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Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betraying a promise.

'When North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis stepped onto the Senate floor on Sunday, he had already voted no on a key procedural vote to advance President Donald Trump's sweeping tax and spending package. What's more, he just shocked his fellow Republicans by announcing he was not going to run for re-election next year, a move that could scramble the midterm map. So now that the occasional Trump critic was free to fully unload on the president's signature legislation, he did just that.

I'm telling the president that you have been misinformed. You supporting the Senate mark will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid.

Specifically, he was angry about how the Senate version of the bill would impact Medicaid recipients. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office crunched the numbers and found the Senate version would leave 11.8 million more people without health insurance in 2034, nearly a million more than under the House version. And Medicaid is just one part of this huge bill that the American people by and large are not on board with.

To quote our colleague Charles Barkley, terrible, terrible, terrible. Let's take a look at the net favorable rating on the big beautiful bill. Minus 19 points Washington Post, minus 20 points Pew Research Center, Fox minus 21, Quinnipiac University minus 26, KFF minus 29.

'So as Congress continues to debate ahead of Trump's self-imposed July 4th deadline, how else are you going to feel it if it gets to his desk? My guest is CNN climate reporter, Ella Nilsen. We're gonna talk about how customers in both red and blue states could soon be feeling the heat from higher energy bills. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind. Stick with us.

Okay, Ella, so there's just so much in this bill and honestly, I'd recommend our listeners to head over to cnn.com just to get a full sense of actually what's in it. But today I'd like to zero in on the areas you cover extensively, climate and energy policy. So how should we think about how this big package deals with that stuff?

Yeah, David. So this is a huge rollback of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the big climate and clean energy bill that was passed in 2022 when Joe Biden was president.

So I will terminate the Green New Scam, one of the great scams in history.

Trump has been calling for this to get repealed basically since he was on the campaign trail. He's obviously no fan of green energy or renewables. He's been a long time, I think, personal opponent of wind energy in particular. He often talks about how ugly wind turbines are, how they kill birds.

And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?

'But in general, Trump is a very pro-fossil fuel president. He often talks about drill-baby-drill. His administration is talking about bringing back more

I call it beautiful clean coal. I tell my people never use the word coll unless you put beautiful clean before it

They just don't really like renewables, wind and solar in particular. And they're making it a point to try to phase out subsidies for this type of energy in this bill. Trump has also often talked about Biden's EV policies, claiming that Biden had a mandate for EVs, which is not what it was. And one of the things that they are looking to kill that I think will certainly happen in this Bill is a $7,500 tax credit for consumers who are hoping to buy an EV.

This was like a discount that people could get if they bought an electric car, but that's going to be going away.

Correct, yes, this is like, you're at the dealership, you're getting ready to drive off the lot, and this is literally 7,500, you get to take off the sticker price of an EV.

I don't want windmills destroying our place. I don't want these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up a half a mountain that are ugly as hell. And by the way, the panels are all made, and the windmils, they're all made in China.

The bill also contains heavy restrictions for energy companies that are building wind and solar to generate new electricity. So these are renewables developers that are making utility scale solar farms or utility scale wind farms. It really hones in on killing longstanding tax credits, tax credits that honestly have been bipartisan for many years. And the idea was to incentivize developers to just build. Massive, massive amounts of wind and solar, which are already some of the cheapest forms of electricity out there because sun and wind are free. There's no fuel cost like there is for oil or gas or coal. So Republicans are arguing basically that wind and solar are mature technologies and that they don't need subsidies.

So won't that mean a loss of jobs if these projects go away?

'Yes, very much so. In both wind and solar and also in EV manufacturing, you know, we have done extensive reporting on the amount of jobs that are being created by the Inflation Reduction Act, by this Biden-era climate and clean energy law. And 80% of them are being created in Republican congressional districts and in red states. And these are good paying jobs. These are the types of manufacturing jobs that Donald Trump talks often about bringing back. A lot of projects are already partially built or near in completion, but there are hundreds of others that are still waiting to be constructed.

Okay, so that's an impact for people obviously working on those projects, but I think a lot of people want to know about how this is going to impact them like literally in their homes. It's summer, it's hot in a lot of these places. People just want to if their electricity bill's going to go up, their heating bill's going to up in the winter. So how will this package impact those costs?

So yeah, this is going to impact pretty much everybody in the country. Basically, if you have an electricity bill, this Republican tax package will impact you. Because Republicans are taking away these incentives for wind and solar, which are very cheap, it means that less wind and power is going get built and less of this energy is going be added onto the grid. That means that developers, utilities are going to turn more towards natural gas. They're gonna turn more towards keeping existing coal plants. These are old plants that have been around since, you know, the 60s and the 70s. It means that these coal plants are gonna be on the grid for longer. And that all means that individuals' electricity prices are going to go up over the next decade. Electricity prices are already going up around the country, and that's due to a few factors. There are things like utilities are investing in hardening their electricity distribution system. So basically like power lines that, you know, you see getting knocked over in extreme weather. They're trying to make these more resistant and more resilient. Alongside all of this. The US for many decades had seen relatively flat electricity demand. In recent years, that demand has gone up sharply.

If you take all of the electricity in the country right now for houses, for buildings, for everything, we need to more than double it....

Because of AI and supercomputing and the need for more electricity for data centers.

...To be number one. We're now way ahead of everybody at AI. China's in second place, but way behind. And they're going to be producing a lot of energy and a lot electricity for this. And so are we, and we're going get approvals very fast.

