Trump orders agencies to halt spending from Biden's climate law

financialpost.com:

President Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies to “immediately pause” the spending of money from the Inflation Reduction Act, former president Joe Biden’s signature climate law that provided hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to clean energy and other climate initiatives.

The directive, included in an executive order issued Monday, mandates agencies to review grants, loans and other payments associated with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Trump has derided as the “Green New Scam.”

The order follows a vow Trump made on the campaign trail to “rescind unspent” money from the climate law, billed by Democrats as the largest-ever investment in fighting climate change.

Projected to provide incentives for electric-vehicle, wind, solar, hydrogen and nuclear power projects, the law has been seen as a target for the incoming administration, searching for ways to pay for Trump’s planned tax cuts.

Clawing back the funds won’t be easy, though. The Energy Department has committed more than $170 billion for grants and loans, through cash made available in the IRA and a separate bipartisan infrastructure law, it said on Friday. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has said it has awarded 93 per cent of grant funding coming from the IRA.

The broader energy directive signed by Trump on Monday terminated Biden’s American Climate Corps program — a New Deal-inspired jobs program to fight climate change around the United States. Trump also ordered the EPA to consider eliminating the “social cost of carbon,” a metric used for estimating the potential economic damage from global warming and extreme weather, historically used to justify environmental policies.

Bloomberg.com