Carbon Capture

Some of the tax breaks, like one that restores a tax credit for home geothermal heating and cooling, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to install, should make a significant difference to individuals trying to lower their carbon footprints. The credit is 30 percent if the system is installed between 2017 and 2019, then drops to 26 percent in 2020 and 22 percent through 2021. Others, like the carbon capture and sequestration provision, offer complicated and uncertain benefits to costly technologies that might or might not pay off—and that are hotly debated in environmental circles. Senators with widely divergent views of climate policy, including Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, favored it. Bob Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), praised the tax cuts for promoting low-carbon sources of energy, which he called "critically necessary to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050."