A New Theory About Why Biden’s Big Climate Law Failed

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Hi, I'm Robert Samier, the founding executive editor of heatmap news. You are listening to

Shift Key, he maps podcasts about decarbitization and the shift away from fossil fuels.

It is Wednesday, March 11th. The Inflation Reduction Act was the biggest climate law

passed in American history, and probably the biggest climate law passed by any government ever,

although some Chinese industrial policies could give it a run for its money.

When President Biden signed it into law almost three years ago,

Democrats had high hopes for the statute. They imagined a country transformed with new factories,

new solar farms, a new engine of the economy. And since it was enacted, the U.S. has seen more

than $819 billion in clean investment, that's public and private investment combined,

according to MIT and Rhodium Group Data. But of course, despite that success, the IRA didn't survive.

Last summer, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress passed the one big beautiful bill act,

a giant tax cut since spending package that repealed many of the key emissions reducing policies

from the IRA. Gone are the demand side incentives for electric vehicles, as well as the long-term

tax credits for wind and solar energy. This has left many in the climate community asking,

what happened? How did they go from the heights of policy success to the depths of an ignominious

repeal in just three years? Well, our guest today might have some answers and point to a way forward.

Joining me on shift key is Alexander Gasmerion. He's an assistant professor of political

science at the University of Michigan and the co-author with Helen Milner of the book,

Climate Fault Lines, the new political economy of a warming world. He's also the co-author of

a new paper published last month in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,

titled Why Biden Era Clean Energy Investment Policies Had Limited Political Returns.

It offers a new theory for why the IRA didn't survive. Today on shift key, we're going to talk

about that paper, the trade-off, the Democrat's face between taking credit for policies and making

them durable, and my credibility matters so much for politicians and everyone else. It's all coming up

on shift key. Alex, welcome to shift key. Hi, Rob. It's great to be here. So, can you just start by

describing your recent study and what you found? So, as your listeners, I'm sure will be familiar,

the Biden Administration's inflation reduction act was the largest investment in clean energy

in American history, and many of the reformers intended for the IRA to do more than just

address climate change. They also had a political theory, which was, we're going to deliver these

economic benefits to communities and voters will reward democratic politicians for it. So, in our

paper, with Nate Jensen at UT Austin and Dustin Tingley at Harvard, we wanted to see, did this

actually happen? So, what we did was we surveyed 5,000 people in 2024, and we asked them,

one, did you see new green investments? And two, if so, who did you credit? And we took these survey

responses and we linked it up with the location of projects. And so, this is what we found.

We found first that these investments were modestly visible, so people living closer to them

were more likely to say they noticed them, but they weren't traceable. So, people closer to these

projects weren't more likely to connect them back to the Biden Administration. I mean, in fact,

they thought the governor was most responsible for these investments by much more than Biden.

And if we look at the data on who's claiming credit, it's governors who are much more active

in sustaining their credit claiming activities. So, the takeaway was the IRA was visible,

but it wasn't traceable. How did you measure basically who was claiming credit for these?

Yeah, so we constructed a big data set for each project. We had an army of research assistants

go through and see, all right, did the company issue a statement? All right, if so, collect that

statement. Did the governor, did the senator, did the house representative, you know, the district

representative issue a statement? So, first, we collected this big data set to see who's issuing

statements. We checked everything, social media, company press releases, and so on. And so,

we could see, okay, how frequently are statements being issued? And then we looked at, what are they

saying? So, we went through each of the statements and we coded who was getting credit, who was

being described as showing up at the ribbon cutting or so on. And what we found was that number one

claimer of credit, the number one politician making these statements was governor. So,

governor's issue statements on two-thirds of projects, clean energy manufacturing projects,

Biden administration officials broadly defined. So, not just Biden, but include secretary

grand home and so on, only making statements on about half of projects. And then if we look at

what are the companies saying? And we're really interested in the companies because the companies

are much more apolitical than these other potentially partisan actors. And the companies

are spreading credit widely. They're crediting the governor, the local officials, the Biden

administration. And that makes sense because these companies, they're diplomats. They're not partisan

actors. They have to work with a lot of different levels of government to make these projects happen.

