The Republican presidential candidate has said some pretty rude things about EVs over the years. In particular, he has called President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which despite its name is mainly a package of incentives for EV adoption and domestic production of EV components and raw materials, a “green new scam,” and has promised to claw back unspent funding from the IRA if he wins the presidency.
Of course, the Biden administration foresaw this danger from the start, and have worked hard to fast-track the IRA’s clean energy investments. Ali Zaidi, President Biden’s National Climate Adviser, says the administration is racing to get “steel in the ground” and lock in as many of the projects as possible.
MORE: How the Inflation Reduction Act is creating EV industry jobs in red states
“The Biden-Harris administration is focused on sprinting through the next few months,” Zaidi told Politico. Our agencies, our cabinet, have been relentlessly focused on execution. We’re north of 85 percent of those grant dollars being either awarded or well under competition. EPA just hit a milestone— two thirds of their dollars obligated.”
Any president who wishes to cancel IRA-funded projects might face resistance from both sides of the aisle. Nearly half of the investment so far, some $63 billion, has gone to seven states—Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin—according to an analysis carried out for the Guardian by Atlas Public Policy. And these just happen to be the seven swing states that are expected to decide the outcome of the election.
Many IRA-funded projects are located in economically depressed and politically red regions—for example, the so-called Battery Belt that stretches across the South. Battery factories are under construction in Missouri, Georgia and West Virginia (which will also soon be producing electric school buses). Auto manufacturing plants at risk of closing are being retooled for EV production across eight states.
Cognitive dissonance abounds. Many of the same Republican lawmakers who voted against the IRA, and have criticized it since, have been happy to preside at ribbon-cuttings and to hail the jobs created in their districts.
SEE ALSO: This provision of the IRA could deliver much bigger results than the EV tax credits
“I am with [Trump] on pulling back on unspent money,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia), told Politico. Except, apparently, in her home state. “Several investments [in West Virginia] are being driven by the tax credits in the IRA,” she said, adding that she hopes to “maintain those because they are job creators.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said recently that he’d favor using “a scalpel and not a sledgehammer” to pare down the IRA.
While the Democrats may have done a good job at getting IRA-funded projects underway in record time, they’ve done a poor job at publicizing their successes. As The Guardian reports, polls have found that only 4 in 10 American voters have even heard about the IRA.
“Most people don’t even know about it, so clearly there’s a communication problem,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in public climate opinion at Yale. “There’s been a lack of focused messaging and the media is not inspired to do the job for them.”
The IRA seems like a potential vote-getter for the Dems, but it may be a bit late to get their message across.
“The steady drumbeat of announcements over the past two years has been remarkable, and time and time again they are going to swing states,” said Tom Taylor, a Senior Policy Analyst at Atlas. “The election will decide the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the election will be decided by the states that have benefitted the most from the manufacturing incentives in the law.”
Sources: Politico, The Guardian
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