Hours before he was set to leave the U.S. to go to the U.N.’s 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) on climate change in Glasgow, Scotland, President Biden rolled out a new framework for a whittled-down budget reconciliation package that includes $555 billion in clean-energy funding.

Weighing in at close to 1,700 pages, the revised Build Back Better Act (H.R. 5376) comes with a $1.75 trillion price tag, half of the $3.5 trillion budget that House Democrats sent to the Senate in August. (See House Democrats Reach Deal, Pass $3.5T Budget Plan.) It is also missing some of the flagship energy provisions Biden and the Democrats had pushed for in the original, most notably the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would have provided $150 billion in incentives to utilities that hit yearly targets for adding clean energy to the grid.

The announcement from the White House said the revised framework was the result of “input from all sides” and good-faith negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), the two moderate Democrats whose support will be crucial for getting the package through the Senate. On Monday, Manchin told reporters he was not committed to voting for the package, saying its cost was higher than advertised because of accounting gimmickry.

“President Biden is confident this is a framework that can pass both houses of Congress, and he looks forward to signing it into law,” the White House said in a statement. The president also called on both houses of Congress to pass both the budget reconciliation package and the bipartisan infrastructure bill “as quickly as possible.”

But a hearing on the bill before the House Rules Committee on Thursday afternoon quickly turned adversarial, as Republicans attacked it as a “tax and spend” measure and the hearing itself as a rush job. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the committee’s ranking member, said he had found out about the hearing “the same way most did: on Twitter,” and he moved for the session to be adjourned, arguing that the bill had not been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office.

The motion was quickly voted down, but other Republicans piled on, with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, calling provisions to increase taxes on natural gas a “heat your home tax” and electric vehicle tax credits as “handouts to the rich.”

Rules Committee Chair Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) countered that congressional committees had already spent 165 hours marking up the bill. Thursday’s hearing was a discussion, he said, “about the details of a very important bill. … We can talk about the good and what people have problems with, and there are still opportunities for change.”

Speaking at an afternoon press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also stressed that “we won’t have anything, regardless of whatever input we have in the bill, unless it is agreed to by the Senate. … The text is there for you to review, for you to complain about, for you to add to or subtract from whatever it is, and we’ll see what consensus emerges from that.”

As outlined in a White House overview of the framework, specific clean energy spending includes:

• • • $320 billion for 10-year, expanded tax credits for a range of clean energy technologies, including residential and utility-scale solar, storage, transmission, electric vehicles and manufacturing.
    • $105 billion in resilience investments to address extreme weather — hurricanes, droughts and wildfires — and “legacy” pollution in low-income and disadvantaged communities. Part of that money here would go to a Civilian Climate Corps that would provide jobs focused on mitigating the impacts of climate change and maintaining public lands.
    • $110 billion for investments and incentives to develop new clean energy technologies, manufacturing and supply chains.
    • $20 billion for federal clean energy procurement, to incentivize “government to be [the] purchaser of next-gen technologies, including long-duration storage, small modular reactors and clean construction materials.”

The balance of the bill covers health care, education and other social spending, such as six years of funding for universal, free pre-school for all 3- and 4-year-olds, a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit and a new hearing benefit for Medicare.

The International Stage

Passage of the Build Back Better Act, and the companion bipartisan infrastructure bill, is seen as critical for Biden as he heads to Europe first for the G-20 Summit this weekend in Rome and then COP26, where world leaders will be presenting their carbon-reduction commitments Nov. 1-2. Biden committed earlier this year to reducing the nation’s emissions at a minimum 50% over 2005 levels by 2030. Heading to Glasgow with at least the possibility of the two bills getting to his desk would demonstrate on the international stage that the U.S. is ready to make good on its aggressive goals.

Speaking prior to his departure, Biden fleshed out more of the clean energy spending still in the bill. Funding to replace some of the country’s 480,000 diesel school buses with EVs survived the cut, as did support for a nationwide network of 500,000 EV chargers.