I have a few questions about the study then we're going to get into what it means. So,

did you track it all whether people liked the projects that were going up? And if so,

did you see any distinction between say clean energy projects and clean manufacturing projects?

Yeah. So, on the survey, we also asked a question that said, do you think these projects are going

to benefit or harm your community? And overall, majority of people across the political spectrum

thought these projects were beneficial, economically beneficial. And this is actually tracks a lot

of public opinion research on clean energy projects, manufacturing projects. In general,

people tend to like these projects. There's a separate conversation to have about the sort of

politics of sighting. But if you ask people if they like these projects, they say they like them.

And that actually doesn't very much depending on where these projects are built.

And the second part of your question is, are there differences based off of the type of project?

So, we separately analyze manufacturing projects from electricity projects, solar, wind,

because you think the job creation benefits are much larger. A lot of the solar, wind

investments are very capital intensive, less labor intensive, more, you know, short-term

construction versus long-term jobs. And we really didn't see much of a difference when separating

out based off of the type of project. That's so interesting because we do polling through

Heatmap Pro to basically detect how people are feeling about wind and solar projects in their

area. And one thing we found is that people can be very supportive of these projects in theory,

but then far less supportive when they are actually being built near them. There's a solar project

that's somewhere else in the county. They're fine with it. But if it's somewhere in their county

that they know and like and is proximate to their house, they might not be as big a fan. But it

sounds like however these projects were getting sighted, by and large, people thought well of them.

Yeah, we have no indication of our data that there was a sort of backlash to these projects.

But what you point out is, you know, right, in the sense that people like a lot of these

clean energy projects in the abstract, but if they want it sighted next to their house,

there tends to be less local support. When it comes to these manufacturing projects,

I think the manufacturing projects might be slightly different because they're creating many more

jobs and so on. But they also raise a different set of concerns. People were worried about things

like water usage, increased traffic and so on. This is a separate problem with the potential

political logic of the, you know, deliverism thesis. But you know, despite this concern,

we don't see any sign of it in our data. And it doesn't also sound like there was any

geographic diversity in how people felt about these two. Another thing we see in our data is like

the Sunbelt is very favorable to clean energy projects, to manufacturing projects,

economic development of all types in ways that say that Northeast is not. But it doesn't sound like

you saw these regional divergences either. So we're really interested in figuring out cause and effect.

So we do a lot in our analysis to hold constant these different differences, right? Because you

might be worried the political composition of voters varies across these places. So we're holding

a lot of that constant. But we do look at some of these differences, less so in terms of geography,

but we look at differences in terms of, is the survey taker a public and a Democrat? And what was

remarkable is we thought maybe the Democratic survey takers might be more likely to link it back

to Biden if they were closer. And we don't, we don't see that. The Democratic survey takers,

the independent survey takers act a lot like the Republican survey takers next to these projects.

So let's talk about then what your interpretation of these results are. That's the $800 billion

question. There's a number of different theories floating around about how the IRA would work.

And I want to talk about them. But what's your interpretation of how this paper should be thought

about and what it found? This paper tells us that we need to be clear-eyed about the trade-offs

when designing climate policy. So when the government's channeling money through tax credits to

private companies, there are structural barriers to claiming political credit. You know, voters are

going to see the company. They might see the governor. They're not going to see the policy

behind the reform. But one thing I want people to take away is that that's not necessarily bad news

for the energy transition. Sharing credit may actually lead to more durable climate policy.

Monopolizing credit has its risks because it can make clean energy partisan when what we need is a

broad bipartisan consensus. And at the same time, though, sharing credit alone is still not

enough because you need people on the ground. You need local organizations, union civic leaders

that can help people in these communities understand the role of federal policy. And that was

part of the piece that was missing, this organizational capacity that's ground up and not just

top-down messaging. What's your interpretation of what was missing from the IRA role out then?

