“A lot of the push to keep these subsidies alive isn’t about good energy policy — it’s about keeping industries afloat that can’t meet reliability and affordability standards on their own.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Friday that his agency plans to cut billions in grant funds for Biden-era loans as the Trump administration conducts a review of the department’s $400 billion clean energy investments, a decision that energy policy experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation cheered on.
Before leaving office, former President Joe Biden squeezed $25 billion into the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) for various projects, with the bulk of the funds going toward renewable energy development. Wright’s newly announced plans to review and cancel a majority of the loans has the backing of several energy policy experts who told the DCNF that the LPO has stripped cash from taxpayers and contributed to U.S. grid instability.
“We’ve got a lot of reasons to be worried and suspicious about that,” Wright told Bloomberg in response to a question about the LPO. “Some of these loans will go forward, some of it, it’s too late to change course. A lot of them won’t go forward, but that’s a very careful review process that we’ve just put in place and just got a team to execute on.”
The LPO has previously dished out loans for nuclear energy, an industry championed by the Trump administration. However, among the loans finalized after the election were $6.57 billion to an electric vehicle manufacturing facility in Georgia and $289.7 million to solar energy development and battery storage in Massachusetts.
“[The LPO] may have been well-intended, but it’s morphed into a clean energy slush fund that dooms energy projects by making them tied to federal funding,” Gabriella Hoffman, the director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women’s Forum wrote to the DCNF. “LPO investing currently undermines competition and market innovation of energy technologies. In the event it stays, however, it must be radically reformed to not prop up reliable energy sources like solar and wind.”
Notably, the rush to get these loans greenlit under Biden prompted a November inspector general report, which highlighted several potential risks to taxpayers related to the LPO, including concerns that the office may be moving too quickly to distribute funds, possibly at the expense of properly vetting loan applicants.
Other noteworthy projects approved under Biden’s watch included a $2.5 billion in loan for EV technology, 1.45 billion for a solar manufacturing facility in Georgia and $584.5 million for a solar photovoltaic (PV) system with an integrated battery energy storage system in Puerto Rico.
Founded in 2005, the loan office was created to help advance clean energy infrastructure, and it was increasingly active under the Obama administration, which approved a $535 million loan to Solyndra, a green energy company that collapsed just two years later. Activity slowed during President Donald Trump’s first administration, but under Biden, the office received a massive funding boost from Congress — totaling $400 billion — to support green tech firms.
“These past four years have been the most productive in LPO’s history,” LPO wrote in a fact sheet three days before Trump returned to the White House. “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the Office has announced 53 deals totaling approximately $107.57 billion in committed project investment – approximately $46.95 billion for 28 active conditional commitments and approximately $60.62 billion for 25 closed loans and loan guarantees.”
“If the government’s going to use my money as a taxpayer through LPO investments, that money should be going to investments that actually provide reliable power,” André Béliveau, senior manager of energy policy at the Commonwealth Foundation told the DCNF. “A lot of the push to keep these subsidies alive isn’t about good energy policy — it’s about keeping industries afloat that can’t meet reliability and affordability standards on their own.”
While the majority of the LPO’s support in Congress and the White House has come from the left, some right-of-center organizations recently urgedWright on April 14 to “preserve” the LPO for the sake of “American dominance.” The organizations argue that the LPO plays a “critical role” in enabling “new nuclear power development.”
“LPO continues to play a critical role in financing infrastructure that enables new nuclear power development, revitalizes domestic mineral production, and modernizes both grid and gas systems — all central to the administration’s goals of lowering energy costs, reshoring manufacturing, and achieving energy dominance,” the letter reads.
Subsidizing energy projects that are not able to survive on their own in the free market is questionable, Amy Cooke, the co-founder and president of Always on Energy Research and the director of the Energy and Environmental Policy Center, told the DCNF. “The calls to eliminate it are well-founded, and at the very least, it should be dramatically reformed,” she said. “If the market isn’t interested in it, is it the responsibility of the Department of Energy to fund [these projects]?” she asked.
“We should be funding improvements for firming the grid and not arbitrarily add more intermittency,” Béliveau said in reference to wind and solar projects that provide less inertia — the grid’s ability to continue running smoothly after a disturbance occurs between energy supply and demand for the electrical grid.
“If it’s going to exist, then reforms need to make sure that we’re being good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” he added, pointing to natural gas and nuclear as options that could help “firm the grid.”
“The Trump administration’s version of energy dominance has created a source-neutral way of picking winners and losers,” he continued, noting that reliability, affordability and security are the priorities of the administration, as opposed to a climate-change centric approach to energy policy.
Trump declared a national energy emergency on his first day back in office and signed an executive order to boost domestic energy generation. He signed a series of other EOs within his first 100 days in office to speed up the permitting process and clear red tape for several industries including coal and critical mineral mining.
“The so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) increased DOE’s loan authority by $290 billion,” Myron Ebell, former senior fellow and director for the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute told the DCNF. “This gives the federal government the ability to finance a large number of commercially unviable companies and prop up the entire renewable energy industry. The special interests that line up for these handouts spend more effort on lobbying in D.C. than they do on innovating and producing competitive products. DOE’s corporate welfare handouts need to be ended,” he said.
“First, the Trump administration should suspend any further loans, and second, Congress should end DOE’s loan authority in the reconciliation package,” Ebell continued. “The reconciliation package must also include repealing all the green energy tax subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Those two together will pay for hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts.”
The Biden administration encouraged the further development of renewables through billions of tax credits and subsidies under the IRA. Initially projected to contain nearly $400 billion worth of tax credits in 2022, later estimates revealed that the costs could skyrocket to $1 trillion over 10 years, in the case of the Goldman Sachs analysis. The Cato Institute’s March report showed that IRA tax credits could get up to $4.7 trillion by 2050.
“The entire program has to be shut down,” author and Climate Depot executive editor Marc Morano told the DCNF. “You can’t have the energy department picking winners and losers in the energy sector.”
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
