How urgently must we act on climate change, and who bears the cost of the energy transition?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Markets already know how to price externalities — carbon just needs to become one of them. A carbon tax or cap-and-trade system is the most economically efficient way to reduce emissions — pricing the externality of carbon into the market. Revenue collected can be returned directly to households, offsetting the higher energy costs the price itself creates.
Economists across the spectrum back carbon pricing; the hard part has always been who bears the cost. Carbon pricing has support across economists of both parties, and a border adjustment prevents offshoring emissions to countries without a comparable price. The political challenge is distributional — ensuring the cost doesn't fall disproportionately on lower-income households who spend a larger share of income on energy.
Raising energy costs unilaterally hits working Americans while China and India keep increasing emissions with no comparable price. Carbon taxes raise energy costs for every American, hitting the working class hardest. U.S. unilateral action raises domestic costs while China and India continue to increase emissions, harming American competitiveness without a comparable climate benefit.
Paying companies to worsen the problem the government says it wants to solve is the easiest fix in climate policy. Ending $20B+ in annual fossil fuel subsidies is the lowest-hanging fruit in climate policy. It stops the government from paying companies to worsen a problem it otherwise says it wants to solve.
These provisions built up over decades through the tax code, so unwinding them cleanly takes more care than a single repeal vote. Fossil fuel subsidies accumulated over decades through the tax code and are not easy to cleanly distinguish from standard business deductions available to other industries. A phased reduction tied to alternative energy development makes the transition more manageable for the workers and communities involved.
Most of what critics call subsidies are the same deductions every other industry gets, and this industry supports millions of jobs. What critics call "subsidies" are mostly standard business deductions available to all industries, not fossil-fuel-specific handouts. The U.S. energy industry supports millions of jobs and energy security, and eliminating these deductions while mandating renewables raises energy costs further still.
The federal government just gave up its own primary legal tool for requiring cleaner cars and power plants. In February 2026, the EPA rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding that gave it authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and power plants under the Clean Air Act, repealing emissions standards built on that finding for over 16 years. Renewable deployment now depends almost entirely on state mandates and the IRA's tax credits, with no federal regulatory backstop requiring cleaner generation if either falls short.
Losing the federal backstop doesn't kill the incentive-based approach, but it does remove the fallback if incentives alone underdeliver. The IRA's tax-credit approach and state-level renewable mandates can keep driving deployment even without the endangerment finding, since neither depends on EPA's Clean Air Act authority. But without a federal regulatory backstop, there's no mechanism to compel action in states or sectors where incentives alone don't move the needle, and the rescission itself is still being litigated.
Removing a 16-year-old finding that's been disputed for years clears the way for market-driven deployment instead of mandates. The February 2026 rescission of the endangerment finding removes the legal basis for EPA to mandate emissions standards, leaving renewable deployment to market forces, tax incentives, and state policy rather than federal regulatory mandate. The IRA's technology-neutral tax credits have already driven record renewable deployment without needing an emissions-standard mandate behind them.
Wind, solar, and storage are the better bet than a technology whose construction costs keep blowing past projections. Nuclear power has serious safety, cost, and waste problems. Investment in wind, solar, and storage is a better path than nuclear, whose construction costs have consistently overrun projections.
Whether newer designs finally clear the cost bar is the whole ballgame here, not the underlying physics. Nuclear is zero-carbon baseload power that the climate math may require, and advanced reactor designs and small modular reactors address some traditional safety and waste concerns. The open question is cost competitiveness against renewables plus storage.
Nuclear is already America's largest source of carbon-free power; regulatory barriers, not the technology, made it uncompetitive. Nuclear energy is America's largest source of carbon-free electricity and is critical to any realistic decarbonization scenario. Regulatory barriers and activist opposition have made it uncompetitively expensive to build — reform both rather than writing off the technology.
Walking away from the baseline global framework undermines everyone's confidence that commitments will hold. The Paris Agreement is the minimum framework for global climate action. U.S. withdrawal under Trump — and the uncertainty it signals about American commitments — undermines global progress even among allies who stayed in.
These agreements are only as good as their enforcement, and blind deference to unenforceable targets doesn't help anyone. International climate agreements are only as effective as their enforcement mechanisms and the seriousness of major emitters' actual commitments. U.S. engagement is valuable when it's genuine; blind deference to unenforceable targets is not the same thing as real progress.
One side of this deal faces real cuts and payments; the other side's biggest emitter faces a deadline nearly a decade away. The Paris Agreement asks the U.S. to reduce emissions and transfer wealth to developing nations while China — the world's largest emitter — faces no binding constraints until 2030. That's neither fair to American taxpayers nor effective at actually reducing global emissions.