Your weekly resource to learn what the environmental movement is saying about the news of the day and the political fight of our generation. This week, we’re covering the fight to protect clean energy tax credits and jobs, Republicans’ Big Ugly Bill, and Trump’s attacks on public health and democracy.
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“For all the talk that I’m hearing about the need to prioritize affordable, reliable energy, I agree. We also need to be advancing clean energy for the sake of the grid, for the sake of environmental protection, for the sake of public health. We don’t have to choose between the two.”
— Senator Alex Padilla (CA) in a hearing on Trump’s 2026 budget request on Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s proposed cuts to funding for clean energy.
“For all the great laws — and they are great — that we have here in Connecticut, no one is safe from King Trump today. We have to make sure that we defend democracy.”
— Senator Richard Blumenthal (CT) in Connecticut at one of more than 2,100 No Kings Day rallies held across the U.S. last Saturday.
“If this bill passes in its current form, thousands of tradespeople will lose their jobs. These are hardworking Americans who have undergone specialized training and are now feeding their families with the skills they’ve learned.”
— Aaron Nichols, Research and Policy Specialist at Exact Solar, on how repealing clean energy incentives in Republicans’ reconciliation bill will harm families, workers, and businesses across the country.
OREGON ENACTS LAW ADDRESSING RISING ENERGY COSTS, PROTECTING CONSUMERS FROM EXTREME ENERGY USE OF BIG TECH : Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed the “Protecting Oregonians With Energy Responsibility” (POWER) Act into law this week, creating a new electric rate pricing system for data centers, cryptocurrency operations, and other large energy users. Oregon is currently home to 131 data centers, each of which can consume as much electricity as 50,000 residential homes. Currently in Oregon, industrial customers pay around eight cents per kilowatt hour, compared to over 19 cents per kilowatt hour paid by residential customers. This law will ensure that Oregonians do not continue to pay higher rates for electricity driven by energy-intensive industries.
NCLCV AND BLUEGREEN ALLIANCE URGE SENATOR TILLIS TO PRESERVE CLEAN ENERGY TAX CREDITS: North Carolina LCV and BlueGreen Alliance held a press conference at Senator Thom Tillis’ office highlighting the economic benefits of clean energy tax credits and urging the senator to vote against congressional Republicans’ Big Ugly Bill. Representatives from the BlueGreen Alliance warned that the House version of the reconciliation bill will eliminate union jobs and slow down investments in the state, which has become a leader in energy and manufacturing.
NCLCV TAKE: North Carolina LCV Government Relations Director Dan Crawford said, “As it’s currently written, the Congressional reconciliation bill stops clean energy progress in its tracks. It could cost North Carolina tens of thousands of jobs by 2030, along with billions in clean energy investments spurred by clean energy and manufacturing tax credits. [Congress] should focus more on strengthening our economy and lowering costs, not on preserving tax breaks for the wealthiest and exploding the deficit. I call on Senator Tillis to demonstrate his leadership in making that happen.”
LCVVF LAUNCHES AD SUPPORTING ADELITA GRIJALVA: LCV Victory Fund launched a $60,000 television ad program supporting Adelita Grijalva in Arizona’s special election for the U.S. House of Representatives for Arizona’s seventh District. The ad outlines how Adelita Grijalva will protect social security, medicaid, and medicare, and stand up to Donald Trump.
LCVVF TAKE: LCV Victory Fund Regional Campaigns Director Nate Fowler said, “Adelita Grijalva has shown that she’ll fight back against the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress when they try to put Big Polluters before our communities. Having faced extreme heat waves in Arizona, Grijalva understands the importance of building a clean energy economy, supporting environmental justice, ensuring access to clean drinking water, and protecting our public lands while following the leadership of indigenous communities. Arizonans deserve a leader who will look out for their communities, families, and children and fight back against the attacks on climate progress.”
SENATE FINANCE COMMITTEE RELEASES BILL TEXT: The Senate Finance Committee released its portion of the Big Ugly Bill that includes substantial cuts to clean energy tax credits, including incentives for wind and solar energy. Despite clear evidence that clean energy tax credits provide numerous benefits to their constituents, Republican senators chose to side with billionaires.
OUR TAKE: LCV Vice President of Government Affairs Sara Chieffo said, “Make no mistake, polluters and their allies in Congress are hellbent on banning clean energy just to pad their profits while we pay the price. Clean energy is the fastest, most affordable form of energy to bring online. At a time of rising energy demand and prices, blocking clean energy progress will drive up families’ energy costs while jeopardizing hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country and shuttering manufacturing facilities. Repealing clean energy tax credits will start raising energy bills next year by an average of $110 and will only keep going up.
“Pushing tax handouts for billionaires while raising energy and health costs on the rest of us is not what the American people want and we will fight this disastrous bill every step of the way. Now is the time for Senators who have said they support a more reasonable approach to clean energy incentives to deliver — we need actions, not empty promises.”
