The United States Senate Committee on Finance has released draft legislation that would quickly end or scale back most major tax credits for clean energy, solar panels, electric vehicles (EVs) and other benefits provided by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The plan would get rid of a $7,500 EV tax credit for consumers within 180 days, along with home energy rebates for heat pumps and other products. A tax credit for rooftop solar panels would also expire six months after the legislation passed.

Chief Executive of America’s Clean Power Jason Grumet said the Senate bill “would increase household electricity bills and threaten hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country,” reported The New York Times.

Grumet predicted that “good paying jobs, technology innovation, and AI data centers will be driven overseas.”

Federal tax credits for solar and wind power would be quickly phased out, and companies would only qualify for the biggest tax credits if they start construction within the next six months. If they began construction next year, they would receive 60 percent, with the credits falling to 20 percent the following year. Projects built beyond 2027 would not get any tax benefits.

The Republican controlled Senate has released their Finance committee text. On energy policy, it improves slightly over the House bill — but it will still gut clean energy projects, killing jobs largely in Republican districts. This is a garbage bill. THREAD.
www.finance.senate.gov/tax-reform-2…

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— Leah Stokes (@leahstokes.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 5:46 PM

Tax breaks for power sources like nuclear, geothermal and hydropower would be phased out in 2036, a summary of the bill said.

“It appears Senate Finance has taken this bill from a flat D to a solid D+ for the clean energy industry,” said Ethan Zindler, a BloombergNEF analyst and U.S. Treasury Department official during the Biden administration, as Bloomberg reported. “And that may be with a bit of grade inflation factored in.”

The Senate draft preserves renewable energy tax credits slightly longer than the House version, which would have done away with them almost immediately, reported The New York Times.

Under the IRA, 10 percent of refining or recycling costs for critical minerals were covered by a permanent tax credit, Heatmap reported.

However, the Senate changes start phasing out the critical minerals tax credit beginning in 2031, with 75 percent able to be claimed that year, half in 2032 and a complete end to the credit in 2034.

“In practice, this means that the Senate GOP text would end the IRA’s permanent tax credit for producing many critical minerals, which would damage the financial projects of many mineral processing and refining projects,” Heatmap said.

The new Senate version of the legislation expands slightly the type of qualifying battery components.

Overall, the Senate phaseout of clean energy tax credits is faster than many supporters of the technologies had hoped, with some analysts warning that electricity prices could increase due to the changes, reported The New York Times.

The new draft would make companies that lease solar energy ineligible for federal tax credits. Analysts say this change could lead to a sharp decline in the rooftop solar market.

“This is worse than I thought it would be,” said Sam Ricketts, co-founder of clean energy consulting group S2 Strategies, as The New York Times reported. “I was expecting senators who had purportedly supported the clean energy industry to step forward and make a mark here and improve the bill in a material sense. They have not done that.”

FACT SHEET: The “Baseload Fallacy”: Undercutting Wind, Solar, and Batteries While Supporting Nuclear and Geothermal Won’t Protect the Grid—Or Families’ Energy Bills, from @ClimatePower
climatepower.us/news/fact-sh…

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— Sam Ricketts (@samtricketts.bsky.social) June 17, 2025 at 10:14 AM

While no Republicans voted for the IRA in 2022, almost 80 percent of the $841 billion-plus clean energy investments that have been announced since have gone to Republican districts in states like Georgia and Wyoming.

Clean energy groups and Democrats called the new Senate draft a disaster, saying the plan would destroy manufacturing and jobs all over the country while driving up the cost of energy.

The changes to the IRA would also make meeting the country’s goal of cutting emissions by at least half below 2005 levels by the end of the decade virtually impossible.

“This bill would endanger hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs and take food out of the mouths of millions of children,” said Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, the leading Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, as reported by The New York Times.

Ari Matusiak, chief executive of nonprofit Rewiring America, called the Senate package a “profound mistake.” Matusiak pointed out that in 2023 more than 3.4 million U.S. homes used the residential clean energy and energy efficiency home improvement credits to make upgrades.

Jackie Wong, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior vice president for climate and energy, referred to the revised package as “a 20-pound sledgehammer swung at clean energy,” adding that it “would mean higher energy prices, lost manufacturing jobs, shuttered factories, and a worsening climate crisis.”

The post A ‘Profound Mistake’: Senate Republican Rollback of IRA Clean Energy Tax Credits Would Cost Jobs, Raise Energy Prices and Bring More Climate Extremes appeared first on EcoWatch.

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In new research, scientists from the Wageningen University & Research have confirmed regular activity by sharks and rays at offshore wind farms around the Netherlands. The team was able to confirm the presence of these elasmobranchs through traces of environmental DNA, or eDNA, in the waters around Dutch wind farms.

The researchers collected 436 seawater samples to analyze for DNA traces, a method that the team noted was affordable and non-invasive, making it more humane for the marine life. It served as an alternative to actually capturing any sharks or rays present in the study areas.

“It’s like finding a fingerprint in the water,” Annemiek Hermans, Ph.D. candidate at Wageningen University & Research, said in a statement. “Even if you don’t see the shark, the DNA tells you it’s been there.”

A researcher takes laboratory samples to analyze for DNA traces. Wageningen University & Research

The results, part of the university’s larger ElasmoPower project, revealed the presence of five shark and ray species at four offshore wind farms, including Borssele, Hollandse Kust Zuid, Luchterduinen and Gemini. Thornback rays (Raja clavata) were the most common and were present year-round at three of the offshore wind farms. The scientists published the results in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management.

