Climate Corner: What happened to ‘all-of-the-above’ energy?

Jun 28, 2025

George Banziger

editorial@newsandsentinel.com

Federal elected officials in the House, Senate and Oval Office have frequently stated that their energy policy is “all of the above,” meaning coal, oil, natural gas, wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, and more. But what appears in the “Big, Beautiful Budget Bill,” which is now before the U.S. Senate, seems to be a war on renewables and gift to the fossil fuel industry.

Without clean energy tax credits, which were voted on by Congress with the Inflation Reduction Act, we miss most of the “above.” In Washington County we are seeing plans for data centers as part of economic development, for example with the repurposing of retired coal-fired power plants, these data centers will require lots of energy — from natural gas AND from clean energy sources. Clean Energy Tax Credits will boost the economy in Washington County, in the Mid-Ohio Valley, create jobs and lead to economic stability, which is sorely needed at this point. Without Clean Energy Tax Credits, residents will experience high utility rates; it is estimated by the Clean Energy Buyers Association (2025) that the average American residential consumer would experience an increase of $110 in the next year without these additional sources of energy. These tax credits will also serve the purpose of achieving energy independence for our national economy.

Energy tax credits were intended to increase the country’s electricity supply, reinvigorate its battery and electric vehicle supply chains and cut carbon pollution. These initiatives have helped drive a clean-energy manufacturing boom across the country. The Inflation Reduction Act improved on decades of failed policy by going technology-neutral — its tax credits support any new power plant that doesn’t generate greenhouse gas emissions. That means technologies that even Republicans like, including nuclear fission, geothermal power and nuclear fusion, could benefit.

Furthermore, these tax credits are driving private investment, creating good-paying jobs, and strengthening American energy independence. Businesses across Ohio and West Virginia — especially in manufacturing, construction, and energy–are already benefiting. Rolling back these incentives would disrupt job growth and hurt local economies. By expanding domestic energy production, we reduce reliance on foreign energy sources. These investments in renewable energy are about leveling the playing field, letting businesses compete, and ensuring taxpayers get a return on investment.

Instead, the budget bill before the Senate grants subsidies to oil drillers, provides for drilling on federally owned public lands, gives drillers the benefit of avoiding paying the alternative minimum tax annually, and grants a subsidy for carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that is scientifically unproven, economically impractical, and dangerous to our environment. All of these gifts to the fossil fuel industry involve billions of lost tax revenue and, more notably, will drive up our national debt by the trillions.

As we are experiencing our first major heat wave of what is predicted to be another scorching summer, we are reminded of the environmental costs of the expansion of burning fossil fuels, specifically global warming. Natural gas, which its congressional advocates are so actively supporting, is responsible for over 80 times the greenhouse gas emissions as carbon dioxide — more pollution, more captured heat, and other environmental consequences.

Regional advocates of the natural gas industry falsely claim that the extraction and processing of natural gas are important for the economy and for job creation in Appalachian Ohio and West Virginia. This is a myth. The natural gas industry is not a major employer in Ohio. In a report by the Ohio River Valley Institute (2025) it was noted that of more than five million jobs in Ohio the natural gas industry provides fewer than 10,000. In recent years it has been in decline, laying off 40% of its employees since 2018. This trend has also been apparent in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The employment deficiency in the natural gas industry is particularly striking in Ohio’s eight major gas-produciing counties, which have lost 11,000 jobs since the beginning of the fracking boom in 2008. ORVI has based this report on publicly available data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

So, for the sake of our local and national economies, job growth, energy independence, the environment, let’s put ALL of the above back in the pending budget bill. If you live in West Virginia, contact Senator Shelley Moore Capito and Senator James Justice; in Ohio contact Senator Jon Husted and Senator Bernie Moreno and urge them to put clean energy tax credits back into this bill. Now is the time — Senate leaders are looking at a July 4 deadline.

***

George Banziger, Ph.D., was a faculty member at Marietta College and an academic dean at three other colleges. He is a member of the Green Sanctuary Committee of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Marietta, of Citizens Climate Lobby, and of the Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action team.