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Despite lots of fretting, the evidence for one is incredibly flimsy.
Is the Inflation Reduction Act hurting President Biden’s hopes for re-election?
As Biden celebrates the first anniversary of his historic climate law, there’s handwringing in some Democratic circles about exactly that. According to Axios’ Josh Kraushaar, one of the reasons that Biden is struggling in head-to-head polls with leading Republicans is that “Democrats are pushing the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy too quickly,” something that he identifies as “a consistent theme with working class voters of all backgrounds.”
The evidence for this broad claim is incredibly flimsy. Kraushaar points to one poll which finds that respondents favor a mix of energy sources moving forward over phasing out “the use of oil, coal and natural gas completely,” by a margin of 72-26. And that’s about it. That’s odd, because when voters are asked about the individual provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, including EV subsidies, tax incentives to install solar panels and industry subsidies for wind and solar power generation, they support them by double-digit margins. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, for example, found that voters approved of the EV tax credit by a margin of 50-22.
It is only when respondents are presented with the stark, all-or-nothing language beloved by the fossil fuel industry that they tend to balk, activating fears that AOC is going to personally repossess your gas-powered truck tomorrow morning or that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is going to shut off your natural gas lines and starve you out until you install an electric stove. It’s the thinking pushed by former Democratic strategist Ruy Texeira, now with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, who attributes to Democrats the position that “We need a rapid green transition to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with fully renewable energy sources” and then identifies this position as Biden’s chief vulnerability.
Because the overwhelming majority of Americans still drive rides powered by internal combustion engines and rely on fossil fuels every day, it should not be surprising that sudden, dramatic change polls poorly. Americans, after all, have a very well-known status quo bias that must be worked around if meaningful social change is to be successfully pursued. But leading Democrats, including the president, aren’t pushing for that kind of dizzying change anyway. The administration has set a goal of having 50 percent of new vehicle sales by all-electric by 2030 – seven years from now.
Even that timeline means that the infrastructure for gas-powered vehicles will have to remain in place for decades, and that’s assuming future presidents don’t reverse course. But making electric vehicles a growing component of America’s long-term transportation plan requires some up-front investment and subsidies and that is exactly what the Biden administration has done. To paraphrase former President Obama, if you like your gas-guzzling Canyonero, you can keep it.
It’s worth noting that the Biden administration does not anticipate generating all of America’s electricity with “wind and solar,” as the poll that Texeira cites suggests, which would indeed be hard to pull off. That’s because the administration’s lofty goal of phasing out fossil fuels by 2035 relies heavily on massive new investments in next-generation nuclear power plants, not just the $6 billion band-aid that has been placed on propping up the country’s existing atomic generators. And while the administration has not released plans, or publicly pushed for, big new investments in nuclear power, they should consider it. If anything, it is generally liberal Democrats, not working class voters, who oppose nuclear energy, which polls well with Americans, and Biden and his team would be wise to unveil more specific ideas about how they plan to fill the gap between renewable capacity and dead dinosaur juice.
But Kraushaar, Texeira, and other centrist fretters are also missing a huge and consequential aspect of status quo bias in our politics — in another year, the Inflation Reduction Act and its provisions will be the status quo, as Republicans found out the hard way when they tried to overturn what they thought was the hated Affordable Care Act in 2017. It turns out that, while people had and still have mixed feelings about Obama’s signature health care reform, they also didn’t want to return to a world in which you could be denied insurance for “pre-existing conditions.” The law went from consistently unpopular to a third rail virtually overnight when Trump was elected.
Not only that, but the green initiatives in the IRA are already very well-liked, at least when they’re spelled out. As the percentage of Americans with EVs or plug-in hybrids grows, so will the appreciation for the tax credits, the expanding charging infrastructure, and more. Yes, there is still some dissatisfaction with aspects of the economy, but that has much more to do with Biden’s inability to wave a magic wand and conjure 2019 prices back into being than it does with tax discounts at the local Chevy dealership.
There’s also more to holding power than strictly hewing to a public opinion consensus.
Nowhere in the ruminations of people worried about the electoral blowback of green energy initiatives is there much concern about climate change itself, a particularly galling blind spot given this summer’s relentless, record-breaking heat waves, the deadly blazes that consumed the Hawaiian island of Maui, and the wildfire smoke repeatedly blanketing parts of the U.S. in a choking, sun-blotting haze. Democrats aren’t pushing for green energy because they are consumed with woke ideology – they are trying to do their part to arrest the planet-wide catastrophe that fossil fuel burning has set into motion. And they have already done the most important thing they can do with power – using it instead of cowering in fear of the electoral consequences.
Read more about the politics of the energy transition:
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.