Hostility toward the outgoing Democratic president is no surprise in Sulphur, Louisiana, a red town in a red state in a country that has handed the White House and Congress to Republicans. Yet the message felt like a poke in the eye at a time when Robertson was seeking funding through Biden’s signature climate law so her nonprofit organization could repair and retrofit hurricane-battered houses in the area — including her neighbor’s. Not even a fraying tarp, a tar patch or the piece of corrugated metal tacked on the roof could keep the rain from pouring inside.
Donald Trump has vowed to overturn the law that would provide the funding, the Inflation Reduction Act, which he has referred to as the “new green scam.”
If he follows through once he assumes office, Trump would be rolling back a law that has disproportionately benefited red areas like Sulphur that make up his base.
Though not a single Republican legislator voted for the law, an outsized portion of its historic $1 trillion in climate and energy provisions has benefited red congressional districts and states that voted for Trump, according to a report by E2, a group tracking the effects of the law. Red districts had the biggest growth in green jobs, the report said. Red states, including Nevada, Wyoming, Kentucky and Georgia, have seen the biggest jumps in clean energy investments, according to an August report from the Clean Investment Monitor, which tracks public and private investments in climate technology. Texas has received $69 billion in clean investments since the law passed, second only to California.
Not all of the money has been spent yet. And several provisions are vulnerable to rollbacks, among them tax credits for home energy improvements and certain alternative fueling sites. Billions hang in the balance, including, to Robertson’s chagrin, more than $100 million for disadvantaged communities, like Sulphur, to combat pollution and better weather the effects of climate change.
An ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church, Robertson, 66, wears her wavy white hair short, cusses freely and greets by name the homeless of Sulphur, a city of some 20,000 people. Miss Cindy, as she’s known in her neighborhood, named her nonprofit organization, Micah 6:8 Mission, after an old testament verse about caring for the poor.
Last summer, she and other community leaders worked around the clock to submit the grant proposal seven weeks in advance of a fall deadline. Among her partners is Build Change, which specializes in creating housing that can withstand natural disasters in the developing world. The organizations have sought more than $19 million for their local improvement plan, which includes shoring up roofs, remediating mold and mildew, providing homes with solar-powered air conditioning and building a community center where residents can find refuge during emergencies.
But in mid-December, an email from the Environmental Protection Agency explained it didn’t have enough time to make a decision on her application before the inauguration.
It will be up to the Trump EPA to determine whether Sulphur and some 2,000 other communities get the grants they applied for.
Now, Robertson said, all she can do is pray that Republicans will see that the investment is in everyone’s best interest, including their own.
As her small staff gathered for a weekly meeting in December, she bowed her head. “Dear Lord,” she said, “if it’s your will, may we get this damn grant, please.”
A Storm-Battered Community
Sulphur is near the beating heart of the extremely profitable petrochemical industry. Huge multinational corporations — including Westlake Chemicals, Citgo Petroleum, LyondellBasell and ConocoPhillips — have plants just a few miles from Robertson’s home and the office of her environmental nonprofit. But Portie Town, the crisscross of streets lined with low-slung homes on the north side of Sulphur where she lives, seems to have gained little for its proximity to these engines of wealth.
Named for a widow who moved to the area with her eight children in the early 1900s, Portie Town (pronounced Por-shay) remains a place of struggle. Median annual income is around $40,000 and life expectancy is 69, nine years short of the national average. Climate change has added another layer of challenge. The hurricane risk in Calcasieu, the parish where it is located, is in the top 3% in the country, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which rates the expected annual loss from storms in the area as high and the resiliency as low.
With its shore on the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana has always been vulnerable to storms, but the threat has unquestionably worsened in recent years. Climate change has raised temperatures, causing the air and water to warm. Storms intensify as they travel across the warmed oceans, pulling in more water vapor and heat, which makes hurricanes stronger and more intense.
When Hurricane Laura hit in August 2020 — its eye passing directly over Sulphur — it was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the state’s history, killing at least 30 people and knocking out the power in Portie Town for weeks. Many residents couldn’t afford generators or the fuel to run them and went without air conditioners and refrigerators even as the temperature soared above 90 degrees. Shortly after the power was restored, it was knocked out again by Hurricane Delta, which was followed by a deep freeze caused by Winter Storm Uri. The next year, Hurricane Ida tied Laura’s record for the strongest winds measured in Louisiana.
“The storms have been getting closer and closer together, more and more active,” said Jessica McGee, who lives with her adult son in a small, cream-colored house a few blocks from Robertson in Portie Town. The McGees haven’t had gas since Hurricane Laura; they have used electric space heaters and cooked their meals in a microwave oven for the past three years. Boards nailed over their windows before the 2020 storm remain there.
McGee, who lives on disability benefits, said she has neither the strength nor the money to repair the hurricane damage. “It’s my water, it’s the pipes, it’s the floor…,” she said. “The next one, our roof is going to be gone.”
If Robertson’s nonprofit is awarded the grant it is seeking, McGee’s house may also benefit. She brightens at the thought that government funding could bring her home back from the brink of inhabitability, but remains skeptical of politics.
“I don’t vote,” McGee said, shrugging. “It’s not for me.”
A Political Lightning Rod
The sprawling Inflation Reduction Act had many goals, including funding the Internal Revenue Service and lowering health care costs, but its main aim was to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change through tax credits, customer incentives and grants. Despite its purpose, its authors conspicuously omitted the word “climate” from its name in an effort to get bipartisan support for it.