The researchers were able to learn more about the migration of basking sharks (Cetorhinus maximus) through detecting their DNA around the Hollandse Kust Zuid wind farm during the winter. As Earth.com reported, the basking sharks’ winter migratory path in Dutch waters was previously unknown.

The Hollandse Kust Zuid wind farm. Esgian / Silco Saaman / s2foto

Other notable findings were the starry smooth-hound (Mustelus asterias) and the blonde ray (Raja brachyura). Both species were found at multiple offshore wind farm sites through various seasons.

“We’re trying to understand whether these animals are actually using the wind farms as habitat, or whether they’re being displaced by them,” Hermans explained.

The scientists noted that the elasmobranchs could be drawn toward the offshore wind farms because trawling is not allowed in these areas and fishing and shipping near wind farms comes with restrictions, which could potentially create safer areas that may benefit and attract marine life. The lack of seabed disturbance further allows smaller fish and other marine life to recover, creating a more abundant food source for sharks and rays, Earth.com reported.

Ongoing research will be needed to determine whether the elasmobranchs are using the offshore wind farm sites as safe habitats and how they affect other marine life. In particular, the study authors warned that preventing seabed-disturbing activities in these areas will be vital for protecting marine life.

“We must tread carefully,” Hermans said. “If we start allowing bottom trawling in these areas, we risk losing the very protection these zones may offer.”

The post Are Sharks and Rays Using Offshore Wind Farms as Habitats? appeared first on EcoWatch.

https://www.ecowatch.com/offshore-wind-farms-marine-life-habitats.html

Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe is seeking to purchase important Tribal lands to create a corridor for wildlife conservation as part of a partnership agreement with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation.

The corridor will connect 18 million acres of contiguous privately owned and state wilderness that are the habitat of endangered species like Florida panthers and Key deer, reported The Guardian.

“The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida have stewarded the lands and waters of Florida since time immemorial. The entirety of this land, and her flora and fauna, have been shaped by successive generations of our people. Our collective Indigenous Knowledge offers a unique perspective informed by this deep and historic relationship to the lands and waters of the National Wildlife Refuge System that lie within our traditional lands,” said Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee Tribe, in a press release from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

During the Seminole Wars two centuries ago, Tribal members sought to protect the Everglades and avoid banishment by government forces to Indian territories in what is now Oklahoma.

In January, the Miccosukee Tribe entered into an agreement with FWS for co-stewardship of national wildlife refuges in South Florida. The agreement means Miccosukee citizens can once again hunt, fish, gather culturally significant and medicinal plants and conduct ceremonies in the refuges adjacent to traditional Miccosukee lands and within the Greater Everglades.

In the wake of the Trump administration’s slashing of federal funds for conservation projects, the Miccosukee Tribe has stepped in to fulfill what it feels is a “moral obligation” to protect their sacred lands and the plants and animals found there.

“We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the lands and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial,” Cypress said, as The Guardian reported. “[But] we’ve seen some sort of hesitancy a lot of times to commit to projects because of the erratic nature of how the government is deciding to spend their money or allocate money.”

The agreement was announced during a corridor stakeholders’ summit last week in Orlando. It came as a Native American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) study found that 60 percent of Tribes recognized by the federal government have lost over $56 million in federal funding since President Donald Trump took office for his second term.

Though Tribes have their own independent governments, the U.S. has legal trust responsibilities to protect rights set out in Tribal treaties regarding lands, assets and resources, a press release from The Wildlife Society (TWS) said.

“These services are part of what we receive in lieu of all of the years of what we gave up — our land, our resources and sometimes, unfortunately, our culture and language,” said Executive Director of NWFWS Julie Thorstenson in the TWS press release. “These are not things that are, in our mind, something that is really negotiable.”

A Florida panther in a tree in Naples, Collier County. Tim Donovan / Florida Fish and Wildlife

As government funding has disappeared and federal land stewardship agreements face an uncertain future due to the Trump administration’s attacks on the National Park Service, Cypress said Tribal leaders had reassessed their work with other partners.

“For good reason, my predecessors had more of a standoffish approach. They went through a lot of the areas where they did deal with conservation groups, federal agencies, state agencies, pretty much not including them in conversations, or going back on their word. They just had a very different approach to this sort of thing,” Cyprus explained, as reported by The Guardian. “My administration has taken more of a collaborative approach. We’re engaging with different organizations not just to build relationships, but fix relationships that may have gone sour in the past, or were just non-existent.”

Lawmakers established the Florida Wildlife Corridor in 2021 and have preserved approximately 10 million acres thus far, with an additional eight million considered “opportunity areas” that need protection. Environmental groups have warned that there is still the potential for large areas to be lost to development.

The Florida legislature has been considering corridor funding cuts to balance state spending, and has encouraged commercial partnerships and investment.

The Tribe has already established a direct or collaborative stewardship with nearly three million acres in Biscayne and Everglades National Parks, as well as Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. Cypress said the Tribe was working on identifying and prioritizing lands inside the corridor that had historical significance.

“Financially, the tribe will invest some money, but we’ll also be instrumental in finding investors, partners interested in the same thing, which is to conserve as much of our natural habitat as possible while making room for growth and development,” Cypress said. “We’ve shown we can do it in a sustainable way, and our voice can help in shaping the future of Florida as far as development goes because once a lot of the land gets developed we’re not going to get it back. We need to do it in a way where we benefit not just ourselves in the present, but for generations in the future as well.”

The post As Trump Cuts Conservation Funds, Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe Will Purchase Land for Wildlife Corridor appeared first on EcoWatch.

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