Up on the roof

A few months left to take advantage of Joe Biden's foresight

You may recall the amount of sweat, anguish, and resolve it took to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. There were the amazing young people of the Sunrise Movement, who channeled the energy of Greta’s worldwide outburst into the offices of Nancy Pelosi, energizing the 2020 primary race and then—in a remarkable display of political maturity—turning that energy into legislative sausage-making. There was the steady morphing of the Build Back Better bill into ever-more compromised climate legislation, and then the widespread conviction that even that would not pass. Until at the last minute Joe Manchin agreed, as long as it was larded with yet more gifts for the fossil fuel industry. And with that Congress took its first real action on climate in the 35 years it’s been an issue.

It was supposed to be a steady source of funding that would last a decade, giving this energy transition time to find its feet, and giving the U.S. a foothold in the fight with China to determine the future. But in the course of a few months the White House and the fossil-funded GOP Congress have overturned all that except the extra gifts to the fossil fuel industry. (Antonia Juhasz provides the best account yet of all the excruciating details in Rolling Stone.) The IRA won’t last a decade. Its funding starts running out at the end of September—if you’re in the market for an EV, that has to be done now. (And there may be some excellent lease deals). And if you’re even considering getting solar on your home, that needs to happen by the end of the year if you want the tax credit.

Normally we talk about these things as political questions—but today I asked a few experts to share their take on what individual Americans might want to do over the 165 days.

Here’s Cindy del Rosario-Tapan, from the very experienced Solar United Neighbors (who are sponsoring a webinar later this week to go over the same ground and more)

• The impacts of this new law will be severe. We expect the solar market to shrink significantly and will readjust over time. It’s likely many companies will have layoffs or go out of business in the near-term.

• Our advice to homeowners is to act now:

• If you are a homeowner and planning to pay cash or finance your system through a loan, we highly recommend you go solar in 2025 to benefit from the tax credit and that you do so soon. Homeowners should proceed with caution and consult a tax advisor to determine the extent to which their project is eligible.

• The safest way to ensure your project will qualify for the tax credit is to have it “placed in service” before the end of 2025. “Placed in service” is a gray area but a conservative interpretation would be when your system is ready to be connected to the grid.

My old 350.org colleague Phil Aroneanu has been hard at work at Climate United trying to protect what they can of the IRA funding. He breaks it down a little further:

If you're hoping to put solar on the roof of your home, and you want to own the system (not lease it), the 30% residential clean energy tax credit (25D) will sunset at the end of 2025, 10 years sooner than what was written into the Inflation Reduction Act.

If you own a business or non-profit, or work at a school or city government agency and want to install solar OR you want to lease a solar array for your home rather than own it outright, you'll need to get started as soon as possible to qualify for the up to 60% investment tax credit (48E) and bonuses available. Onerous restrictions will kick in by the end of 2025 making it more difficult to claim the tax credits for projects that aren't yet under construction — and the Trump administration just released an Executive Order that will add even more red tape to these tax credits.

If you're hoping to buy and electric vehicle, the tax credits expire on September 30th, and if you're planning to install heat pumps, windows, or take other energy efficiency measures, most of those tax credits expire at the end of the year.

And here’s Andrea Karelas from RE-Volv, a group that helps nonprofits go solar. (He’s also the author of the excellent Climate Courage), who analyzes it from the point of view of an average homeowner or project sponsor

So basically, before the big terrible bill, thanks to the IRA, if you went solar in the US, you got an Investment Tax Credit for your system worth 30% of the value (for storage as well) as a base amount and that credit would have been in place through 2032. So if your solar system cost $10K, you'll have $3K less taxes to pay next April, so essentially your system is only $7K. Then there are bonus adders that stack based on certain criteria. If your project is in an "energy community" (which basically is a place that has been historically impacted by fossil fuel production, or has many people working in energy production), you get an extra 10%. If you are in a low to moderate income community you are eligible for a 10-20% adder (but those are first come first serve). And if your equipment is made using majority domestic content (which is basically impossible) you'd get another 10%. So the solar ITC for residences (25d) or non-residential (48e) start at a minimum of 30% savings. If someone qualified for all the bonus adders, it would be 70% covered by the ITC. Many of our projects, for example, get 40 or 50% because they are in an energy community and serve an LMI population.