The benefits of the law were felt widely, spurring clean energy projects in almost 40% of the country’s congressional districts; 19 of the 20 that got the most funding were led by Republicans.
In August, as he was standing on a corn and bean farm next to the deputy administrator of the Biden EPA, Jim Pillen enthused about his state’s grant. Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, called the agency’s $307 million IRA grant “a once-in-a-lifetime, extraordinary opportunity.” In Pocatello, Idaho — a town in a red county that is still recovering from the 2012 Charlotte Fire — “folks are pretty excited” about the planned greenway path that will decrease wildfire risks and allow residents to bike by the river, Hannah Sanger, the city’s science and environment administrator, told me. And in Alaska, where Trump also won handily, the recipients of a grant of more than $47 million to electrify two ports described themselves as “ecstatic” about the money.
Still the law remains a political lightning rod. Republicans in Congress have tried to repeal parts of it dozens of times, and Trump railed against it on the campaign trail. “My plan will terminate the Green New Deal,” Trump told a group assembled at the Economic Club of New York in September. “It actually sets us back, as opposed to moves us forward. And [I will] rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”
Clay Higgins, the Republican who represents Sulphur in Congress, voted against the IRA, which he attacked as a “monstrosity of a bill” that “wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on Green New Deal subsidies.” Higgins, who receives campaign funds from the oil and gas industry, notes on his website that “fossil fuels are the lifeblood of our modern society.” He did not respond to questions about Robertson’s hope to use IRA money to shore up the houses in his district.
In November, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a report that attacked the EPA’s IRA grants as a “green group giveaway” and characterized some of the recipients as “extremist organizations.” The lawmakers criticized funding groups that educate the public about climate change, or “environmental activist organizations that work to influence public and elected officials to adopt their often-extreme views, such as completely eliminating the use of fossil fuels.”
Despite the fiery rhetoric, a full repeal of the law seems unlikely, in part because it would require a majority of the House and Senate to agree on it. In August, 18 House Republicans wrote to Speaker Mike Johnson urging him to preserve the IRA’s energy tax credits, which are already funding projects. And it will be extremely difficult for the new administration to claw back grant money that has already been awarded.
Even if he fails to get the congressional support necessary to repeal the law, Trump could reverse the executive order that grants the authority to implement it. He could also cut short its longer term provisions, some of which were supposed to extend through 2029 and beyond. He can interfere with the funding that now flows through more than 12 federal agencies. And he can put a halt to the two dozen proposed rules that would carry out the law’s goals, according to the Brookings Institution. Congress could also severely undermine the law by targeting the rules that have been issued since Aug. 1 — and can thus be overturned through the Congressional Review Act.
A Looming Decision
Soon after the IRA was signed into law in 2022, Robertson began looking for ways it could benefit Portie Town.
Her charity had already been distributing food, clothing and “hurricane buckets” filled with mosquito repellant, canned ham, batteries and other supplies to locals when it and several other organizations together received $407,000 in IRA funds in 2023. The grant pays for the groups to distribute “evidence-based materials” about pollution, climate change and public health, according to its application. It also paid for two air monitors, which regularly document dangerously elevated levels of particulate matter in the air, pollution that is associated with premature death and breathing problems.
The IRA’s Community Change Grants, designed to provide approximately $2 billion for climate-related projects in disadvantaged communities, offered more direct help.
Robertson despaired on the December day when she learned that the Trump administration, not Biden’s, would be deciding whether Portie Town will get the grant.
“This community needs this so badly,” she said through tears. “Damn it.”
Just that morning, she had visited with Janet Broussard, 82, who lives by herself a few blocks away. The two had stood outside Broussard’s trailer imagining how the grant might improve it. Broussard’s roof had come off more than four years ago during Hurricane Delta. It was replaced, but, within two years, the new one was damaged by a tornado. She had no insurance that would pay to repair the damage and catches the rain in a bucket that she empties after storms.
But Robertson said that if the grant came through, Micah 6:8 Mission would be able to help fix the roof. “We’ll also be able to take the siding off, insulate, put new siding on, take the windows out, put in double-paned insulating windows,” Robertson had said.
Zealan Hoover, a senior adviser to the EPA administrator who oversaw the IRA grant programs, said the agency made a herculean effort and managed to distribute more than 95% of the money. But agency officials didn’t have time to give the proposals that were submitted in the final weeks of the application period the careful reads they deserved, he said, and so they decided to reserve some funds so the next administration can finish the process. “We are going to give those 2,000 applicants who came in at the very end, you know, some hope and chance of being selected,” said Hoover, who pointed out that, under any administration, “the agency’s mission is to protect human health and the environment.”
What it decides will matter to Tony Rodriguez, who hung the “F--K BIDEN” banner outside his home in the fall. A slight man with a graying beard who goes by Burnout, Rodriguez said he hung the banner to raise awareness about “all the bad stuff” Biden did. He had heard on the news — he can’t remember the exact source — that the president was to blame for children being sex trafficked, repeating a false conspiracy theory, and had sold out our country.
Still, he said he would be grateful if Miss Cindy would use some of the money she is hoping to get from the law championed by the outgoing president to stop the rain from coming into his bedroom.
“At least then he’d have done something good,” he said.
