Despite President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to take back unspent federal climate money from the Inflation Reduction Act, a local environmental leader expects the funds to be largely protected.
Congress passed the bill and President Joe Biden signed it into law in 2022. Allocating more than $300 billion for clean energy and environment projects, the Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest single investment in climate action in U.S. history.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to take back unspent funds and repeal the law.
Greater Cincinnati and the state of Ohio received millions of these dollars for projects like expanding solar energy, making climate action plans and monitoring air quality, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Inflation Reduction Act investment tracker.
Ryan Mooney-Bullock is the executive director of regional climate collaborative Green Umbrella.
"While we are definitely concerned that there may be some rollbacks of funding, the [Biden] administration put a lot of measures in place to protect against that,” Mooney-Bullock said. “We're still learning and understanding what all the details are going to be.”
Mooney-Bullock says the federal government has distributed a lot of Inflation Reduction Act money to agencies which are awarding grants, like the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program.
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“[They] have all ... given large pots of money to nonprofits, to educational institutions, to other organizations that are then tasked with regranting those funds or setting up basically revolving loan funds that make these dollars available in perpetuity for clean energy projects and other things like that,” Mooney-Bullock said.
She says the organizations have been proactive in obligating as much of the money as possible.
“We're hopeful that will mean that those dollars are secured,” Mooney-Bullock said.
Roughly two-thirds of the funding has been awarded, according to a White House statement.
Trump’s interest in scrapping the Inflation Reduction Act is part of his larger environmental stance against climate action. He’s set on boosting climate-warming fossil fuel production and has talked about rolling back rules that curb associated greenhouse gas emissions.
Mooney-Bullock says that won’t necessarily halt support for the clean energy transition.
“There is enough private sector momentum in that area because they know — they can read the tea leaves of the energy forecasting — that we have to be shifting towards renewable energy sources, just based on the fact that fossil fuels are not going to last forever and they're not going to remain cheap,” Mooney-Bullock said.
Cincinnati has the goal of being 100% carbon neutral by 2050, which it plans to achieve, in part, by increasing clean energy use.
Without as much federal support over the next four years, Mooney-Bullock expects local work — and funding — to define climate action.
“What I'm seeing local climate action looking like is truly relying on local work,” Mooney-Bullock said. “I believe that funding will continue to be available over the next at least two years, and I think that we are going to see national philanthropic entities, and I hope local and regional philanthropic entities, start to really shift towards this space.”