Trump's big toxic bill will cost America

Sydney Morning Herald

13-07-2025

But it will eventually hurt us all because the IRA, had it not been dismantled, would have spared the world around four billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
Indeed, the total carbon cost of terminating the IRA, supercharging the US fossil fuel industry, and various other Trump executive actions, is now estimated to be around 7 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Or, as the specialist climate publication CarbonBrief notes, around the total annual output of Indonesia, the world's sixth-largest carbon emitter.
According to an analysis by Princeton University's REPEAT project, US emissions are now set to fall by just 3 per cent by 2030, rather than the 40 per cent required should the US have reached its abandoned Paris Agreement target. This is around four per cent of current total global emissions each year.
This is the price we must all pay for Trump's BBB, in both the incalculable increase in the impact and incidence of climate catastrophes over the coming years, and in the cost of offsetting those lost cuts by increasing the burden on other nations.
That Trump does not care about the global impact of domestic policies is no surprise. But what is harder to fathom is the costs he is willing to heap upon Americans.
Trump's various climate and energy policies, including those in his BBB and the trashing of the IRA, plus his various executive orders, will see Americans paying more for dirtier sources of energy.
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It will see a decrease in clean electricity generation in 2035 by more than 820 terawatt-hours – more than the entire contribution of nuclear or coal to its electricity supply today. It will increase US household and business energy expenditure by US$28 billion annually by 2030 and over $US50 billion by 2035, according to REPEAT.
Average US household energy costs will increase by around $US165 per household per year in 2030.
Even more perversely, the initiatives will lock the US out of competition with China for a share of the technologies of the future beyond wind and solar. The burgeoning EV industry is being crippled not just by a loss of incentives and tax breaks for battery development, but by sanctions on the Chinese components the industry will need in the absence of US alternatives.
'We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future Ford,' Ford's chief executive Jim Farley said at a conference last month, describing recent visits to China as the 'most humbling experience' of his life.
Tellingly, even as Trump abandons the industries of the future with his BBB, he has propped up not just those of the fossil fuel era, but even one that came before. To secure the crucial support of the Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski Trump found the cash to increase tax deductions for Alaskan subsistence whaling.
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Indeed, by the time the bill had been forced through Congress, it had gathered so many tax cuts and pay-offs that it failed to pay for itself. Rather, over the next decade it will add US$2.5 trillion to the already eye-bleeding US debt of $US36.8 trillion.
Climate advocates have been locked in a debate over whether the only way to save the climate would be to destroy the global economy. Over recent years optimists had begun to toy with the notion that perhaps the revolution in green tech over recent years, such as the 90 per cent collapse in the cost of solar power, might just allow us to preserve both.