LCV released a deep dive on the Senate Finance Committee bill text and its massive cuts to clean energy tax credits.
TAKE 2: LCV Vice President of Federal Policy Matthew Davis said, “The Senate Finance Committee Republicans have released their title of the GOP’s reconciliation bill (a.k.a. Big Ugly Bill), and let’s be clear: while some of the words may have changed, the effect is the same – increased energy costs for people across the country ($110 more per year next year and rising to over $400 per year in the next five), attempting to ban clean energy like wind, solar, and batteries (93% of new U.S. electricity generation last year), and slashing hundreds of thousands of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of private investments. This bill remains an assault on U.S. manufacturing and American families struggling to keep up with rising energy bills—threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, billions in private investment, and higher energy costs for consumers. The “tweaks” in this section of the Senate bill cannot disguise the basic fact: polluters benefit and people get screwed. This Senate scheme doubles down on the House’s agenda of gutting incentives for clean energy, pushing the U.S. clean energy industry off a cliff, further enriching fossil fuel executives, and handing Trump’s agencies broad power to rewrite vague provisions into full-blown roadblocks for clean energy deployment.”
Prior to the release of the Senate Finance Committee bill text, LCV released a memo recapping the first wave of provisions from the Energy and Natural Resources (ENR), Judiciary, and Homeland Security Committees in Senate Republicans’ big ugly budget reconciliation bill.
TAKE 3: LCV Vice President of Federal Policy Matthew Davis said, “The ENR Committee’s section of the Big Ugly Bill doesn’t just hand over more public land to Big Oil; it puts millions of acres of Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands up for sale. It’s all being done under the guise of the housing crisis, but there are no affordability requirements, no conservation safeguards, and no guardrails on what gets built. All told, there’s nothing stopping our public lands from being sold off for the next Trump Tower, or for luxury developers, fossil fuel companies, and profiteers to treat our shared natural heritage like private inventory.
“Over in the Judiciary Committee, Senate Republicans are trying to weaken the courts’ ability to hold polluters and the government accountable. One provision makes it harder to stop government abuses in court, while another bans the Justice Department from including payments for environmental restoration or community relief in legal settlements, even in cases of serious public harm.”
“And in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, infighting among Republicans led them to release two versions of the bill: one reduces the amount of funding for Trump’s racist and ineffective border wall relative to the House-passed bill but sells off the US Postal Service’s entire fleet of electric vehicles, while the other skips the vehicles sales but throws another $46.5 billion at the xenophobic border wall, which is an environmental disaster. And it gets worse: the bill maintains the Homeland Security Secretary’s sweeping authority to waive any law the agency wants, from the Clean Air Act to tribal consultation requirements, no matter the damage it causes.”
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION PROPOSES ROLLING BACK ASBESTOS BANS: Trump’s EPA plans to reconsider a ban on chrysotile asbestos, the last form of asbestos currently used in the United States. The substance is currently banned in over 50 countries, and is linked to mesothelioma, several other forms of cancer, and an estimated 40,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. This dangerous move from EPA, which brings us further from eliminating asbestos from our communities, would be a major setback for the health and safety of people across the country. Once again the Trump administration is moving us backwards and prioritizing the interests of big businesses and polluters above public health and safety.
MILLIONS GATHER TO REMIND TRUMP THERE ARE NO KINGS IN AMERICA: Millions of people gathered in a nationwide day of defiance to show President Trump that America does not do thrones, crowns, dictators, or kings. While the president threw himself a birthday party in Washington, D.C., over 2,100 communities and 5 million people across the U.S. rallied against the Trump administration’s abuses of power.
OUR TAKE: LCV said, “All across the country we’re speaking up to say No Kings, the same way we stood up every morning in school to say ‘with liberty and justice FOR ALL.’ Trump’s strongman tactics and overreach have no place in the United States – the power belongs to the people not to Trump, not to billionaires, not to ANY one person or group.”
ON THE BLOG: This week on The Power Source Blog, we celebrated Black culture, heritage, and freedom, and took a hard look at how the current administration is threatening Black communities by rolling back environmental justice programs, as well as how we can fight back against these injustices. And speaking of fighting back, we have an all new recap of last weekend’s incredible No Kings protests where more than 5 million protesters took to the streets in cities and towns across the country to oppose the Trump administration’s assaults on democracy.
ON OUR SOCIALS: Two words: People power. Millions of you showed up across the country to remind Donald Trump there are no kings in the United States, and that is just the beginning. We are taking charge and fighting back to protect our democracy and environment.
JUNE 23: Maine Conservation Voters press conference to protect clean energy.
JUNE 23: Conservation Voters New Mexico rally to protect public lands.
JUNE 25: Clean Water Act Senate hearing.
JUNE 26: Tell the Senate No Handouts to Polluters + Billionaires.
JULY 4: Independence Day.
JULY 17: John Lewis Day of Action.
©2025 League of Conservation Voters