This is actually something people who listen to this podcast will remember from past discussions.

But on the tax incentive side, there is not much mobilization on the community level,

helping provide information to community members about the role, the inflation reduction act.

Let me give you an example, which actually was part of the reason that I got interested in this

study. Back in 2023, I drove out to Weirton, West Virginia, which is the site of a new form energy

battery plant. This is an old steel mill town. It's incredibly symbolic. It's like out of the ashes

of this steel mill, you have this battery plant rising. And I was interested in going to this town

because it's the sort of prototypical example of IRA investment in a red state.

Two reactions I had from going there, talking to people on the street, talking to local officials,

was nobody knew the IRA had a role to play. In fact, I pressed local politician on who do you

think is responsible for this project? And they laughed and they said, I think baby dog is responsible

for this project. And I said, what is what is baby dog? And they said, that's the name of Jim

Justice, Governor Justice, then Governor Justice's dog, who he would actually even take around

to all these sort of ribbon-cutting public engagement ceremonies. The dog had his own little seat.

And it just sort of demonstrative of these local and state politicians are very good at claiming

credit. And I think there is a misconception. It's not always credit where credit is not due.

In fact, the state government provided its own set of tax incentive policies that help

form energy locate there. These companies are trying to decide where to locate across the

entire United States. And there's a suite of state and local policy incentives along with federal

incentives. So this is just to illustrate if local elected officials can't tie it back to Biden,

people on the street aren't going to tie it back to Biden is just unrealistic to expect

there to be political returns. How much do you think governors actually do deserve credit here?

Because one thing we observed was that a lot of the benefits of the IRA were going to

Georgia, we're going to Texas, we're going to Arizona, and then we're going to the kind of

middle-south region that was eventually kind of abortively dubbed the battery belt, right?

And part of that was because yes, labor is cheaper in those places. Yes, you know, they're right

to work states. Yes, land is cheaper. But another part of it that I feel like was overlooked

sometimes was that it was actually, it was a state capacity story. And it was that those states

Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Georgia had very aggressive departments of commerce or

state economic development boards that were quite proactive about getting new projects to come

to their state in a way that I think places that maybe hoped to benefit from the IRA, but then

ultimately maybe did not as much like Michigan, let's say, did not take the same entrepreneurial

approach to the policy. I mean, it sounds like this kind of what you're saying, but maybe they're

right to attribute some of this to their state government because actually it's their state that

is the reason they're getting this clean energy factory and not another neighboring state.

I think that's right. The governors and state and local officials play an incredibly important

role in attracting these investments. And so long as you're operating within this tax credit

framework, tax credits, they're an incentive that can push a company to make an investment that

might not all ready would have. There are certain elements of the IRA that tried to channel these

to certain geographies, energy communities and so on. But the state government is trying to

attract this investment and say you should come to the state rather than going to this other state.

And they're going to give a generous set of tax abatement policies, other types of incentives

and inducements to get them to come there. So by nature of how the tax policy is set up,

it's going to have a role for state and local actors. And I can't quantify that they're responsible

for 50% of the investment for say, but their role is legitimate. So this is not just a case of

people claiming credit where credit isn't due. This is a reasonable thing for governors to actually

attend these ribbon cutting ceremonies and say they played a role. Maybe this came up in your field

work. Maybe this came up in the survey. When we try to think about the IRA, how much of an effect

is it that the president could not speak or really struggled to communicate some of the more

maybe complex ideas that he needed to in order to like sell these projects to the American people?

So the first thing I would say is just looking at the data and of course we don't have access to

the internal White House deliberations. But if we look at the data, presidential messaging is

at its highest immediately after the IRA's passage and it falls over time. Whereas governors

sustained their messaging. But I think an important takeaway from this paper and the question you're

asking essentially is, well, what would a more vigorous messaging strategy would have met in these

areas where they got projects? I think a top down messaging strategy would not have been as effective

without bottom up organization. And in fact, a top down messaging strategy could have backfired

in several ways. Most notably, it could have polarized projects locally because this is happening

in red and purple states. If you tie Biden's name to it, they might be less willing to go along

with these projects. And ultimately, if we care about rapid decarbonization, which I think we

should care about that, this might actually make it more difficult to build abroad by partisan coalition.

