Climate Change

Congress does not vote on the climate. It votes on tax credits, permits, fees, and export licenses, and where a member stands is the sum of those smaller answers. What is unusual here is how cleanly the measures sort by party. At the two ends, cosponsorship is almost entirely one party or the other. The genuinely cross-party bills all sit in the middle.

One set would push emissions down. The largest would restore the clean-energy tax credits for solar, wind, batteries, home efficiency, and electric vehicles that the 2025 tax law repealed. A narrower one would lift the accelerated construction deadlines that same law placed on wind, solar, and hydrogen projects, so that projects already in the pipeline do not lose their financing; its sponsor and every one of its cosponsors are Republicans. A third would charge imported steel and cement a fee based on the carbon used to make them, and hold American producers to the same standard. It is the only live carbon-pricing measure in this Congress.

Three bills in the middle draw real support from both parties. One speeds environmental review for forest thinning and prescribed burns, which is adaptation rather than emissions reduction, and which some environmental groups oppose. Another would make the federal disaster agency independent and cabinet-level and shift money toward preparing for disasters rather than paying for them afterward. The third sets a deadline for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license the fuel plants advanced reactors need.

A third set would lift existing climate rules. Two are already law, both passed under the Congressional Review Act, the procedure that lets Congress nullify a recent federal rule by simple majority. One erased the federal permission that let California require a rising share of new car sales to be zero-emission. The other ended the fee on methane leaked from oil and gas facilities that the 2022 climate law created. Two more have passed the House and wait in the Senate. One would declare all natural gas exports to be in the public interest, ending the Energy Department's power to review or deny them. The other would bar a president from halting hydraulic fracturing without a vote of Congress, and leave the regulation of it to the states.

That changes how to read the numbers below. On every other issue here, the strongest signal comes from bills that would do something new. On this one it comes from the two resolutions that undid something, because those are the measures that reached a recorded vote in both chambers, putting nearly every member on the record by name rather than by inference. Support here has to be read for its direction, not as a score: a yes on those two is a vote to remove a climate rule, and it is counted as one.

Two things are missing, and not by choice. There is no carbon fee-and-dividend bill to track, because the long-running version was not reintroduced this Congress. And the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and the rescission of the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health were both done by executive action, so Congress never voted on either and no member has a position to show.

None of these bills is endorsed here. They are chosen because together they map the real range of what Congress is weighing, from restoring the credits to repealing the rules, and because each vote and cosponsorship is a documented fact you can check yourself in the record linked below.