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.
Since the IRA passed in August 2022, 325 new clean energy projects have been announced across 41 states and Puerto Rico, according to nonpartisan environmental research group E2, which tracks them. Michigan has the most projects in the country — 30 — which are expected to create a total of more than 12,000 jobs. In Georgia, 28 projects and $15 billion of investments will create almost 16,000 jobs. And North Carolina has seen a staggering $19 billion flowing into 22 projects.
“I believe we’re at the advent of the biggest economic revolution we’ve seen in generations in this country,” said Bob Keefe, the executive director of E2.
GOP politicians in these states welcome the economic boost and attribute it to their states’ own fostering of business, low taxes and light regulation more than anything Biden did.
Kemp said Georgia’s green energy boom has been decades in the making, based on relationships fostered by him and two prior governors.
“Those job creators could go anywhere and still be impacted by the IRA, but again and again, they’re choosing Georgia,” Kemp said. “That hasn’t happened by accident.”
Similarly, a spokesperson for South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, a Republican, said EV makers and other car companies “have been flocking to South Carolina for years and they will continue to long after President Biden leaves office.”
But IRA incentives were critical to many of these projects going ahead, and Democrats have been broadcasting that message.
Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, a Democrat whose district includes the Our Next Energy EV battery manufacturing factory, authored an IRA program that funds the conversion of shuttered or at-risk auto plants in eight states for EV manufacturing. She said the IRA has had a big impact on people in her state, but more needs to be done so voters understand that.
“I think we have to do a better job of talking about what we’ve done,” Dingell said. “Many of the things in this bill are making a difference, and part of our job is to talk about why they’re making a difference.”
Polling shows that many voters have heard little or nothing about the IRA. The full economic impact of the law is yet to be felt because many factories are still under construction.
For one nonpartisan mayor of a small town in southwest Tennessee where Ford Motor Co. is building a giant EV facility that’s expected to hire about 6,000 workers, credit is due to “a whole range of people, from Biden and the Inflation Reduction Act all the way down the line to the state level, to the county level, to the municipality level,” said Allan Sterbinsky, mayor of Stanton.
Sterbinsky sees the new factory as transformative. “Suddenly at our back door is something that we used to have to go to Detroit and Chicago for,” he said. “For people who have been in multiple generations of poverty, now they will have multiple generations of prosperity.”
©2024 Bloomberg News, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