Now, thanks to the big terrible bill, the residential credit (25d) will expire Dec 31st 2025. So basically your system price goes up by a minimum of 30% if you don't have it fully installed before January 1st 2026. (And you could be missing out on up to 70% of the system cost covered if you qualify for the bonus adders.)

Now, the nonresidential credit (48e) on paper looks like it gets a better deal because you can theoretically get project construction started a year from when the bill was signed (so July 4th 2026) or get it completed by the end of 2027. BUT they also added requirements regarding Foreign Entities of Concern to limit the use of Chinese parts or equipment that are so unworkable that it makes the ITC unusable, even with these extended timelines. The FEOC requirements kick in January 1st 2026. So in essence, non-residential projects now also have a December 31st 2025 deadline.

All of this would be easier to navigate with devoted help from blue state officials: here, for instance, is some good advice from NYSFocus on how New York governor Kathy Hochul could help, and some excellent analysis along the same lines from Noah Ginsburg. But I think the bottom line is clear—this summer and this fall are the right times to work with a trusted local provider to get your project up. If nothing else, it’s a good way to disappoint the GOP and their fossil fuel friend group.

While you’re doing that, of course, we also need to be standing up for clean energy in general. That’s why we’re hard at work on SunDay.

Part of that work involves the solar industry reinventing itself for the world past subsidies—which is not impossible. Its old model won’t work without federal support, but that’s not necessarily the end: solar flourishes without much in the way of subsidy elsewhere, in places like Australia, because they’ve evolved a lower-cost business plan. Permitting reform is key (and a key focus of SunDay), as Ryan Kennedy makes clear in this piece from PV magazine just yesterday

Permit applications can cause delays of two to six weeks or more, causing a poor customer experience and higher project cancellation rates. Permitting also drives up costs. In New Jersey, for example, permit approvals and related barriers add an estimated $3,800 to $4,500 to average project costs. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) said the cost could be in excess of $6,000 to $7,000 for an average project.

New Jersey regulators, among other states, recently passed legislation to require automated permitting for residential solar, cutting timelines and costs. Tools like the Department of Energy’s SolarApp+ can facilitate permitting in your jurisdiction, and DOE provides technical assistance for implementing the tool.

Birch estimates an average U.S. installation could shed $0.98 per W from automated permitting fixes alone.

Since that hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t make the immediate blow any easier. As Aroneanu says,

Multiple recent analyses of the budget bill estimated that cutting clean energy and manufacturing tax credits will scale back solar and other renewable generation capacity by up to 72% in the next decade, raise household electricity prices up to $290, trigger the closure or cancellation of 331 solar and storage factories, and erase $286 billion in local investment in American communities, killing 760,000 jobs in the process.

Make no mistake: the Trump administration is doing everything in its power to try to kill clean energy.

Still, it seems impossible that American ingenuity won’t start to figure out some ways, especially since the rest of the world is surging confidently ahead. (Here, somewhat randomly, are updates from Turkey, Africa, and of course China). As Karelas says

We know solar is the cheapest form of electrons ever created. Last year 90% of new generation built in the US was clean energy 78% of it solar. (No wonder they're coming after it this hard.) There are some in the residential space who are trying to make the most of the situation by saying, ‘look, the industry had a nice cushion with these tax credits for many years.’ Tax credits also made project financing more complicated—there's a world where the solar industry bounces back from this after cutting costs, streamlining various processes, and will be stronger than ever… So, light at the end of the tunnel, but definitely a terrible blow.

Our job is to magnify that (sun)light, shorten that tunnel, and not fall any further behind the rest of the world than we have to. So, to work on all fronts!

In other energy and climate news:

+For years the knock on solar power was that it hurt the stability of grids—a “parasite” as energy secretary (and fracking exec) Christopher Wright insisted recently. But in the recent killer European heatwave, authorities in one country after another insisted that solar was now stabilizing their grid.

As a result of soaring air con use, daily power demand soared by up to 14 per cent in Spain, 9 per cent in France, and 6 per cent in Germany, compared to the previous week.

“Despite the huge pressure, European grids passed the stress test, and solar electricity played a major role in keeping them running,” says Pawel Czyzak, Europe Programme Director at Ember.

