GOLDEN CRESCENT AND 1000 ISLAND NEWS

On Wednesday, Axios published comments from a top CIA official who declared that “ China is the existential threat to American security in a way we really have never confronted before .” Deputy Director Michael Ellis also said his agency’s top priorities were to help the US maintain a “decisive technological advantage” in several areas, including AI, batteries, biotech, and computer chips. Ellis said that the CIA is being restructured to deal with threats from China. It aims to hire more skilled people, including “more people with technical backgrounds...more STEM grads.” While America’s top spy agency is focusing on AI, batteries, and chips, China has spent the past three decades cornering the market on the metals, minerals, and other commodities needed to fabricate and mass-produce those very same technologies. Ellis’ comments were published the same day the International Energy Agency released its  Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 . And the findings of that report are ...

Summary House budget bill speeds up expiry of clean energy tax credits, makes them harder to use Budget bill preserves tax credits for nuclear energy Attention turns to Senate to save key IRA tax credit measures Bill's passage sends clean energy stocks plummeting   WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) - The House budget bill that narrowly passed in an  early morning vote  on  Thursday would effectively put the brakes on a clean energy production boom in the  United States   spurred by subsidies enacted in 2022.   Republican lawmakers' "one big beautiful bill" to carry out President  Donald Trump's  plan to cut taxes and boost spending on the military and border enforcement would end Biden-era tax credits for clean energy projects years sooner than planned in an earlier draft,  rendering them unusable  for most companies.   "We and many others had expected the first bill to be the worst version: This was wrong," Roth Capital clean energ...

Dive Brief: House Republicans on Thursday morning narrowly passed a  sweeping budget bill  that guts federal support for wind, solar, storage and other clean energy industries. The bill terminates most technology-neutral clean energy tax credits for projects placed in service after 2028 and those that begin construction more than 60 days after the bill’s passage. It also tightens restrictions on foreign entities’ involvement in projects, creating a “truly untenable” situation for developers, Jeffries analysts said Thursday. Nuclear projects have more time to qualify for the credit. The bill advances to the Senate, which is expected to take it up next month. Several Republican senators are  calling for significant changes , and questions remain as to how the two houses will reconcile “sharply contrasting versions of the bill,” Jeffries said. Dive Insight: The text that passed the House on a 215-214, party-line vote early Thursday is  even less favorable to clean energ...

  The Inflation Reduction Act’s Green Energy Tax Credits Chairmen Burlison and Grothman, Ranking Members Frost and Krishnamoorthi, and distinguished members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on the  Inflation  Reduction Act’s (IRA) green energy tax credits. I am William McBride, Chief Economist and Stephen J. Entin Fellow in Economics at the Tax Foundation, where I focus on how we can improve our federal tax code. Today, my testimony will  focus on three points .  First , I will discuss how and why the budgetary cost of the IRA’s tax credits has grown.  Second , I will describe who benefits from the tax credits.  Third,  I will recommend ways to reform the credits and comment on the reforms specified in the reconciliation legislation put forward by the House  Ways and Means Committee . The Growing Cost of the Credits The IRA’s green energy tax credits  ...

  Republican holdouts on the House Budget Committee allowed their party’s massive budget bill to advance Sunday night   after negotiating deeper cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act, but they continue to call for even more cuts to clean energy incentives. The bill had been blocked from passing Friday night by Reps. Chip Roy, R-Texas; Ralph Norman, R-S.C.; Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.; and Josh Brecheen, R-Okla. Rep. Lloyd Smucker, R-Pa., also voted no;  he said on X  that he “fully support[s] the One Big Beautiful Bill” and his vote was “a procedural requirement to preserve the committee’s opportunity to reconsider the motion to advance OBBB.” Brecheen said in a  Friday X post  that he felt the House “cannot allow wind and solar tax credits, in current form, to continue in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill.’  As it is currently written, Green New Scam subsidy phaseouts are delayed until 2029 — with some of these subsidies lasting until 2041!” After a weekend of n...

House Republicans have recently  unveiled  their proposed modifications to energy subsidies, which would substantially pare them back and raise  $515 billion dollars  of revenue. This is causing considerable heartburn among subsidy defendants, but  the truth is that the subsidies are largely high cost, inefficient, and transfer wealth from taxpayers to the richest Americans. When Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) along party lines in 2022, they  pledged   that the law would cut energy costs and achieve steep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.  These promises have fallen flat . Soaring cost estimates and diminishing projections of emissions reductions have revealed the IRA’s clean energy subsidies as an ineffective burden on taxpayers. Their repeal is a straightforward way for Congress to save hundreds of billions of dollars. The cost of the IRA’s green subsidies—which include tax credits for wind and solar power, carbon captu...