Climate cash is about to pour into East Coast states. Here’s why.

East Coast states face a surprising opportunity in the midst of the fossil-fuel-focused Trump presidency: hundreds of millions of dollars in new climate funding.

Money is pouring in from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the cap-and-trade system for the electricity sector in 11 states. In the first half of 2026, RGGI auctions brought in about $1.3 billion by selling allowances for power plants to emit climate pollution. That’s a 70 percent jump from the same period last year, thanks to soaring power demand, Virginia’s reentry into RGGI and a Trump-shaped bottleneck in renewable energy development.

For instance, energy efficiency lowers the peak demand on the grid, which means utilities build and procure less –— so everyone pays lower prices. Averting pollution also improves public health, bringing more economic benefits.

Those dynamics are why RGGI’s history of returning $11 billion to states has yielded closer to $23 billion in total energy savings, said Jamie Dickerson, a senior director at Acadia Center, which advocates for climate policy across the northeast.

“We totally understand that in this affordability environment … just providing direct bill credits is a helpful way to give relief to those ratepayers,” he said.

But each rebate, he added, is a “one-time shot” that doesn’t accumulate into a better, cheaper power system the way energy efficiency does.

That’s why “durable, long-lived energy efficiency savings represent the highest and best use of overall funds,” he said, so that “maybe we actually shrink the need to do, year after year, single-shot discounts.”

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