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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 journalCompact 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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Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Thursday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for many of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Five major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event this week:
Officials have not made any statements about the cause of any of the fires yet.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At about 27,000 acres burned, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 2,000 structures damaged so far, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 1,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between very wet and very dry years over the past eight decades. But climate change is expected to make dry years drier in Los Angeles. “The LA area is about 3°C warmer than it would be in preindustrial conditions, which (all else being equal) works to dry fuels and makes fires more intense,” Brown wrote.
And more of this week’s top renewable energy fights across the country.
1. Otsego County, Michigan – The Mitten State is proving just how hard it can be to build a solar project in wooded areas. Especially once Fox News gets involved.
2. Atlantic County, New Jersey – Opponents of offshore wind in Atlantic City are trying to undo an ordinance allowing construction of transmission cables that would connect the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project to the grid.
3. Benton County, Washington – Sorry Scout Clean Energy, but the Yakima Nation is coming for Horse Heaven.
Here’s what else we’re watching right now…
In Connecticut, officials have withdrawn from Vineyard Wind 2 — leading to the project being indefinitely shelved.
In Indiana, Invenergy just got a rejection from Marshall County for special use of agricultural lands.
In Kansas, residents in Dickinson County are filing legal action against county commissioners who approved Enel’s Hope Ridge wind project.
In Kentucky, a solar project was actually approved for once – this time for the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In North Carolina, Davidson County is getting a solar moratorium.
In Pennsylvania, the town of Unity rejected a solar project. Elsewhere in the state, the developer of the Newton 1 solar project is appealing their denial.
In South Carolina, a state appeals court has upheld the rejection of a 2,300 acre solar project proposed by Coastal Pine Solar.
In Washington State, Yakima County looks like it’ll keep its solar moratorium in place.
And more of this week’s top policy news around renewables.
1. Trump’s Big Promise – Our nation’s incoming president is now saying he’ll ban all wind projects on Day 1, an expansion of his previous promise to stop only offshore wind.
2. The Big Nuclear Lawsuit – Texas and Utah are suing to kill the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority to license small modular reactors.
3. Biden’s parting words – The Biden administration has finished its long-awaited guidance for the IRA’s tech-neutral electricity credit (which barely changed) and hydrogen production credit.