Looking to the global marketplace, Biden said, “We’re going to get off the sidelines on manufacturing solar panels and wind farms and electric vehicles with targeted manufacturing credits. You manufacture, you get a credit for doing it. These will help grow the supply chains in communities too often left behind.”

He also said the bill was “fiscally responsible” and would decrease the federal deficit and reduce inflationary pressures on the economy.

Enthusiastic Endorsement from Progressives

The immediate response from House and Senate Democrats was mostly positive, as were statements of support from industry trade associations.

While Sen. Manchin had yet to comment late Thursday afternoon, Sen. Sinema sent a semi-positive signal via Twitter. “After months of productive, good-faith negotiations with [Biden] and the White House, we have made significant progress on the proposed budget reconciliation package,” she said. “I look forward to getting this done, expanding economic opportunities and helping everyday families get ahead.”

The House Progressive Caucus also looked to be getting behind the cut-down version. In a clip posted to Twitter, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said a meeting of the caucus had “enthusiastically endorsed a resolution that approves, in principle, the framework that the president laid out today. We are really proud of the president and of our Progressive Caucus and our progressive allies for getting so many of our big priorities into the framework.”

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, highlighted the bill’s “new Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund [that] will accelerate innovation, prioritize the needs of environmental justice communities and ensure the communities we represent are better protected from the rising tide of extreme weather. Rebates for homeowners to electrify and make their houses more efficient, combined with resources to create a 21st century electric grid, will allow us to get more renewable energy online and powering our neighborhoods.”

A statement from Jason Burwen, interim CEO of the Energy Storage Association, focused on the bill’s “investment tax credit for standalone energy storage, [which] is critical to accelerating the pace of storage deployment on the electric grid. Combined with new manufacturing incentives available for batteries and federal procurement of next-generation long-duration storage, the Build Back Better Framework will supercharge efforts to rapidly transition to clean energy while building a robust energy storage supply chain here at home.”

Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, linked the bill’s clean energy tax credits to job creation. “Solar is a job-creator, and the long-term tax incentives for solar, storage and domestic manufacturing will put us on a path to decarbonize the electric grid, reach the president’s 2035 clean energy target and create hundreds of thousands of quality career opportunities in every community.”

Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy, spoke to the urgency of passing substantive climate legislation but also raised concerns about the negotiations still to come. “Potential unintended consequences around last-minute additions to otherwise unrelated pieces of the legislation … may work at cross-purposes with the mission-critical climate objectives at the heart of this bill.”

Ditto Cleantech

Comments from the business community were more mixed.

Echoing Republican criticisms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was concerned about the Democrats’ push to get the bill passed before the organization had time to review its details. While continuing to support the bipartisan infrastructure bill, Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer, said, “It is the height of irresponsibility for Congress to rush through such a large and complicated bill with no clear understanding of the real-world impact of the policies that are being proposed. Congress should slow down and make sure they get the policy right.”

But cleantech businesses said the bill would support the development and commercial deployment of key technologies.

Jon Power, president of CleanCapital, a cleantech investment firm, said the bill’s investments in innovation “will provide businesses, schools, nonprofits and municipalities with affordable renewable energy [and] will rapidly speed up the clean energy transition and unleash significant private sector funds.”

Similarly, Tim Latimer, CEO of geothermal developer Fervo Energy, said the bill’s clean energy provisions “will catalyze widespread buildout of utility-scale geothermal energy and accelerate national progress toward a fully decarbonized electricity sector.”

The bill’s sections on the tax credit for carbon-capture technologies, known as the 45Q credit, got high marks from the Carbon Capture Coalition, in particular its option for direct payment. If enacted with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, “this package would provide the most transformative and far-reaching policy support in the world for economywide deployment of carbon management technologies that are essential to meeting midcentury climate goals,” said Madelyn Morrison, the coalition’s external affairs manager.