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Is a backlash to electric cars brewing in a key Democratic voting block?
Do Republicans have a chance to steal some voters from the Democrats?
Conservative intellectuals and elected officials are looking at the United Auto Workers strike against the “Big Three” American automakers as an opportunity to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party and its contested working class support. While the UAW is striking over typical labor issues like pay, hours, pensions and health care, lurking in the background are the electric vehicle transition and the Inflation Reduction Act, two pillars of President Biden’s time in the White House.
Although the UAW’s leadership repeatedly insists that it supports auto electrification, it has been a persistent critic of how the Biden administration has carried it out, citing the flow of subsidies going to operations that set up shop in Southern states where workers are typically not unionized. While the IRA’s subsidies have rules that encourage unionized construction labor, they typically lack the same requirements for manufacturing workers.
Conservatives looking to consolidate and expand working class support, especially in the Midwest, see the strike as a chance to appeal to union members and take shots at the Biden administration’s climate policy.
“I support the UAW’s demand for higher wages, but there is a 6,000-pound elephant in the room: the premature transition to electric vehicles,” J.D. Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, tweeted on Wednesday. “While EV supply chains are still heavily concentrated in China, the Biden administration sends billions to that industry every year. While most Americans want to drive a gas-powered car, the Biden administration pursues a policy explicitly designed to increase the cost of gas.”
That Vance has picked up this mantle is unsurprising. He has made a concerted effort to portray himself as more attuned to working class concerns than is typical for Republican elected officials. Though organized labor supported his opponent Tim Ryan in the 2022 Senate race, Vance still cast himself as friendly to unions — or at least its members.
Getting in on the action has been Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri who has also made populist moves on economic policy. “Every dime the auto industry is spending on Joe Biden’s radical climate mandates should be spent on workers. They deserve better wages, better hours, and a guarantee their jobs will be safe — not shipped off to China,” he tweeted Friday.
And Donald Trump, who according to Edison Research exit polls won the union household vote in Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2020, thundered on Truth Social: “The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer. They will all be built in China and, they are too expensive, don’t go far enough, take too long to charge, and pose various dangers under certain atmospheric conditions. If this happens, the United Auto workers will be wiped out, along with all other auto workers in the United States.”
Conservative intellectuals who are trying to realign the movement towards the working class picked up the baton.
“The current UAW situation is an interesting and I think quite compelling and relevant case study in this broader trend in American politics that goes under the heading of ‘realignment’ where the agenda of the left, the Democratic Party, progressives just does not take into consideration the interests of workers, the working class, working families,” Oren Cass, founder of the think tank American Compass, told me.
Michael Lind wrote in the heterodox conservative journal Compact earlier this week that “As a pro-labor president, Joe Biden easily defeats Donald Trump,” but, he argued “Trump’s hopes for returning to the White House may depend on his ability to persuade manufacturing workers in Wisconsin and other Midwestern industrial states that, in spite of the anti-union record of his earlier administration, he will protect their jobs and livelihoods not only from foreign competition but also from Democratic environmental policies.”
Now, don’t expect UAW president Shawn Fain and the leadership to be sharing stages with Trump or Vance anytime soon — Fain has described a potential second Trump term as a “disaster.” But Republicans are picking at a scab that Democrats, environmentalists, and unions have spent years trying to mend.
The issue is that much of the green industry is not unionized and likely won’t be soon. The bestselling electric vehicles, namely Teslas, are made by non-union workforces, while other EV startups and foreign automakers who have set up shop in the United States tend not to be unionized either.
Many of the components of the green transition — especially solar panels and batteries — are made in the highest volume and at the lowest price in China. Where auto companies have set up battery joint ventures or are planning to, they are not always unionized and sometimes pay wages much lower than what autoworkers in traditional auto plants earn.
And lurking over all of this is BYD, the Chinese car company that is by some measures the biggest seller of electric vehicles in the world, and is already posing a mortal threat to the European auto industry with its low cost electric vehicles.
The UAW’s president Shawn Fain has bluntly said that he fears that “if the IRA continues to bring sweatshops and a continued race to the bottom it will be a tragedy.” Unlike most of the union movement, the UAW has pointedly withheld its endorsement of Biden’s re-election campaign.
The Biden administration and its defenders have countered that the Inflation Reduction Act was designed to buttress American workers, creating resilient, secure supply chains that create good jobs for a broad swathe of Americans across the country. And the law continuously leans on companies to set up shop in the United States and use union or higher wage labor in construction and American-made steel and other components. And if and when workers at auto or battery plants want to organize, they’ll have a friendly National Labor Relations Board to oversee it, thanks to Biden.
Meanwhile, conservatives smell blood. They argue the Biden administration is selling out the Democrats’ traditional working class base for the sake of a green agenda that tends to be supported by more well educated and higher income voters.
