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You can turn even the wonkiest policy into a culture war issue if you try hard enough.
“We need a leader,” said JD Vance as he accepted the Republican nomination for vice president, “who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Green New Scam and fights to bring back our great American factories.” The election, he said, is “about the auto worker in Michigan, wondering why out-of-touch politicians are destroying their jobs,” and “the energy worker in Pennsylvania and Ohio who doesn’t understand why Joe Biden is willing to buy energy from tinpot dictators across the world, when he could buy it from his own citizens right here in our own country.”
This is the tale Vance tells about energy and climate — one of contempt and betrayal, elitists sacrificing hard-working blue-collar Americans on the altar of their alien schemes. On the surface it may sound like it’s about jobs and economics, but it’s really about the eternal culture war that divides us from them.
This is nothing new. Maintaining this artificial division between environmental and economic concerns is central to the effort to protect the fossil fuel industry, and has been for decades. Voters must be convinced that any attempt to do something about climate change is not just unserious but an assault on virtuous working people waged from Washington and other places controlled by the snobbish liberal elite.
The argument plays on beliefs about environmentalism that go back decades. Beginning in the 1970s, a group of political scientists led by Ronald Inglehart drew attention to a change in public opinion in advanced societies around the world, as “post-materialist values” based on autonomy and self-expression grew in political prominence. The generations that grew up after World War II, they argued, were less focused on material scarcity and more concerned with issues like abortion, equal rights for women and minority groups, and the environment.
The idea that environmental concerns were separate from economics — that they are fundamentally cultural and not material — has always been used by the right to discredit environmentalism and those who advocate for it. As George H.W. Bush said about Al Gore in 1992 when Gore’s warnings about climate change were considered a little wacky, “This guy is so far off in the environmental extreme, we’ll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American.”
Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. But the solutions have also gotten more real.
In Vance’s home state, for instance, an “energy worker” is much more likely to be working in green energy than fossil fuels; as Semafor recently noted, “Clean energy-related companies now employ about 114,000 people in Ohio, compared to 71,000 working in oil and gas.” The state is enjoying something of a solar boom, as well as a significant increase in production of batteries that will power the electric vehicles Vance and his running mate despise. The “great American factories” Vance celebrates apparently don’t include projects like the joint LG-Honda battery plant in Jeffersonville, an hour’s drive from his home town of Middletown, which will complete construction later this year and is slated to employ 2,200 of his constituents.
But in the picture painted by Trump, Vance, and others running on the anti-anti-climate change agenda, there is essentially no such thing as a green job; efforts to lower emissions have only costs and no benefits. And the cost is not just to our economy but to our spirit, making us impotent and weak. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who may well become Secretary of Energy if Trump wins, began his convention speech with a call-and-response to the audience. “Who will make America energy dominant?” he asked three times, to which the audience responded, “Donald Trump!” “Energy dominant” has replaced “energy independent” as the goal for the Trump-era GOP, not surprising given that dominance and submission is one of the central themes of Trump’s life.
“Energy dominance” isn’t so much a practical state of affairs as a feeling, the sense that our heads are held high and others grovel before us, whether that has any relation to reality or not. After all, under Joe Biden the country is about as energy dominant as it could be, and not always for the best. America is not only producing more oil than any country in the world, it’s producing more than any country in human history. We’re also the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas.
Yet according to Burgum, the next four years will bring either an apocalypse of enfeeblement as we huddle together in darkness or an explosion of manly strength, depending on which president we elect. “Imagine: no electricity for your fridge, your lights or air conditioning,” he warned. “President Trump will ensure there’s power for you, and importantly, that we have the power as the United States to beat China in the AI arms race.” You can almost feel the power Trump will give you, like a steroid shot to the national soul — or a dose of something even more potent. “Teddy Roosevelt encouraged America to speak softly and carry a big stick,” Burgum went on. “Energy dominance will be the big stick that President Trump will carry.” To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a stick is just a stick — but not this time, I think.
All that was no doubt music to the ears of the American Petroleum Institute, one of the convention’s sponsors, as well as both Trump and Vance, who has introduced a bill to repeal the EV subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act and replace them with subsidies for internal combustion vehicles. “The whole EV thing is a scam,” Vance has said.
In other words: Don’t be fooled when Democrats tell you that climate change is an economic threat and that transitioning to a green economy will actually increase prosperity. All you need to know is that the “Green New Scam” is being imposed by the people you hate.
Those resisting climate action would prefer that voters continue to see it as solely a cultural issue, as though the environmental conversation were still confined to beautifying highways and picking up litter, something we can set aside with no material cost. But the truth is that culture and economics are entwined, and always have been. The Republicans who took the stage in Milwaukee to rail against green energy and present themselves as the protectors of the working class understand that only too well.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.