Trump’s second term will have major implications for the future of U.S. clean energy — and for the more than $150 billion in private-sector clean energy manufacturing investments triggered by Democrats’ landmark climate law.
Those investments are expected to create about 160,000 jobs, mainly in Republican congressional districts, with most projects coming online during Trump’s second term, as POLITICO reported this week.
That economic bounty is a reason for Republicans to keep the Inflation Reduction Act in place, some of the law’s advocates argue, despite Trump’s pledge to rescind its unspent funds as part of a dismantling of President Joe Biden’s climate policies.
“Because it is undeniably true that the IRA is good for businesses and good for all Americans, any attempted rollback of the IRA is a fool’s errand,” Biden’s former White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy said this week.
She and other climate advocates vowed to fight to defend Biden’s climate progress despite Trump’s victory.
One politically inconvenient fact for Democrats: Only a fraction of the clean energy investment unleashed by the IRA is up and running, and roughly 53 percent of announced facilities have yet to begin construction, according to a POLITICO analysis of data from policy research firm Atlas Public Policy. That limited the amount of concrete economic progress that Kamala Harris and other Democrats could brag about during the campaign. It could even allow Trump to claim credit for the new jobs.
For now, manufacturers are likely to stay the course, the head of one clean energy organization said.
There “will certainly be the potential for some chilling effect” for clean energy manufacturers, especially if Trump keeps up his rhetoric on prioritizing fossil fuels, said Andrew Reagan, executive director of Clean Energy for America. But Reagan predicted that companies will keep doing work until something on the policy side “dramatically changes.”
