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The drafters of the IRA seem to have hit on the same strategy that has made America’s defense budget so impervious to cuts: Pork.
Here is a good rule for politicians: Bringing home the bacon is a good thing.
Taking a pass on government-funded projects that bring millions or billions of dollars to your district, along with great new jobs for your constituents? That’s not so good.
Those two related truisms might explain why the climate-friendly provisions of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act seem to have largely escaped grievous cuts in the debt ceiling deal announced Saturday night by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
While nothing is over until it’s over — and some of McCarthy’s fellow conservatives are blanching at the deal he made — there is reason to believe good old-fashioned pork-barrel spending might have saved the Biden administration’s clean energy agenda from a terrible wound.
But it was a close thing.
Republicans have definitely had their eye on the IRA during the debt ceiling fight. The law included some $369 billion in spending on climate and renewable energy policies. But in April, the GOP-led House passed a bill that would’ve repealed some of those provisions — stuff like tax credits for new and used electric vehicles, along with incentives for building solar panels and other clean energy infrastructure projects.
Those cuts didn’t survive negotiations. "House Republicans had fought for repealing some of the clean energy tax credits approved by Democrats last year, as well as stopping the White House’s plan to cancel student loan debt,” The Washington Post reports. “The Biden administration objected strongly to those proposals, and they fell out of the final deal."
So what happened?
A guess: Yes, Republicans like to grumble about “climate alarmism,” rail against private-sector “environmental, social and governance,” and generally make a bogeyman of the Green New Deal. But they are undeniably benefiting in a big way from the IRA’s climate and energy investments in their own districts.
And nobody likes to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
As Politico pointed out in January, Republican members of Congress are among the IRA’s big political winners: Two-thirds of the clean energy projects announced since the law passed — things like battery and electric vehicle plants — have been located in GOP districts.
Which was kind of funny, because every House Republican voted against the law.
“Just because you vote against a bill doesn’t mean the entire bill is a bad bill,” explained Rep. Garret Graves, a Louisiana Republican.
Maybe. It’s pretty easy — and fairly common — for members of Congress to vote against a bill, see it pass, only to pivot and take credit for the goodies that suddenly appear. “Voting no and taking the dough” has a long, rich history in American politics. Most voters never notice the hypocrisy.
They do notice, though, when the goodies go away.
Like, say, when that promised battery plant that was going to bring hundreds of new jobs to town suddenly doesn’t pan out.
That was the situation Republicans found themselves in heading into negotiations over the debt ceiling. It’s one thing to rail against “government spending” in the abstract — and another thing entirely to oppose specific spending that your own voters are already enjoying or counting on.
House Republicans “are ready to kill new, good paying jobs coming to their own districts to play politics,” the advocacy group Climate Power lamented last month.
McCarthy, it seems, didn’t want to deal with the grief — or the campaign ads that were surely coming against the more vulnerable members of his caucus. Who could blame him?
All of this means that the sheer ambition and size of the Inflation Reduction Act, while still falling short of what the world needs to avert a climate emergency, probably saved it from the GOP’s chopping block. We’ve come a long way from the days when then-President Obama touted the economic value of green jobs — and then gave the nation small-bore “weatherization” projects that were arguably successful but also pretty easy not to notice if you looked around your own community.
The “battery belt” taking shape across the southeastern U.S., on the other hand, is pretty hard to miss. It is also represented by a lot of congressional Republicans.
This has implications for future climate fights. The drafters of the IRA seem to have hit on the same strategy that has made America’s defense budget so impervious to cuts: They’ve spread the wealth.
Few politicians want to look unpatriotic by voting against military spending, of course, but it doesn’t hurt that the defense industry — all those contractors and subcontractors, countless companies and workers — is spread out across every state and congressional district. Vote for defense cuts and you’re voting against your constituents’ jobs.
Now the same may be true of the green energy industry. Republicans don’t have to believe in climate change, and they can argue for fiscal austerity all they want. The debt ceiling deal, though, suggests that conservative members of Congress have one priority even higher than those ideals: Their own hides. The climate may benefit.
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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.