5 Wins for Clean Energy Innovation in Biden’s Budget
Originally published on the NRDC Expert Blog.
The Biden administration’s 2022 budget released on Friday includes major funding increases for important Department of Energy (DOE) programs to drive clean energy innovation, address the climate crisis, and build a strong and equitable economy. These funding increases complement the investments proposed in the President’s American Jobs Plan (AJP). Now it’s up to Congress to pass AJP and write a government funding bill that reflects the President’s proposals.
Below are five components of the budget that would accelerate clean energy innovation and redirect DOE programs toward our greatest challenges and opportunities.
1. Historic Funding Increases for Clean Energy
The budget includes $4.7 billion in regular-year funding for DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), a $2 billion (or 65%) increase from 2021. EERE houses the agency’s efforts focused on heavy industry, building decarbonization, clean transportation technologies, and renewable power. These programs are underfunded relative to the need for investment and the opportunity to build out domestic clean energy industries. The administration’s budget would give these programs a much-needed funding boost.
The budget also ramps up funding for other clean energy programs at DOE and establishes a new Advanced Research Projects Agency — Climate with initial funding of $500 million, of which $200 million is at DOE.
2. Demonstrations & Deployment to Round Out the Innovation Portfolio
The budget emphasizes funding for demonstration projects and deployment of climate solutions, a welcome pivot from the Trump DOE’s narrow focus on early-stage research and development. The new Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, funded at $400 million, fills a critical gap in DOE’s efforts to commercialize newer, better clean energy technologies, reduce costs, and address barriers to widespread deployment. The $300 million for Build Back Better Challenge grants will help bring the benefits of clean energy to more communities. And the focus throughout the budget on research, development, demonstrations, and deployment will better equip DOE to accelerate clean energy innovation at the scale necessary.
3. Bringing Clean Energy to More Communities
DOE should play a critical role ensuring that more communities see the benefits of technologies like renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles. Strong community engagement practices and funding for clean energy projects to benefit low-income, pollution-burdened, and energy transition communities and communities of color can help DOE meet these goals.
The budget includes several new programs to bring clean energy to more communities. For example, it proposes to prioritize the new Build Back Better Challenge grants for marginalized, overburdened, and energy transition communities. It also appears to expand the Weatherization Assistance Program — one of the only existing efforts focused on low-income communities — to enable more households to access funding for cost- and energy-saving retrofits, though the details on the expanded program are not yet clear.
The budget also indicates that EERE’s goal is to accelerate a just, equitable clean energy transition. This explicit focus, while just a start, is an important shift. Historically, EERE and most other offices at DOE have not been designed to support equity and environmental and energy justice.
4. Procurement and Funding to Decarbonize Heavy Industry
Technologies to clean up industrial facilities like steel mills and cement plants are critical to addressing the climate crisis. But these sectors have long been a major gap in DOE innovation efforts. The budget acknowledges that decarbonizing heavy industry should be a focus for both EERE and the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. This focus is a great first step toward building out a strong federal industrial sector program. As Congress turns the President’s proposals into a detailed appropriations bill, we hope to see large funding increases for the Advanced Manufacturing Office, funding for large-scale demonstrations at industrial facilities, and support for DOE to expand its heavy industry efforts to include electrification, hydrogen, circular economy measures, novel processes, and carbon capture and storage.
The budget also includes more details on the industrial-sector decarbonization efforts proposed in the American Jobs Plan, including, notably, funding to procure low-carbon materials. The federal government is a top purchaser of industrial products like steel and cement for the construction of roads, bridges, buildings and other projects. Government procurement is thus a critical lever in creating early markets and sustained demand for cleaner materials, alongside direct investments to help ensure U.S. industry is making the cleanest products on the market.
To better leverage procurement to drive innovation, the federal government should support efforts to create a reporting system that helps manufacturers account for all the carbon associated with producing a range of industrial products, and require that all construction projects receiving federal funds take climate pollution and labor protection into account when awarding contracts. We urge Congress to include funding in the FY22 budget for the federal government to support these priorities. Doing so will ensure we capture the significant emissions reduction opportunities associated with switching to lower-carbon materials in projects funded by the American Jobs Plan.
5. Support for State, Local, and Tribal Governments
Action from states and municipal governments is critical to meeting our climate goals; increasing clean energy; and driving adoption of innovative technologies, policies, and business models. Federal funding is necessary to support states and cities in these endeavors, but current programs lack the budget to meaningfully support them.
