Hypocrisy and profiteering threaten renewable energy
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Obscured by his “green new scam” rhetoric is a mad scramble by his supporters in Congress to reap the economic benefits of green industry for their states and districts.
The increasing investments, precisely in the places that voted for him, make President-elect Trump’s pledge to “terminate” many green programs political wolf talk. That is because the renewable energy industry is growing jobs more than twice as fast as the overall economy.
A lasting irony of the outgoing Biden administration will be
how no Republican in Congress voted for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Yet 85%
of the announced clean energy projects and 68% of the jobs triggered by the
IRA, such as those related to electric vehicles, wind power, solar power, and
battery storage, have gone to Republican-held congressional districts, according to E2,
a nonpartisan group that monitors the clean energy industry.
The representatives of those districts see no apparent
contradiction in touting the attractiveness of their areas for clean energy
investments, while publicly supporting the President-elect’s rhetoric and
proposals to end clean energy programs.
Love/hate relationships abound
For instance, Texas Congressmember Jodey Arrington, who
represents a House district that includes Lubbock and Abilene, called the IRA a
“failed liberal spending spree that crippled our economy and left working
American families worse off.” The Washington Postreported in
October that Arrington’s district is the nation’s fifth-highest recipient of
investments for clean energy and manufacturing, receiving nearly $5 billion.
Then there is Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn: a climate skeptic who
says infrastructure projects that fight climate change are a “gateway to
socialism.” She told the Republican National Convention this summer that the
“green new scam” was “destroying small businesses.”
Huh? Relative to the size of the state’s economy (as
measured by gross domestic product), Tennessee ranks first in
the nation in clean technology manufacturing investment from the IRA, according
to the Clean Investment Monitor, maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the
Rhodium Group.
Senator Blackburn seems well aware of
it. Even before the IRA, when vehicle maker Ford cut the ribbon on a $5.6
billion electric battery plant in her state in 2021, she boasted how
Tennessee is “leading the way for innovation” with a “historic project” that
would directly create 5,800 jobs and create “countless opportunities in
supporting industries.”
The champion of hypocrisy is Representative Richard Hudson,
congressman for North Carolina’s Ninth District, nestled in the center of the
state. In voting against the IRA, he blasted clean
energy programs as “woke climate and social programs that won’t work.”
Hudson was wide awake for the money coming to his district
to expand a massive Toyota battery plant for
electric vehicles and hybrids. According to E2, Hudson’s
district is top in the nation both for clean energy investment and for clean
energy job growth triggered by the IRA. The Toyota plant alone promises more
than 5,000 jobs. Estimates of investment in his district range from nearly $10
billion to nearly $13 billion.
Selective cuts desired
If the next Trump administration is serious about pulling
the plug on clean energy, that will add up to a lot of jobs and investments to
undo in states and districts where the President-elect handily won the
election. North Carolina Representative Hudson hinted he agrees. When CNN asked him in
June if he would vote to repeal the IRA if the Republicans won control of the
federal government in the election—which they did—he responded, “Rather than
try to repeal one big bill with another big bill, we ought to look at the individual
policies.”
Another sign that Republicans ultimately won’t scrap all the
benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act came in an August letter by
18 Republicans to House Speaker Mike Johnson. The lawmakers asked Johnson to
preserve clean energy tax credits in any effort to repeal or reform the IRA.
The letter acknowledged that
energy tax credits “have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and
created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts
represented by members of our conference.”
The letter warned that repealing energy tax credits,
especially those for projects that have already broken ground “would undermine
private investments and stop development that is already ongoing.”
This acknowledgement from conservative lawmakers that clean
energy and electric vehicles are good business makes it reasonable to bet that
the investments they’ve secured for their districts will survive the
President-elect’s rhetoric of a “green new scam.”
Risks to offshore wind loom
Much less clear is the near-term future for offshore wind.
While campaigning, President-elect Trump promised to sign
an executive order on the first day of his return to bring a halt to the
offshore wind industry. Never mind that onshore wind is booming in
red states in the windy, rural middle of the United States, providing 130,000
jobs. The fastest growing occupation in the nation is wind turbine service technician, paying an
average of nearly $62,000 a year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
(BLS).
According to the
Energy Information Agency, the top four states for
electricity generation from wind in 2023 were the red states of Texas, Iowa,
Oklahoma, and Kansas.
The offshore wind industry, a staple of energy generation in
northern Europe, is still in its infancy in the
United States. It remains highly vulnerable to
price shocks, supply-chain issues, local opposition to siting, and being
a political dartboard.
The industry is currently centered in more liberal Northeastern states thanks
to ideal water depths off the Atlantic coastline and forward-looking governors
from Massachusetts to Virginia who have been competing the last two decades for
ports and projects.
