Jennifer A Dlouhy, Ari Natter | (TNS) Bloomberg News
Wind turbines nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower are rising off the Massachusetts coast. A $2 billion electric truck factory is taking shape in South Carolina. And in Colorado, a three-square-mile field of ink-black solar panels is powering a steel mill.
The U.S. is mobilizing so much investment into clean energy that it now tops even the peak of America’s fracking revolution in the 2010s. The wave of spending triggered by Joe Biden’s signature climate law is set to be the president’s biggest and most-enduring domestic achievement — yet it barely registers in Kamala Harris’ campaign.
From stump speeches to the Democratic convention and her debate with Donald Trump, Harris has largely shied away from touting the success of Biden’s green initiatives, despite the staggering size of the private investments the policies have sparked.
Her motives are clear. Fighting climate change may win voters in her home state of California. But the topic is far more divisive in natural-gas rich Pennsylvania and other states pivotal to the election. The implications go well beyond the campaign.
Harris’ reluctance to make green initiatives a central platform underscores how fighting climate change still fails to resonate with many U.S. voters, even when those efforts stimulate the economy and create thousands of jobs. That will make it difficult to marshal broad support needed from U.S. lawmakers to take another legislative leap forward. Ultimately, the lack of political will risks leaving the nation, the world’s second-biggest source of carbon dioxide emissions, dangerously short of its net-zero goals.
“It’s not clear how much appetite the public has for more climate policy this soon,” said Kevin Book, managing director of the Washington consultancy ClearView Energy Partners LLC. “On the airwaves and in the campaign messaging, energy has become an us-or-them kind of thing. And climate policy has become even more polarizing.”
Just 3% of registered voters in seven battleground states say climate change is the most important issue for them this November, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll taken in late August. Only 39% say climate is “very important.”
In the midst of the election, it could be easy to miss that the U.S. is actually on the cusp of dramatic change.
“We’ve created more than 330,000 clean-energy jobs,” Biden said during an address at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York on Tuesday.
The president’s policies, including his signature climate law, have helped drive about $493 billion of new investment into the manufacturing and widespread deployment of solar panels, electric vehicles and other emission-cutting technology since mid-2022, according to data analyzed by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and the energy and climate research firm Rhodium Group. Over the last 12 months alone, the measure has helped spur about $285 billion of new investment, which largely went to Republican-leaning areas. That eclipsed the $252 billion that energy companies invested in shale development at the peak of the fracking boom in 2014, according to a tally by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Yet when Harris mentioned Biden’s 2022 climate law during the debate, she gave its benefits only a passing mention before highlighting how domestic gas production also climbed on her watch.
When asked about downplaying progress on climate, a spokesman for the Harris campaign responded with a statement that didn’t mention climate or clean energy. Rather, it cited how the climate law — a broad measure named the Inflation Reduction Act that was also designed to lower the U.S. deficit and address other issues — has spurred employment and lowered drug costs.
“Vice President Harris is running on a platform to reduce the cost of living and build an economy of the future that creates opportunities for all Americans,” the spokesman, James Singer, said in the statement. “The investments in the Inflation Reduction Act are helping spur innovation and jobs across the country and saving seniors thousands of dollars on their prescription drugs costs.”
Harris’ approach likely reflects lessons learned from her early days as vice president, when Biden’s moves to make good on his own campaign pledges to discourage fossil fuel development collided with Republican efforts to blame him for high gasoline prices. She has already seen what “public backlash against a green agenda could look like,” Book said.
Trump has seized on Harris’ commitment to ban fracking during her short-lived 2019 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. She has since renounced that position, but Trump nonetheless continues to say Harris would try to outlaw the practice, which is key to Pennsylvania’s economy.
Away from the campaign trail, the speed of the U.S. energy transition has grown striking. By 2027, one in every four cars sold in the U.S. will be electric, up from just one in 10 last year, BloombergNEF forecasts. And in 2028, nuclear and renewable power will overtake U.S. electricity generation from fossil fuels, BNEF projects.
Scott Keogh, chief executive officer of Volkswagen AG’s U.S.-based Scout Motors subsidiary, compared the opportunities opened by the Biden climate law to a “gold rush” shortly after the company announced a $2 billion electric truck production facility in South Carolina.
Keogh is counting on a surge in demand stoked by tax credits worth up to $7,500 for the purchase of U.S.-made EVs. The facility, set to open in 2026, will be able to produce 200,000 vehicles a year.
Tax breaks also have revved up manufacturing of more obscure — but vital — components for cleaner cars and power generation. A CelLink Corp. factory in central Texas expanded production of harnesses that bundle thousands of wires inside EVs and leave room for bigger batteries. Germany-based EEW Group opened a New Jersey factory that’s making massive, steel cylinders that can be driven nearly 300 feet below the seabed to anchor offshore wind turbines.
If elected, Harris is expected to largely maintain Biden’s course when it comes to fighting climate change, including following through on plans to impose more limits on emissions from factories and power plants.
She hasn’t completely avoided touting the IRA.
Her campaign issued a fact sheet arguing it has helped cut energy bills and revive U.S. manufacturing. She posted about the law on X Monday, calling it the “largest-ever investment in climate action.” And she mentioned it during the debate. Yet even then, she brought the law up in the context of how it offered new territory for drilling, a compromise designed to secure support for it to pass the Senate.
“I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking,” she said.
Much of Biden’s climate legacy could even withstand a victory for Trump, who has vowed to divert spending away from what he derides as the president’s “green new scam.”
U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks during a climate event at the White House complex Nov. 14, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Biden spoke on his administration’s efforts to address the global climate crisis and the Fifth National Climate Assessment. (Win McNamee/Getty Images/TNS)
Businesses in many cases are locked into clean-energy investments by considerable upfront costs. Car companies, for example, are spending billions retooling assembly lines to produce EVs, said Nick Nigro, founder of researcher Atlas Public Policy.
“The investments that are made are made,” Nigro said. “They have every incentive to see those through.”
It’s still not enough. While Biden has put the U.S. on track to accelerate the rate it’s cutting emissions, the country would still fall short of its Paris Agreement commitment to slash planet-warming pollution at least 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, Rhodium Group said.
Not all of the administration’s climate achievements would be safe under Trump.
The former president has vowed to repeal tougher auto pollution limits that effectively compel EV sales. Trump would also have wide berth to undermine tax credits encouraging consumers to buy EVs.
In some instances, Trump may run into resistance from within his own party if he tries to roll back tax breaks.
By dollar value, nearly 90% of projects announced since the IRA passed are located in Republican-held congressional districts, where labor and land costs tend to be cheaper, according to estimates by the clean energy advocacy group E2. In August, 18 House Republicans released a letter opposing repeal of the climate law’s clean-energy tax breaks.
Environmentalists say the U.S. can’t afford to rest on Biden’s climate laurels.
“The IRA put us on the right track,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of the Evergreen Action advocacy group. “But we know we’ve got to do more.”
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—With assistance from Phil Kuntz, Alex Tribou and David Wethe.
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