Vote to save clean energy jobs, factories, and innovations.
President Biden, with Democratic control of the House and Senate, passed landmark legislation to rein in climate change. Republicans and Trump want to kill the progress that improves American lives.
Source: Canva and Cleantech Adoption
Voters will decide the future of the clean energy transition, which seeks solutions to limit rising seas, wildfires, and extreme weather events caused by fossil-fuel-induced climate change. But such solutions are only championed by Democrats in Congress and the White House.
The Democrats’ legislation has spurred economic growth by creating good-paying jobs through investing in new electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing plants, battery manufacturing, minerals mining, solar and wind power, utility-scale batteries, power transmission upgrades, heat pump installations, and other technology deployments.
This robust progress since the 2020 election is now at risk. Why? On Super Tuesday, former President Trump captured the Republican primary after his last remaining opponent, Nikki Haley, dropped out of the race.
Trump’s primary win is despite 91 felony charges and two state civil case convictions, one involving the rape of E. Jean Carroll and the other involving business fraud. Despite these civil convictions and felony charges, Trump’s pursuit of the 2024 presidential election has been unstoppable. Some polls even place Trump in the lead for the November election against Joe Biden.
Adding to Trump’s good fortunes, two Supreme Court (SC) decisions are helping Trump's path to the White House. In its first decision, the SC delayed a DC court jury from hearing the January 6th case brought by the Department of Justice’s lead prosecutor, Jack Smith. How? The SC is slow-walking Trump’s immunity claim. (See Joyce Vance’s essay, “The Supreme Court Disappoints.”)
In a second decision, the Supreme Court relieved Trump from Article 14, Section 3 of the Constitution, which bars oath-breaking insurrectionists from Office. (See Heather Cox Richardson’s discussion in her March 5th newsletter “Letters from an American.”)
As Thomas B. Edsall writes in the New York Times, “This Could Well Be Game Over.”
Trump’s certainty of garnering full Republican support to win the 2024 presidential election and usher in his dystopian vision was foreseen last November by Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institute in his Washington Post analysis, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”
What will happen if Trump wins the next presidential election? He has told us. He has said that when he is a dictator on Inauguration Day, he will “drill, drill, drill” for oil and gas. On his first day as dictator, he also plans to stop support for electric vehicles by terminating “Green New Deal atrocities.”
Trump has proven his intentions. As reported by the New York Times, “Mr. Trump — who has called climate change a “hoax,” “nonexistent” and “created by the Chinese” — rolled back more than 100 climate and environmental protections during his [first presidential] Administration, while promoting the development of fossil fuels. He has claimed, falsely, that windmills cause cancer, that energy-efficient buildings have no windows, and that solar rooftops leave older people without air-conditioning in the summer.”
Trump’s preposterous statements expand the Overton window from radical and absurd ideas to acceptable ideas. We cannot let these absurd statements become normalized and demagoguery replace critical thinking.
The problem with Trump’s approach is that it lays the groundwork for accepting radical policies proposed by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is a conservative, right-wing think tank that sees its role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”
What does the Heritage Foundation propose? In its Project 2025 book, “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise,” the policy analysts at Heritage provide detailed actions to dismantle the clean energy transition. The Project 2025 writers claim that we have an energy crisis that requires radical rollback of “green policies.” [Note: What energy crisis? See appendix, below.]
The Heritage policy recommendations seek an end to commercializing and deploying clean energy technologies that compete with fossil fuels like oil and methane gas.
Three of their policy recommendations spell the end of the Bidenomic’s economic miracle by:
Repealing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Furthermore, Heritage wants to rescind all funds not already spent by these programs;
Eliminating or reforming the Department of Energy (DOE) to stop commercializing energy resources. The DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), the Office of State and Community Energy Programs, ARPA-E, the Office of Grid Deployment (OGD), and the DOE Loan Program are on the cutting block.
Eliminating applied programs under the Office of Electricity, which administers grant programs for energy storage and the testing of grid-enhancing technologies.
The Republican agenda’s assault on Americans’ benefits
Since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was signed into law less than two years ago on August 16, 2022, the benefits have already started flowing to local communities and states across the U.S. These benefits are despite the slow start to many of the construction projects due to administrative delays in permitting new construction projects by local, state, and federal authorities having jurisdiction over new construction projects. The benefits include:
271,713 new clean energy jobs. A just-released report by Climate Powercatalogs new clean energy jobs for electricians, mechanics, construction workers, technicians, and support staff between August 16, 2022, and February 28, 2024.
$239 billion in new 2023 investments in manufacturing and deployment. According to the jointly published Climate Investment Monitor by the Rhodium Group and the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), the investments are in U.S. clean energy, clean vehicles, building electrification, and carbon management technology.
A $3 trillion investment in renewable energy technology through 2050 will replace much of the fossil fuels contributing to climate change and dirty air pollution. This forecast is by Goldman Sachs in its article, “The US is poised for an energy revolution.”
$53.7 million financing value for 57 project locations is supported by the DOE Loan Program Office.
The Heritage Foundation opposes federal government support for the commercialization of new technologies. Heritage must have forgotten that NASA helped commercialize such technologies as water purification, breathing masks, polymer fabrics, and cordless devices. The Internet came from military research by ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). Tesla survived to be the largest U.S. EV automaker competing against the Chinese EV juggernauts like BYD thanks to a “$465 million in low-interest loan from the US Department of Energy to accelerate the production of affordable, fuel-efficient electric vehicles.” Tesla used “$365 million for production engineering and assembly of the Model S.”
The U.S. must support high-risk, promising technologies to achieve competitive success with other nations. The Heritage Foundation brings out the old Republican refrain that the government should not "pick winners and losers.”
The Heritage Foundation has yet to learn how new technologies are developed and commercialized beyond the early science project stage. Technologies do not suddenly and magically pop out of the laboratory, enter manufacturing plants, become incorporated into established supply chains, and find customers and capital. As anyone who has worked on new ventures knows, not all research ideas succeed. The risk of failure is the nature of new technologies. CEOs who are measured and financially rewarded based on quarterly financial results are reluctant to take long-term technology bets to commercialize new science experiments.
Does the Heritage Foundation want to secede economic might to the Chinese in EVs, batteries, and solar panel companies, which benefited from China’s industrial policy, to pick winners?
America’s corporate CEOs believe differently than the Heritage analysts. They have touted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) benefits. For example, according to the Financial Times, Barbara Humpton, the U.S. head of Siemens, “has urged companies to sell voters on the benefits of the Biden administration’s industrial policy, warning that a change of government could imperil tax breaks and subsidies needed to modernize the American economy.” According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Steel CEO, David Burritt, stated, “[The IRA] is the most amazing thing we’ve seen in the United States for a very long time. It’s a Manufacturing Renaissance Act”.
The Republicans and Trump want to kill the future competitive strength of American enterprises to win in new global and domestic markets for clean technologies. Don’t let them. Vote for Democrats.
Only voting will preserve our country’s future for clean air, water, and a habitable climate while increasing our international competitiveness with China and keeping the U.S. with the most robust global economy.
Appendix
The Heritage Foundation claims the US is in an energy crisis and that the Biden Administration has a “war on oil and natural gas.” The oil and gas industry has been booming by all accounts. Consider the graph below.