And because more people are driving electric cars and we're electrifying things in our homes There is just a huge demand for electricity and basically what is happening Now is you are seeing this demand spiking at the same time that Senate Republicans are saying let's take this very cheap source of electricity with wind and solar and Let's kill the subsidies for it

So this need for power isn't going away. In fact, it's only going up because of the rise of AI and these data centers which use massive amounts of power. But now Republicans are on the verge of taking away a very cheap way of generating that power.

'And I did just want to provide one stat that I got from an analyst, which kind of blew my mind, just in terms of the sheer amount of wind and solar energy that was set to come online over the next decade. We talked to this nonpartisan think tank called the Rhodium Group all the time. They're always doing modeling and crunching data and crunch numbers. And they had projected that if the Biden-era tax credits stayed in place over the in the next 10 years, we would see... Anywhere between 400 to 1,100 gigawatts of wind and solar and batteries come online on the grid over the next 10 years. That is like, at the higher end, that is over one periwatt of energy, which is just a huge amount of energy.

I don't know much about energy, but that sounds like a lot.

It's a ton. And basically, this is the type of energy that data centers need. It's honestly even kind of a drop in the bucket for what data centers need on top of everything else being electrified in American life. So essentially, this was going to be one of the big ways that we were going to meet electricity demand for data centers was just by building wind and solar wherever we could.

Well, with all this said, I guess I'm wondering if any part of the renewable energy industry is actually on board with what Republicans are presenting here.

Yeah, so, beyond wind and solar developers who are very much not on board with it, there are some positives in the bill, or at least it's not as bad, I should say, for developers who are doing nuclear energy, who are geothermal energy, hydropower. So those are basically all forms of energy that don't produce CO2 emissions and planet warming pollution. But I will just say that Trump and his energy secretary, Chris Wright, often talk about these sources. They like them because they are what is considered baseload power. So wind and solar are a bit more intermittent because sometimes the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. And so they are not as reliable as, say, a natural gas plant or a nuclear plant where you can just flip a switch on and off. And have power whenever you want to. However, geothermal and nuclear, especially smaller, advanced nuclear reactors, are promising. They are this electricity generation of the future. But I think of the feature is a very key term here, because these projects are in development right now, but they are nowhere near. Able to provide the amount of electricity that wind and solar could have provided over the next decade. Basically, analysts think that we're still about 10 years away from being able to get power on the grid from small modular nuclear reactors. And in 10 years, the rhodium analyst who I spoke with told me that there would basically be a few gigawatts of geothermal energy on the Grid in 10 year. So That gives you an idea of the sheer scale of wind and solar compared to these other forms of energy.

Like the other forms, they sound good in theory, but they are many, many years down the line. And in the meantime, wind and solar is already up and operating with more planned, but that could be in threat if this bill goes forward.

Exactly.

And a big theme that's really stuck out to me as Congress tries to wrangle this bill across the finish line is that Trump allies have not necessarily been afraid to speak out against parts of the bill they don't like. For example, Elon Musk doesn't seem to like any of it. He's once again threatening to launch primary campaigns against Republicans who vote for it. You have voices like Joe Rogan joining in with some lawmakers from Western states who work to get language around the sale of public lands removed. And even on this wind and solar stuff, a lot of that industry is located in Trump country, right?

'You know, where wind and solar is being built does not fall cleanly along red state or blue state lines. Texas leads the country in wind and soil deployment. They've just built a huge amount of utility scale solar and a huge number of wind over the past decade or so, especially in the past few years. And we've seen Texas gets pretty hot in the summer. Those renewables on the grid have really bailed out consumers during heat waves when power demand has spiked. Oklahoma is another state that has built out a ton of wind energy. I went to Oklahoma a few years ago and talked to farmers that have leased out their land to these big wind turbines. And honestly found that people in Oklahoma, maybe counter to what you would think, being a pretty red state, are pretty friendly to wind energy and they're getting paid to lease their land to utility companies for wind turbines, they don't think it's super disruptive to their farmland or their cattle grazing. And according to this new energy analysis from this think tank energy innovation, states like Oklahoma and Texas would actually see their electricity prices go up the most over the next decade if this tax bill goes into effect. And that's because these states were set to deploy a eye-popping amount of new renewables if the tax credits had stayed. Energy Innovation found that annual household energy costs could rise $845 per year in Oklahoma by 2035. And in the same period of time, they would rise $777 per year, in Texas.

So it sounds like bottom line, most Americans will be paying more for their energy going forward down the line if this bill kind of goes forward in the way that it's currently constructed. But these red states, which are actually leading the way in some of these renewables like wind and solar, are really going to bear the brunt of these costs.

Yeah, I think that's correct and that's partially because, you know, states like Texas and Oklahoma are energy rich. You know, they produce a lot of oil and natural gas and they produce a lot energy from wind and solar. If wind and solar go away, you they have gas to fall back on, but that is going to come at a cost to consumers.

It's really interesting. And if listeners want to find out how this bill will impact their energy costs in their state, Ella and the team have a great interactive up on cnn.com. You can pick your state on the map, get an instant projection. We'll leave a link in our show notes of this episode.

Thanks so much for having me on David, I appreciate it.

One Thing is a CNN Podcasts production. This episode was hosted and produced by me, David Rind. Our showrunner is Felicia Patinkin. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Podcasts. We get support from Alex Manassari, Mark Duffy, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundidge. Have a nice Fourth if you're able to take some time off, enjoy. And we'll be back on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.