Meanwhile, many states are relying on the new tax credit to support plans such as electrifying state vehicle fleets and installing solar panels on public schools. In Washington state, for instance, the Office of Financial Management is coordinating a governmentwide effort to ensure state agencies use elective pay to bolster their climate work. But climate advocates fear that an Internal Revenue Service led by Trump appointees could stall that work.

“There’s a lot of concern about what [Trump] would do with IRS staffing to limit the ability for them to get the refund checks out,” said Jillian Blanchard, director of the climate change and environmental justice program with Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit focused on human rights. Such delays could “chill hundreds of thousands of projects,” she said. “I’m not sure he knows that red states are counting on this money too.”

The last piece: Make sure everything that’s already in place is actually working. “We’re seeing that states and local governments need additional capacity to manage [the IRA] money well,” Jillian Blanchard, the director of Lawyers For Good Government’s climate change program, told me. Harris could help by enacting “more tangible policies like granting federal funding to hire community engagement specialists or liaisons or paying for the time of community leaders to provide local governments with key information on where the communities are that need to be benefited, and what they need.” She also floated the idea of a Community Change Grant extension to help get federal funding to localities more directly.

“The whole point is to level the playing field,” says Jillian Blanchard, director of L4GG’s climate change and environmental justice program. There is no limit to the number of entities that can apply for the credits or the number of projects for which any one applicant could receive them. The IRA authorizes the program through 2032.

The historic dimensions of this federal funding haven’t sunk in for many jurisdictions. “We call this a crisis of opportunity,” Blanchard says. “We want to make sure people don’t miss out.”

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was obviously supportive of the IRA in her role as vice president, but some think she may push the lever even further for green energy as the head of her own administration.

“She was born and bred in California, where the clean energy revolution, in some ways, has started,” said Jillian Blanchard, director of the Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program for the legal advocacy organization Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG). “I think she sees not only the need to protect our planet, but also the benefits in terms of workforce development [and] job opportunities. I think she’s also dedicated to the cause of environmental justice, which is a big piece of Biden’s platform that I think she will continue and hopefully expand upon.”

The stakes are large, says Jillian Blanchard, director of the Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program for Lawyers for Good Government. Her group estimates up to $2.2 trillion can be leveraged for climate, infrastructure and water investments. “The potential of this money from these bills can completely change the framework of systemic environmental racism,” she said. “That’s why we spend a significant amount of our time providing legal resources and providing support, because we want to see that money equitably distributed. The devil’s in the details and in the implementation.”

In partnership with the Village of Dowell; the National Renewable Energy Lab; Elevate Energy and Lawyers for Good Government, the City of Carbondale will conduct a comprehensive pre-feasibility study of what the community has been calling the Energy Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Proposal.

A water affordability crisis looms over Benton Harbor, Michigan, according to a new report from the Benton Harbor Community Water Council. The report criticized the state and federal government’s response to the lead crisis that started in 2018 and called for a slate of reforms to prevent and respond to future drinking water issues and to ensure water will be affordable for city residents.

New report says Benton Harbor’s already above-average water rates will need to be raised 20% every year for the next nine years to eliminate an annual operating deficit.

Tucked deep within President Biden’s landmark climate bill sits a seemingly small tweak to IRS rules that, for the first time, lets companies sell their clean energy tax credits. 

The change accounts for just a fraction of the 100,000 or so words in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which Congress passed in 2022. But experts say that by making clean energy tax credits more accessible, the move will help drive most of the government’s investment in the sector over the next decade and supercharge the industry.