions Urging Congress to Oppose the Republicans' Catastrophic Horror Budget
A last-ditch effort as my country is about to self-sabotage on a world-historic scale.
We’re now in what is likely the final stretch for the Republican mega-budget negotiations, with the Senate actively debating the bill with a goal of passing it today or tomorrow, sending it to the House, and then the House sending it to be signed into law by July 4. It was already looking very probable that what’s going to pass will be very bad for America, but over the weekend it somehow got much, much worse — not just repealing support for vital clean energy, but adding a punitively high new tax on clean energy projects specifically (described by experts as “designed to kill the industry”) while increasing subsidies for expensive and dirty fossil fuels. The bill will likely essentially destroy the American clean energy industry that so many have worked so hard to create, and given that clean energy provided over 90% of new U.S. electricity-generating capacity in 2024, it may effectively destroy any shot at the U.S. successfully building any new projects that need abundant electricity, from “reducing electricity bills” to “powering globally competitive AI.” There are truly no words to properly describe just how incredibly stupid this is. These three articles give it a good try, but…damn. As recently as a week ago, I would not have thought it possible that even this President and Congress would screw up on such a monumental scale. If this passes, the U.S. is going to be a deindustrializing backwater until at least 2029. (At least the bill also gives us massive healthcare cuts and a surging national debt!)
For context, I discuss at length in these two articles why the energy parts of this budget (essentially repealing the Inflation Reduction Act to a greater or lesser extent) are so incredibly bad for the United States, cutting the nation’s blossoming clean energy and electrification progress right when the rest of the world is accelerating. Since the new insane anti-energy tax was added, it’s even more harmful to the U.S.
The good news here — for a given value of good news — is that this budget is, relatively speaking, much more of a threat to America than it is a threat to the planet. The rest of human civilization just keeps building out clean energy faster and faster. This budget would make it painfully difficult for American industry to build any serious piece of this transformative technological revolution, and make the entire nation energy-poorer and technologically backwards for no reason beyond painfully stupid culture wars, but it can’t possibly stop the bigger civilizational shift. The incredible ongoing clean energy surges in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and…well, everywhere else…are collectively a much bigger deal for the future of Earth.
Still, we’re not quite done in the U.S. just yet. Republican Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina took a courageous stand against this bill, stating that he could not vote for such a disaster (and announcing his retirement from politics in practically the same breath as he was targeted by the current president). Republicans can only afford to lose four of their Senate votes to get this passed, and they’ve already lost at least one. There’s still a window - probably measured in hours now - to try to stop this monstrosity. The Senate voting period is set to begin at 9 AM U.S. Eastern Time on Monday June 30, and the House will need to vote on it again after that.
If you live in the U.S. and you’re looking for some prewritten letters or call scripts with which to contact your legislators, this article collects the ones I’ve created so far. For several months now, I’ve been regularly writing and publishing actions on Your Dose of Climate Hope that highlight ongoing clean energy progress and implore Congress to oppose this world-historically self-sabotaging budget, using Climate Action Now (CAN) software to rapidly connect voters with their legislators.
I focused on using arguments that might at least conceivably sway some Republican Senator or Representative’s mail-reading staffers, avoiding all discussion of strongly “liberal-coded” topics like greenhouse gas emissions or environmental harms and instead pointing out how the proposed repeal of innovation-incentivizing clean tax credits (and now a f***ing tax on top of that!) severely threatens America’s economy, manufacturing jobs, national security, and competitiveness with China.
If you’re a U.S. voter, you can use the links to these actions to send a prewritten data-filled message to your Congressional representatives in just a few clicks.
Below are all the anti-nightmare-budget CAN actions I’ve published since late May, in reverse chronological order. Note that all the projections based on the House budget now substantially underestimate the damage that this bill would do to America.
China installed 93 GW of solar power in May 2025, while the U.S. installed 56 GW of all power sources in all of 2024.
Tell Congress to save the U.S. solar and battery boom!
The U.S. battery boom is keeping the grid stable during extreme heat.
Tell Congress to save U.S. battery industries!
A fast-growing enhanced geothermal industry offers 24/7 clean power for America.
Tell Congress to save the clean energy tax credits incentivizing geothermal innovation!
Iowa startup Talusag is making ammonia fertilizer with water, air, and clean electricity.
Tell Congress to support clean local fertilizer production!
China just built the world’s first grid-scale sodium-ion battery storage.
Tell the Senate to save America’s clean energy industries!
RMI has a great new article on the accelerating worldwide electrotech revolution!
Tell the Senate to keep America competitive in an electrifying world!
The U.S. is already seeing a boom in domestic cleantech manufacturing, with the potential for much more.
Tell your Senators to keep the IRA and save U.S. cleantech manufacturing!
Electric cars are on track to rise to over 25% of total new car sales worldwide in 2025.
Tell the Senate not to kill the IRA’s clean energy and EV tax credits!
General Motors is planning to mass-produce cutting-edge new LMR batteries.
Tell Congress to save critical U.S. battery industries!
