They’re not going back, it turns out.
In Georgia, the heart of the US green manufacturing boom, a new electric vehicle gigafactory is nearing completion. Spanning 3,000 acres, the plant is expected to create 8,500 new jobs. Hyundai Motor Co. has tapped incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which together with the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law helped unleash a wave of investment in clean energy technologies.
Those investments and jobs may hang in the balance if Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November. Trump has vowed to dismantle Biden’s climate policy. A frequent critic of electric cars, he’s taken aim at pollution rules that incentive automakers to sell more EVs and could curtail the IRA’s EV tax credits.
Representative Buddy Carter, a Republican whose district is home to the gigafactory, didn’t vote for the IRA — no Republicans in Congress did. But he said he doesn’t want to see projects like the plant jeopardized.
“I’m going to discourage [the new administration] from making a sudden change,” Carter said.
The lion’s share of IRA investment has gone to red and swing states — especially in the South and Midwest — where land, labor and energy are cheaper. Some GOP leaders and lawmakers in these states say they’ll work to defend projects enabled by the law if the political winds shift.
Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia said he’ll advocate for companies that have brought jobs to the state regardless of who is sitting in the White House next year.
Tennessee Representative Chuck Fleischmann, a Republican whose district has a battery facility that employs 300, said he would be happy to explain the benefits of battery technologies to officials in a second Trump administration.
“I can lay out a very good, positive message,” he said. Fleischmann, Kemp and Carter have all endorsed Trump.
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Greg Sargent’s piece, excerpted below, is a good resource.
Greg Sargent in the New Republic:
A strange moment from Donald Trump’s much-discussed interview with Elon Musk this week, combined with a striking new report from the group Climate Power arguing that a green energy jobs “boom” is underway, together hint at what this might look like. Harris has an opening to argue that Trump, who wants to repeal the Biden-Harris climate agenda, would throw our green energy transition into sharp reverse, putting all those jobs at risk—and to insist in response that, No, we’re not going back.
In their widely panned interview, Musk tried to persuade Trump—who derides climate change and policies incentivizing use of electric vehicles as scams—that we can move toward a more sustainable future by expanding our use of solar power and electric cars. Musk is very pro-Trump and a red-pilled right-winger on other topics, but his position as co-founder of Tesla puts him at odds with Trump on this one big issue.
“We don’t believe that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer,” Musk told Trump. “So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re sexy, they’re cool.” As if talking to a child, Musk added that they can run on solar power stored in batteries “because obviously the sun doesn’t shine at night.”
In this, Musk tried to appeal to Trump’s crassly materialistic, hedonistic side and his entrepreneurial instincts—with some slick inventiveness, we can drive really cool cars and snag all the power we need from that big energy ball in the sky, dude. But to no avail. Trump seemed unimpressed, then segued into a strange rambling monologue about nuclear weapons.
Note that Trump has nothing to say in response to Musk’s suggestion, which, while oversimplified for Trump’s consumption, does offer a seductive future vision that’s far better than the horrors awaiting us if we fail to curb average global temperatures in time.
Which brings us to Climate Power’s new report released on Wednesday. It finds that approximately 335,000 new clean energy–related jobs are on track to be created by over 600 manufacturing projects already launched or announced since August 2022. That’s when Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes hundreds of billions of dollars to incentivize the manufacture and purchase of green energy technologies.
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Neatly capturing the absurdities here, even the steel mill in Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio—the wellspring of his Rust Belt bona fides—is seeing an upgrade, thanks to Biden-Harris subsidies. What’s more, as the Climate Power report details, clean energy projects are set to create thousands of jobs in Vance’s beloved Rust Belt states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—including in rural and Republican areas.
It would be folly to claim this transition will entirely solve the region’s problems. Some projects are being delayed, which is fairly common to such initiatives but is creating an odd political situation: Harris must campaign on the promise of what’s to come. And as Bloomberg reports, many local Rust Belt economies are recovering slowly from the Trump-era pandemic disaster, making it harder to sell that promise.
As far as I can tell, the only thing Trump has ever personally driven are electric carts.