The budget proposes several new programs to support states and cities, including Build Back Better Challenge grants for states and a new Local Government Energy Program. The success of these programs will depend on the details, but it is promising to see new efforts to support states and cities in the budget. Moreover, these programs build on the block grant funding proposed in the American Jobs Plan to provide an influx of support for states to advance clean energy, building electrification, and efficiency.
The budget also includes funding increases to support tribal nations to advance clean energy. Households on tribal lands lack access to electricity at extremely high rates and often face high costs to connect to the electricity grid. The budget proposes a six-fold increase in funding for the Office of Indian Energy (a $100 million increase) to support American Indian and Alaskan Native nations, including to help address energy access and energy poverty.
Federal clean energy programs have already helped foster a revolution in technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle batteries. Now, we have an opportunity to accelerate clean energy innovation to improve, demonstrate, and deploy the technologies and strategies we need to combat the climate crisis. With the right funding and policies, we can do so in a way that creates strong economic growth rooted in the industries of the future, addresses inequalities in our energy and economic systems, and cuts pollution in places that have borne the brunt of it in the past. President Biden’s energy budget is a major step toward realizing these goals, and Congress should pass a government funding bill that incorporates these proposals and brings the benefits of clean energy to communities across the country.
Toyota’s latest move in its work to harm the environment involves an internal platform where it uses video games to spread propaganda among its North American employees, enticing them with prizes to join lobbying efforts to loosen environmental rules around the automotive industry.
We’ve covered Toyota’s anti-environment lobbying efforts many times before.
For an inexhaustive list of how Toyota lobbies to harm the environment, the company:
Now, an excellent report by the Guardian details how Toyota uses internal communications to encourage its employees to join its propaganda efforts, with anti-EV and anti-environment propaganda in the form of video games where employees can earn points and prizes.
Toyota calls the platform “Toyota Policy Drivers,” and it’s available to some 10,000 employees across North America. The games were created by LGND, a software firm that has also made projects for defense contractors Aurex and Bechtel.
It consists of several videos telling Toyota’s side of the story – like Toyota’s insistence that hybrids pollute less than EVs, which is incorrect – and links to participate by reaching out to public representatives.
But that’s just normal corporate propaganda stuff. What’s different about Toyota’s platform is the gamification of the process, encouraging employees to earn points and play video games while digesting this propaganda.
Video games used as anti-environment propaganda
Games include Monster Mansion, Adventure Quest, Star Quest, and Dragon Quest (no, not the long-running and popular RPG – we wonder if trademark authorities might be interested in that one).
Toyota cycles games in and out each year, but each has a similar goal of showing propaganda videos in exchange for points. The videos were publicly visible until this morning. After the Guardian published its article, Toyota password protected them.
Playing the “games” can earn you points, which can be redeemed for stickers and t-shirts, or even trips. One employee says he earned cupcakes and a trip to Washington, DC.
Adam Zuckerman of Public Citizen had harsh words for the program, which he called “dystopian” and said “treats employees like children.” Specifically referring to Stephen Ciccone, Toyota’s VP of public affairs for North America, Zuckerman said:
It’s fitting that Ciccone calls himself a wartime consigliere because he has gone to war against the standards that protect our communities and the air that we breathe. Like the mafiosos that he fashions himself after, he is pressuring his own workers into doing his bidding against the common good. Ciccone should quit cosplaying mafia, end his dystopian game of poisoning our air, and stop blocking the green vehicles of the future.
Toyota’s actions and its public image diverge
Toyota’s propaganda contradicts its long-held public image. For decades now, Toyota has been considered by the public as one of the more environmentally-friendly automakers, first starting with its small cars in the 70s and later due to the Prius, the vehicle that is known for popularizing the conventional gas hybrid powertrain. In the early 2000s, the Prius was among the most efficient vehicles available.
However, the Prius is no longer particularly efficient comparatively. Just about any electric car is significantly more efficient than a Prius – even the ridiculous Hummer EV roughly matches the Prius in energy efficiency at 53mpge vs. 57mpg. Also, conventional hybrids get 100% of their energy from fossil fuels, and are thus inherently incompatible with climate solutions.
Despite Toyota’s false claims that gas-powered hybrids are the answer to reducing emissions, its own numbers show that its emissions have steadily increased over the years. And its average US fleet mpg is consistently middling-to-poor, according to the EPA’s automotive trends report.