“If you truly believe that fighting climate change is the most important thing, you can do that and argue for it,” Cass told me. “But you can’t make a rational case that that’s the priority and say you’re standing up for the American worker. They’re being directly called on that in this dispute.”
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Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.
We’re looking at battles brewing in New York and Ohio, plus there’s a bit of good news in Virginia.
1. Idaho — The LS Power Lava Ridge wind farm is now facing a fresh assault, this time from Congress — and the Trump team now seems to want a nuclear plant there instead.
2. Suffolk County, New York — A massive fish market co-op in the Bronx is now joining the lawsuit to stop Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project, providing anti-wind activists a powerful new ally in the public square.
3. Madison County, New York — Elsewhere in New York, a solar project upstate seems to be galvanizing opposition to the state’s permitting primacy law.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio — A trench war is now breaking out over National Grid Renewables’ Carnation Solar project, as opponents win a crucial victory at the county level.
5. El Paso County, Colorado — I don’t write about Colorado often, but this situation is an interesting one.
6. St. Joseph County, Indiana — Something interesting is playing out in this county that demonstrates how it can be quite complicated to navigate municipal and county-level permitting.
7. Albemarle County, Virginia — It’s rare I get to tell a positive story about Virginia, but today we have one: It is now easier to build a solar farm in the county home to Charlottesville, one of my personal favorite small cities in our country.
Getting local with Matthew Eisenson of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
This week’s conversation is with Matthew Eisenson at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Eisenson is a legal expert and pioneer in the field of renewable energy community engagement whose work on litigating in support of solar and wind actually contributed to my interest in diving headlong into this subject after we both were panelists at the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual conference last year. His team at the Sabin Center recently released a report outlining updates to their national project tracker, which looks at various facility-level conflicts at the local level.
On the eve of that report’s release earlier this month, Eisenson talked to me about what he believes are the best practices that could get more renewable projects over the finish line in municipal permitting fights. Oh — and we talked about Ohio.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So first of all, walk me through your report. How has the community conflict over renewable energy changed in the U.S. over the past year?
A few things I would highlight. In Ohio, we now have 26 out of 88 counties that have established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited. These restrictions are explicitly enabled by the state law, SB 52. I’d also highlight that while the majority of litigation in our database is state-level litigation and contested case administrative proceedings, there are certain types of projects — particularly offshore wind — that have an extremely high prevalence of federal litigation. A majority of federally permitted offshore wind projects have been subject to federal lawsuits. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits have never succeeded on the merits, but they keep filing them and they drive up costs.
In general, as a topline takeaway, [our] report shows more and more of the same.
You personally do quite a bit of legal work on solar and wind permitting battles in the state of Ohio, where as you noted counties are curtailing deployment left and right. What’s your bird’s eye view of the situation in the state right now?
So Ohio has for years had a state-level siting process. The Ohio Power Siting Board reviews all applications for large-scale energy generation facilities, 50 megawatts or larger. The Siting Board has a set of criteria they are required to apply when they are reviewing an application, but basically only one of them seems to matter in deciding whether a project is approved or denied: whether the project serves the public’s convenience and necessity.
We’re seeing that in the majority of proceedings for approvals of large-scale wind and solar projects, there will be groups that intervene in opposition to the project, and often these groups will argue that there is so much local opposition that the project cannot possibly serve the public interest.
The Power Siting Board has been rejecting that argument in important cases recently. The board is still putting substantial weight on whether local governments are supportive or not supportive of a project, but are not rejecting projects just because of a demonstration of local opposition.
Say you’re a developer and you start facing opposition. What is the right legal avenue? How should they do the calculus, so to speak, on how to navigate legal options?
There’s numerous things developers can do. They can work with the local government and community-based groups to work with the local government to craft host community agreements, community benefit agreements — voluntary but binding contracts with the local community where a developer provides benefits; in exchange, community-based groups would agree to support the project, or at least not to oppose it. These can be very helpful and particularly meaningful in places where a local government itself is not in charge of permitting decisions themselves. So in a state like Ohio, if a developer negotiates host benefit agreements with local township governments and then those governments don’t turn around to intervene against a project, those would be extremely helpful.
It’s also important for developers to do community outreach and build a base of local supporters, and get those supporters to turn out at public meetings. Historically opponents of projects are more motivated to show up at a local meeting than supporters, but it’s really not a good look for a project when you have 500 turn out against it and 10 turn out to support.
For years the opponents were very proactive. There would be a proposal for a project in one county in Kansas and a group of opponents in the neighboring county would propose a restrictive ordinance to block future projects — supporters weren’t thinking proactively in the long-term. I think a concentrated effort will produce meaningful results. But they’re behind.