June 2025 saw the highest EU solar generation on record at 45 terrawatt hours (TWh), a 22 per cent increase from the year before. This flooded grids with cheap, clean electricity during daytime hours.

+Pope Leo interrupted his summer vacation to issue an appeal for action on climate change. He celebrated a special mass, including prayers for the victims of the Texas flooding, and then said two things that are worth noting:

1—"We have to pray for the conversion of many people … who still do not see the urgency of caring for our common home," and

2—The church will keep speaking out "even when it requires the courage to oppose the destructive power of the princes of this world".

The emergence of the Catholic church as a key part of the fight against climate change is one of the things that has really helped in the last hard decade.

+Extreme weather may cause European GDP to drop 5 percent, according to a new study

"The peak negative effect on euro area GDP is almost 5%, which is the same order of magnitude as what we have seen in the global financial crisis and a little bit less than COVID-19," said Livio Stracca, who also chairs the Network for Greening the Financial System's workstream on scenario design and analysis.

The findings are based on a new set of tools designed by the NGFS, a group of central bankers and supervisors working to address climate-risk in the financial sector and economy.

The tools aim to help banks and companies understand how climate change may impact their businesses in the short term by testing out a series of climate-related scenarios.

+Global warming is triggering earthquakes in the Alps. As Paul Voosen reports

The evidence comes from beneath Grandes Jorasses, a glacier-clad peak in the Alps that is part of the Mont Blanc massif, home to Western Europe’s tallest mountains. Precise seismic records show a heat wave in 2015 kicked off a surge of small earthquakes under the mountain. Although the tremors themselves were not damaging, the chances of large earthquakes are known to rise with the frequency of small ones. “It increases the hazard dramatically,” says Toni Kraft, a seismologist at ETH Zürich and co-author of the new study, published this month in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Scientists have known for decades that water, pressurized by the weight of kilometers of rock overhead, plays a key role in triggering earthquakes. When water percolates into the pore spaces of rocks, the added pressure can counteract forces that keep faults clamped shut, leading to slip. In eastern Taiwan, for example, movement along a fault—one that ruptured in a magnitude 6.8 earthquake in 2003—is thought to vary seasonally with rainfall. The same mechanism is at play in the clusters of earthquakes sometimes triggered by natural gas fracking, wastewater storage, and advanced geothermal energy projects, which all inject pressurized water deep underground.

+Check out the trailer for a remarkable new documentary called Hollow Tree. As the New Orleans Times-Picayune said, it’s an “eye-opening journey” of three young women through the vanishing lands of Louisiana. It’s easy to forget just what the Gulf (of Mexico) and the Mississippi look like as they meet—a waterworld already ravaged by oil development that all of a sudden is subject to rising sea levels.

+One of the people I count on for strong and clear-eyed commentary is Alaskan Kim Heacox, and his latest essay in the Anchorage Daily News doesn’t disappoint

The best thing humanity has ever devised to determine what’s true — separate from our personal biases, prejudices and faiths — is the scientific method. Be curious. Develop a hypothesis. Test it rigorously. Send it out for peer review. Get critiqued. Revise and test it again. Get more reviews. Get published and cited in scientific journals. It’s not easy. But it’s right.

Here’s what’s wrong: the moral certainty of a closed mind. Living in an echo chamber where a clever conman appeals to people’s blinding, tribal beliefs.

It’s not a matter of believing in climate change. We either accept the consensus, peer-reviewed science, or we do not. The truth is the truth, even if few people believe it; a lie is a lie even if most people believe it.

Meanwhile, after firing huge numbers of scientists who insist on the truth, Trump is hiring from that tiny cadre of researchers who have lived for years on the idea that global warming isn’t real or at least isn’t dangerous. As Maxine Joselow reports

The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.

In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

+In the Guardian, George Hibberd explains how climate morality led him to give up his job as a pilot, but how since he still loves to fly he’s working for a climate-friendly aviation future

There are plenty of ideas for how we create an aviation industry that’s fit for the future, starting with a non-negotiable emissions budget that would set limits on the total amount of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide aviation can produce. We will also need aviation to pay its fair share in tax (currently, jet fuel is tax free). The government could introduce a frequent flyer levy, so those who use aviation the most (ie the very wealthy) would pay a tax to help fund the research and development of low-carbon technologies, which in turn could help to create more skilled jobs. In the future, a long-haul journey might comprise multiple, slower hops in a low-carbon hybrid electric aircraft, while shorter, essential flights, such as those to and from Scottish islands, could be taken in small electric aircraft.