Whereas if you have organizational sort of investments with your local unions or your civic

organizations, those are much more trusted actors who could help people connect the dots between

federal policy and what's happening these investments in their community. So at the end of the day,

there's huge structural disadvantage, regardless of whether the Biden administration wanted to more

actively message or not. They had structural problems in that governors can more easily claim

credit for projects in their state. They're on the ground. They can visit more of these projects.

They can message more companies are spreading the credit more broadly because they have to work

with a lot of people. So I think that just given the setup, this policy design of tax credits,

they're structural barriers to getting credit, even if you're a more vigorous messenger. Unless

you're investing in some sort of bottom up organizational capacity. That's so interesting,

because I feel like one of the things that did happen was that a lot of money was spent to get

churches and schools and civic organizations to install rooftop solar, to install batteries,

to electrify the rest of whatever buildings stock they owned. In some ways, more money was spent

on that than I think to message the policies per se, and yet it doesn't seem like that was successful

either. The IRA, as you know, and your listeners know, is a huge bill and it has the sort of set

a grant-based programs that has the set of tax credits and the actual organizing around it during

the implementation phase, focused a lot more on the grant-based provisions. A lot of those groups,

if you're focusing on the question of will this affect election outcomes, a lot of those groups

are probably already going to vote for democratic policy makers and are not sort of representative of

these switchable voters or voters who could be, you know, might not have voted, but then to get

mobilized. So to the extent, you know, just as a question of are there voters who could be converted

or mobilized, it's the voters in the red and purple states where these manufacturing projects

are going. So if that was your goal, then you would want to allocate more organizational capacity

there. That does sound like you're hitting on a deeper issue with all of this, though, which is

that the voters who care about climate change are at this point already Democrats. And so if you

want to tell people you're doing something good for climate change, then they're already Democrats,

and you can't change how they're going to vote because they're already in your column. If you're

a, you know, presumably a democratic policy maker, trying to enact a like a positive feedback loop

of decarbonization policy. And yet if you want to reach these independent voters with these

Republican voters and you talk about climate change, then you, and you talk about the all the good

work you're doing as a Democrat, then you're kind of polarizing those voters against projects that

otherwise you'd actually like them to support in order to keep the project or the underlying policy

around. Now, exactly. And the other thing I was going to say about the for energy plant is

exactly about this. When I was talking to people about the plant and seeing how they understood it,

they don't understand it as a climate project. They don't understand it as a clean energy project,

even they say our grid is growing and our grid needs storage. And we need that whether or not the

power is being generated from coal or we need that whether the power is being generated from the

sun or the wind. And that actually in my mind is a perfect example of you don't need to talk about

saving the planet or talk about the climate. When you can just talk about these are good

technologies that we need for the economy to be competitive or for the realities of our electric

grid. And that resonates a lot more in these red and purple states. Biden used to talk about when

I hear climate, I talk about jobs and the message from the White House and the message from

Democratic lawmakers about how this policy was going to work is that people would flock to these

projects they'd be very successful and that would create a groundswell of support for them and

make the underlying policy enduring in a way that like previous climate policy has not been. And I

think Democratic policymakers in doing that were like harkening back to their experience with the

Affordable Care Act in the late 20s where the Affordable Care Act was not popular at all and then

Trump tried to repeal it. People discovered all the way it was benefiting their lives and then

that ultimately Trump was only able to repeal certain aspects of it in ways that like may have

fatally damaged the underlying economic structure of the law in the long term but ultimately a lot

of the benefits of the law for ordinary Americans were sustained. And I think Democrats took away

from that story that like yes you can do a big policy by reconciliation and it might be unpopular

but like ultimately people will rally to the law once it's threatened and of course like that

then didn't happen when the Trump administration went to go repeal the law last year.

