The New Paper Arguing Biden’s Power Sector Emissions Cuts Are Largely Intact — Even Under Trump

2026-07-06

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Wait, is the climate policy landscape … in better shape than it looks?Just over a year ago, President Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It repealed many of the Biden administration’s most aggressive climate policies, including tax credits for solar and wind energy.Although those policies are gone, the emissions cuts they achieved remain largely intact — at least in the power sector, according to a new study that we’re covering exclusively at Heatmap. Lily Bermel, the report’s author and a visiting ...

Wait, is the climate policy landscape … in better shape than it looks?

Just over a year ago, President Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It repealed many of the Biden administration’s most aggressive climate policies, including tax credits for solar and wind energy.

Although those policies are gone, the emissions cuts they achieved remain largely intact — at least in the power sector, according to a new study that we’re covering exclusively at Heatmap. Lily Bermel, the report’s author and a visiting fellow at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy, argues that at least where energy generation is concerned, the glass is more than “half full.”

On this episode of Shift Key, Lily joins Rob to discuss what we learned from Biden’s big climate law, why it likely never would have achieved its projected emissions declines (at least not without a tremendous transmission buildout), and how studying its legacy changed her mind about policy going forward.

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned:

The “Glass Half Full” report