The U.S. has the technical capacity to
harness three times more electricity from offshore wind than it currently uses
today, with the Atlantic Ocean off the Northeast coast possessing some of the
strongest wind speeds in the country.
Surprisingly, despite its “Drill, Baby, Drill” mantra for
oil, the first Trump administration promoted offshore wind when it found out
how much money the leases could put into federal coffers. It conducted a
then-record auction for
waters off Massachusetts to site off-shore wind projects. Ports and
manufacturing facilities as far south as Louisiana, home state of House Speaker
Mike Johnson, helped launch
the nation’s first offshore wind farm in Rhode Island.
But that has not stopped oil
and gas companies from continuing to
conduct disinformation campaigns to stir up opposition to
offshore wind. It is clear they have a lot to lose from a full-blown offshore
wind industry in the Northeast. For example, gas accounts for at least half of
the electricity generation in New England and New Jersey. New York City generates between 85% and 90% of its
electricity from fossil fuels. The Northeast Gas Association boasts that about half the entire
region gets its electricity from gas.
On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump elected to play
off that disinformation. He attacked offshore
wind with gale force lies about its
impact on whales and the
environment, claims which
have zero science behind them as NOAA and others explain.
The unending verbal assault makes it reasonable to worry
that under this second administration President-elect Trump may truly try to
score political points by directing the
Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to slow permitting of
new projects and telling the Justice Department to side with opponents of
incomplete projects. Many experts say that
just the slowing of the permitting process risks making construction more
expensive and may scare off investors.
Then there’s the issue of equity
In even more serious doubt is a just transition, where communities that
suffer the most from fossil fuel production and pollution can get jobs, lower
energy costs, and cleaner air from a move to renewables.
Almost by definition, the growth of clean energy industries
in more sparsely populated, majority white, Republican-held districts may
exacerbate the existing structural racism in the energy sector’s workforce,
which has been a driver of the Biden administration’s goal of directing 40% of
federal climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities.
For instance, Black people are 13% of the nation’s workforce
and account for only 8% of the solar and wind workforce, according to the
Department of Energy. The Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) says the
percentage of Black solar workers has not budged since 2022. Yet, the
second-fastest growing job in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, are solar panel installers, making
on average $48,000 a year.
The percentage of people of color in leadership positions in
the renewable energy supply chain is currently infinitesimally small. A 2022 report by
the American Council on Renewable Energy found that of 658 manufacturers
involved in utility-scale wind, solar, and battery storage, 1.8% were owned by
people of color or women. And while there is one bright spot in diversity,
with 33% of new clean
energy jobs last year being filled by Latinos, 88% of solar
industry executives are white and 80% are male, according to the IREC.
Only a quarter of solar firms in the
IREC’s annual National Solar Jobs Census reported that they had strategies to
hire more people of color or women.
With the return of President-elect Trump, accompanied now by
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, it will take maverick clean energy companies
to improve diversity. Just this past June, Vance co-introduced (along
with Senator Blackburn) a bill in the
Senate to eliminate all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs
and funding for any entities that receive federal funding. Representatives
Arrington and Hudson co-sponsored the
measure in the House. Cynically twisting the purpose of DEI to ensure fair
opportunities for people from historically excluded groups, Vice
President-elect Vance claims DEI
“breeds hatred and racial division.”
President-elect Trump himself has already begun to nominate
members of his cabinet with direct ties to Project 2025, the de facto Republican
Party platform that also calls for the elimination of DEI throughout
government. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the end of DEI in the Energy Department and eliminating the
Office of Environmental Justice and External
Civil Rights in the Environmental Protection Agency.
The pall placed over the nation is already being felt even
before Inauguration Day, as Walmart recently announced it was
rolling back DEI policies or dismantling DEI teams, joining companies
like Ford, Boeing, Toyota, Lowe’s, Harley Davidson, Molson Coors, John Deere and Tractor Supply. That
follows the scores of universities that
are eliminating DEI in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 striking down of
affirmative action. It was a ruling virtually assured by President Trump’s
packing of the court in his first term.
In a blog last year on
this flood of renewable money flowing into Republican districts from a
Democratic-inspired law, I wrote that the nation would be so much stronger in
the fight against climate change and the effort to clean up communities and
boost the economy if conservatives would “drop the two-faced charade of climate
denial while diving unabashedly into the pot of federal renewable incentives
and tax breaks.” Now that the forces of climate denial have regained the White
House and control of both chambers of Congress, they don’t even need two faces.
They can just be bald-faced aggrandizers.
The renewable energy industry will indeed have a strong
expansion in the U.S. It’s just that it will be heavily driven by a real green
scam—an expansion being led by politicians who harness and hoard solar power,
wind power, and electric vehicles for their own constituents, but deny it for
everyone else.
Derrick Z. Jackson is on the advisory
board of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of Environmental Health News
and The Daily Climate. He's also a Union of Concerned Scientist Fellow in
climate and energy.