Long-time readers of this newsletter will know that my favorite answer to this conundrum is: Blimp. And I am happy to report that a few weeks ago the largest airship to fly since the 1930s made a few laps of San Francisco Bay. As Mark Harris reports,

The milestone flight was the culmination of 12 years’ work for LTA Research, which is funded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin. “I was a little bit emotional to see it over the bay, performing as well as it did,” says the startup’s vice president of engineering, Peter Sonnek. Sonnek grew up in the Lake Constance region of Germany, where the first Zeppelin airships were made.

“Flight testing the Pathfinder 1 is more than just learning how it flies,” adds LTA’s new CEO, Brett Crozier. “It’s trying to lay the foundation for a future of electric aviation that’s more sustainable, more adaptable, and more capable, in a way that will potentially change the way we move cargo and people around the world.”

As massive as the Pathfinder 1 is, it is merely a subscale prototype of the airship LTA really wants to build. The Pathfinder 3, currently under development at another WWII-era hangar in Akron, Ohio, will form the basis of the airship that LTA will eventually submit for certification by the FAA. The Pathfinder 3 will be larger than the current vessel and will carry more passengers or cargo, but other than that, its design is still far from set, says Crozier: “Everything we’re doing now will inform what that Pathfinder 3 will look like, with the goal of manufacturing commercial airships in Akron.”

And I should note that all this is being underwritten by Google zillionaire Sergey Brin, so at least on occasion this kind of absurd money can be put to good use.

+Sammy Roth, with his usual wonderful work on the California climate beat, takes his beloved Dodgers to task for avoiding obvious (and related) political issues: immigration, and climate change.

Since last summer, 28,000 people have signed a petition urging the team to end its relationship with oil company Phillips 66, which advertises its 76 brand gasoline throughout Dodger Stadium. State officials have accused the oil giant of participating in a “decades-long campaign” to cover up the climate crisis — a crisis that affects everybody but is especially harmful to low-income families and people of color, including L.A.’s Latino communities.

In March, California Senate Majority Leader Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) called on the Dodgers to drop Phillips 66 as a sponsor. In a letter to controlling owner Mark Walter, she pointed out that Angelenos breathe some of the nation’s most polluted air. She also alluded to the link between fossil fuels and more devastating wildfires.

“For decades, the Dodgers have been ahead of the curve. On issues from banning cigarette ads to making history by signing Jackie Robinson, this team has occupied a unique place in American sports,” Gonzalez wrote.

How have the Dodgers responded? At least publicly, they haven’t. Every time I’ve written about Phillips 66, they’ve declined to respond. I suspect they’re hoping the whole issue will just go away.

+Well, someone besides the oil companies is making money off global warming. Uniqlo reports it can now sell lightweight summer duds year round.

Last year was the warmest on record, and western Europe has just experienced its hottest June, as climate change continues to intensify extremes of heat, drought, cold and rainfall around the world. Okazaki said Europeans have become more accustomed to hot days and cold evenings, leading to a tendency to wear thin layers of casual outerwear, a trend that has been spreading to Asia as weather changes have become more extreme. As a result, Uniqlo and its GU stores are holding large stocks of year-round products to be more resilient to changing weather.

+In possibly my favorite climate story of the year, six Republican lawmakers—fresh from gutting the IRA—have written to the Canadian prime minister to complain about smoke coming across the border from wildfires raging in the north.

Tom Emmer is a senior member of Congress, serving as Majority Whip in the House of Representatives.

He and his five fellow Republican lawmakers wrote in the letter, published Monday: "We would like to know how your government plans on mitigating wildfire and the smoke that makes its way south."

They continued: "Our constituents have been limited in their ability to go outside and safely breathe due to the dangerous air quality the wildfire smoke has created.

"In our neck of the woods, summer months are the best time of the year to spend time outdoors recreating, enjoying time with family, and creating new memories, but this wildfire smoke makes it difficult to do all those things."

If I were the Canadian prime minister, I would reply with a little chart showing that the U.S. has put 25 percent of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and ask if we could please stop sending all that crud up into the air. Or maybe he should just put a 50% tariff on Republican nonsense.