And so one question here is like when you were detecting whether people noticed these projects

did you detect any difference or did you have any mechanism to observe like planned investment

of which there were tens of billions of dollars versus real investment that was actually boots on

the ground so to speak factories actually employing people because I think one thing we've seen

at HeatMap is like yeah the forum energy project is amazing you know it's a factory it's actually

working it to West Virginia it's employing people they just got this big data center deal with Google

that's like a real company seemingly doing real work but there were a lot of like other EV

factories that were supposed to be built across especially the southeast that like maybe bought land

and maybe began work on a factory but never employed people and never actually created the

positive benefits that you would then expect to see voters or workers rally to protect when

the underlying policy is threatened. So we checked whether there are differences by operational status

facilities where it's just an announcement versus ones that actually had jobs created and there

were some slight differences but nothing that changes the overall conclusion people still didn't

trace it back to Biden and I think the Obamacare analogy I've always found interesting because I

think it's misplaced and here's why I think it's misplaced is that Obamacare is this much more

direct tangible benefit to individuals right you go on to healthcare.gov you find your plan and so

on and this is building off of this broader political yeah and it was really pre-existing conditions

what created the durability of Obamacare was not even the fact that you could buy plans and maybe

they were subsidized and people really like the healthcare.gov experience I don't think that people

like love the marketplace per se what people absolutely rally to protect was the fact they couldn't

be denied insurance coverage for having pre-existing conditions and it was the creation of that

that individual right within the insurance market that actually was what became the rallying flag

of the campaign that ultimately I think saved many of the aspects of Obamacare.

No exactly and that's also the lesson from what political scientists have studied this process

they call policy feedback and when you have this clearly just designated beneficiary be it older

people who are eligible for Medicare right social security benefits pre-existing conditions it's

much clearer for you to be able to connect the dots back to the federal government whereas with

the tax credit based approach tax credits maybe a sensible policy instrument for incentivizing

investment but they're very challenging to connect back the dots given all the other factors

in between even if you're an individual directly employed at one of these facilities it still

requires a lot of extra political knowledge to understand what's happening given the message

environment we have the messages from the governors from local politicians and so on.

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Democratic lawmakers definitely talked up this theory that we're going to build this policy

and and then the public is going to rally to protect it but before the IRA passed the mechanism

that was discussed was a little different. I wrote the story for the Atlantic in 2021-2022 that

talked about this idea of a green spiral and the idea basically that by enacting

pro-decarbonization policy you get companies more invested in decarbonization and that then drives

another round of policy. You know and ultimately there is backlash but it is the previous investment

that makes corporate action and ultimately policy sticky and that theory was like very dependent on

this political scientist Nina Kelsey's work at GW and she studies the Montreal Protocol which

was and as many listeners will know the big UN treaty to solve the ozone problem and

ultimately in this very famous example the US was a big opponent of doing any kind of international

multilateral work on reducing the production of chemicals that were damaging the ozone layer

until what she describes is basically US companies realized that they were about to get out

competed producing these rapidly commoditizing chemicals and refrigerants and such that were

damaging the ozone layer and they realized that by selling replacement chemicals they would both

have a monopoly on those replacement chemicals and also would have a whole new market which is

all the buyers of the existing chemicals would have to come back to them and buy new refrigerants

and this mechanism where you know corporates rallied to to assist and ultimately then protect

global environmental policy led to a kind of ratchet over time of US chemical companies supporting

treaties to protect the ozone layer and ultimately fighting for more aggressive treaties

to the point that you know through the first Trump administration through the Biden administration

the Senate was ratifying amendments to the Montreal Protocol

and also enacting equivalent law around the Montreal Protocol like under Trump and it was because

these policies that were notionally environmental policies had like huge corporate support

but in her theory it wasn't the public that was rallying to this it was that companies were like

doing investment and then they worked to protect their investment so I guess my two-part question