When Toyota owners are educated about Toyota’s opposition to environmental policy, it results in a 32% reduction in favorability for the brand. A large majority of Toyota owners want the company to support stronger environmental policy.
Similarly, a recent appearance of Toyota’s chairman, Akio Toyoda, decked out in US campaign gear supporting Donald Trump helped many in the public to recognize Toyota’s friendliness with anti-environment actors. As former CEO, Toyoda was largely responsible for the company’s current failure to adopt electric vehicles.
But Toyota has dug in its feet in defending hybrid vehicles, which it considers its own territory, whereas electric vehicles are the territory of other brands. So it twists itself into knots trying to defend more-polluting vehicles, despite the harm that they cause to everyone who lives on Earth – yes, including Toyota employees, who breathe the same air and live in the same disrupted climate as the rest of us.
Toyota laughably claims this corporate-led effort is “grassroots”
While Toyota says that employees don’t have to participate, the combination of incentives and implicit pressure from higher-ups means that employees who would not have otherwise lobbied against the public interest would then be encouraged to do so.
It calls the effort “grassroots advocacy,” even though it is being coordinated and pushed upon employees of a one of the largest corporate entities on the planet (that’s not what “grassroots” means…). It also allows employees to participate during working hours, indicating that it sees these videogames as a work activity, rather than natural grassroots advocacy.
Indeed, the company brags about what it sees as the success of the program, taking credit for various harmful policy changes, like republicans’ illegal attempt to force dirty air on 12 US states. Toyota also used the platform to oppose EPA exhaust rules that would save Americans $100 billion in fuel costs, wrongly calling it an “EV mandate,” despite that the Biden rule is actually technology neutral (which Toyota claims to support, even though it opposed a technology neutral measure in practice).
Perhaps now, with the knowledge of yet another way that Toyota spreads anti-environment propaganda, some of the environmental sheen of this company can start to tarnish in the public eye.
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In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Seth and me (Fred) each buying a new EV, Tesla Robotaxi progress, Ford’s $19 billion charge on EVs, and much more.
The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.
As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.
After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:
We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.
Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast:
Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 4:00 p.m. ET (or the video after 5 p.m. ET:
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The ID.Buzz will not be available in the US for the 2026 model year, but Volkswagen said this isn’t the end for its electric minibus.
Volkswagen cancels 2026 ID.Buzz for the US market
And just like that, the US loses yet another electric vehicle. Volkswagen is pulling the ID.Buzz from its lineup in 2026, but it apparently won’t be forever.
A company spokesperson confirmed the news to Carscoops on Friday, telling them, “Following a careful assessment of current EV market conditions, we have made the strategic decision not to move forward with MY26 ID.Buzz production for the US market.”
While you won’t be able to get your hands on a 2026MY, Volkswagen suggested the electric minibus is in a “transition” phase and will return in 2027.
According to the company spokesperson, the decision enables VW to use the resources instead to focus on selling down current inventory, “ensuring a strong foundation as we prepare for the MY27 transition next year.”
The comments come after a text from a VW dealer surfaced on Reddit, claiming the company notified dealers that the ID.Buzz is being discontinued with no 2026 models planned. The text also stated, “What we currently have in stock will be the final availability.”
Volkswagen’s spokesperson pushed back against the claims, saying that’s not accurate. “We gave dealers this direction: The ID. Buzz continues to serve as an important halo product for the Volkswagen brand, and safeguarding its market presence remains a top priority,” they said.
Like the entire US auto industry, VW is facing new headwinds under the Trump administration, including new tariffs and policy changes such as ending the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles.
Through the first nine months of 2025, Volkswagen sold just under 5,000 ID.Buzz models in the US. The 2025 VW ID.Buzz started at $61,545 with an EPA-estimated driving range of 234 miles.
Electrek’s Take
The Volkswagen minibus was a hit thanks to its open, flexible interior and distinctive look, which became a cultural icon. However, it was also extremely affordable.
While the policy changes under the Trump Administration are forcing automakers to rethink their electrification plans, the $60K electric minibus was a tough sell from the start.
Volkswagen is promising to introduce more affordable vehicles, but the US will miss out on most of them. Will the ID.Buzz return in 2027 at a lower price? It could.
Ford recently announced it has ended production of the current F-150 Lightning and will replace it with an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) version. The American automaker is also shifting from large, more expensive EVs to smaller, more profitable models.
Once thing is for sure: When, or if, the ID.Buzz returns; it will need to be either at a lower price or offer much more in terms of features, driving range, etc.
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