here is I totally agree with you the Democrats talked about this theory that the public would rally

around these policies but if we are going to adopt a more realistic view was that the wrong theory

to invest in number one and number two like what can your study tell us about the success or failure

of that theory voters struggle to connect the dots but companies are much better connecting the dots

you know companies have lobbyists who tell them about what's happening in DC it's much easier

for companies and much more realistic to expect companies to act in their self-interest and lobby

to protect their interests than voters if you have two theories of policy feedback effects one theory

is this firm centric theory you're going to build these green interest groups they're going to act

in their self-interest as they get stronger they'll have more influence and they'll keep growing

and growing and it'll expand and then maybe there'll be a counterweight to the fossil fuel interest

so that's more the firm feedback theory is green spiral as you call it and then the voter theory

which you heard a lot of people sort of optimistically saying this is going to lead to more

support for Democrats and then if you have Democrats win then that will protect the policy from

repeal in theory I think our findings say that the firm feedback theory is much more likely to

operate we're not specifically looking at firm lobbying activities the extent that we look at

firms though we do show that they are rather diplomatic and how they talk about federal legislation

they're still spreading credit but what they're doing behind the scenes lobbying is another question

much harder to observe but we did see a set of trade coalitions lobby to defend specific provisions

of the inflation reduction act the auto industry is interesting because they worked much harder

on 45X the tax credit advanced manufacturing then it it seems that they did for the EV consumer

side tax credit which is curious given the importance of the demand poll but I would say you know

there's you can think of these theories separately firms and voters but there are important

interconnections or interdependencies in the theories so if a firm is going to Republican member

of Congress and saying we need this incentive if that member of Congress doesn't think voters in

their district are going to understand the consequences of their vote on let's say the Republican

omnibus budget bill then they might be less willing to stick their neck out and go against

what the party leadership is saying these two theories are interdependent and so you can't

just say right right off voters and say they're not relevant it's still important to invest in

that ground up organizational capacity to help them connect federal policy to their livelihoods

and I think in some ways the experience during the one big beautiful bill act like confirms this

observation and I think also maybe affirms the more firm centric view because what we saw is that once

there was a legislative package that was attached to a president who was popular within his own

party at the time of enactment then it was very hard for individual lawmakers to rebel on that package

ultimately there was going to be a majority for that package in some form in the Republican House

and centric caucus but that didn't keep individual senators or individual you know house lawmakers

from fighting as they did the Republican centric caucus did actually preserve the tax credit for

energy storage in the one big beautiful bill act yet the IRA created this whole set of tax

credits for solar and wind and nuclear and Republicans actually kept those all around except for

wind and solar and actually even then structured the wind and solar tax credits so that they will

repeal and they will repeal during the Trump administration I think you could argue the repeal was

structured in a way that while it is damaging was not meant to damage projects where investment

decisions had already been made and that suggests that like lawmakers will find it very

difficult to challenge a president or a legislative package on an issue that is highly salient

and highly polarized but they will work in the background to like make that legislative package

less damaging to the material interests of their voters I think that's right one thing I would

say differently is that if you think about the things that survived they're much more

bipartisan in the sense of geothermal nuclear and so on so I think the big question is well how do we

make wind solar these other technologies more bipartisan and I think it's entirely possible because

if you look at some of the states that have a lot of wind and solar these are red states partly

because of geography partly also because of the set of permitting laws that they have set up there

it's quite possible that sharing the credit strategy can create buy-in from across the aisle

potentially in the future because you have Republican governors like Kemp and Georgia with EV

investments the state senators there too although in this case they're Democrats for now

but then you also have in other states significant EV battery investments and so on that there

material interests that firms will lobby to defend and to the extent that those are about competing with

China unless about saving the planet that can be easier to separate it out from this partisan

culture war over the environment it seems like there's two different theories of what future

climate action could look like that are emerging and one of them is relatively firm centric and

elite driven and focused on depolarizing climate and focused on let's talk about economic

development let's not talk about climate that in fact we didn't really talk about it in this

conversation but that maybe one of the things the IRA revealed is that there isn't this grounds

well of public support for decarbonization and a lot of the voters who do care are maybe already

democratic and then there's a second theory that says no no no the issue with the IRA is that it

didn't go far enough with using the public and the only way to create a grounds well of

decarbonization which is what you have to do given the science etc is to actually go in there with

public entities and have the president empower public entities that might be polarizing but they're

going to be so clear and unmistakable that they will create this positive feedback the IRA failed to

do what did the process of the research and writing here tell you about which theory is maybe

more likely to hold water going forward the paper would say the latter strategy would be much

more visible right and traceable most importantly to the federal government now of course that might

be unpopular for another set of reasons given the beliefs that Americans have about government

ownership that said there are government owned utilities the US government recently has taken

it's taken until I'm not going to advocate this particular policy stance and you could also see

potential downsides in a more clear government role in the at least think about electricity markets

as electric rates are starting to go up you could inadvertently tie yourself to this bad

price increase I think there's a lot of different trade-offs in these strategies what the paper

does say as a more general principle is that policymakers need to be cognizant of these trade-offs

when they're calibrating well how much political credit do I want to get in the next election versus

do I want to prioritize a more economically efficient policy and so long as policymakers are

pursuing this tax credit based approach there's structurally unlikely to get credit and if that's

the case then maybe they can afford to pursue a more efficient policy or they need to adopt a

different political logic which could be this more firm-centric approach to policy feedback

one of the bizarre experiences of covering the Biden administration was that the big

reconciliation bill the big legislative landmark package that came out of the Biden administration

was this set of tax credits and a hundred billion dollars of direct spending as well

and as a climate reporter I always felt like there was a disconnect happening because he wasn't

getting credit for it from a lot of even environmental groups they would talk about it but it didn't

seem like their constituents were especially moved by the fact that Democrats had just used their

one big reconciliation shot of the administration on climate and it was a place where a tremendous

amount of money was getting spent but it was having no clear effect on the ground truth politics

it sounds like maybe another lesson of the paper is industrial development or this kind of

decarbonization voter centric theory just cannot sustain the coalition that maybe decarbonization

advocates would like it to there is a few different audiences in the way that the Biden administration

tried to use the bill that they're trying to speak to and this may just be a problem you have a

lot of cooks in the kitchen they want to achieve different things right so one thing you could say

in one theory is okay we've got this big climate bill we think that young voters the base likes

climate so this will help turn them out right and it's unclear whether that happened because maybe

the base was going to turn out no matter what that's a really hard counterfactual test they lost

young voters well I mean this is this is just a broader problem of you know you have a single

election and people like to read different narratives into what the election outcome might be and

maybe Occam's razor says the simplest reason the election outcome was the way it was inflation was

high yeah and then so that's one theory of voting other theory of voting is what our paper looks at

which is the direct beneficiaries of these policies and that given the current sort of organizational

capacity seems like it's unlikely to have a political reward and you know this gets back to some

climate politics 101 in the general public there are not climate voters most people are voting

based off of economic circumstances so if you can convince people that you're going to be the

party that's best for prices or that is best for their material economic circumstances in the way

they understand that that's what's going to matter at the end of the day so framing policy along

those lines seems like it's the most effective approach and I think part of the challenge is that

you saw people making these messages right there is a lot of messaging around the IRA it's that we

needed to compete with China this industrial reshoring activity that we're doing but there is

toggling between different messages because on the one hand people are saying this is the democratic

climate bill on the other hand people are saying this is the bipartisan revitalization of

our supply chains and so on and so it's not very surprising given that you know people

providing different messages to different audiences that not a single thing cut through

there's a line at the end of the paper that says quote green spending channel through private

firms alone is unlikely to build ground up coalitions for climate policy unquote and I guess one

follow up to that would be maybe public sector spending could build ground up coalitions

but might take away broadly from our conversation and you should tell me if that's you disagree

but might take away broadly from our conversation is maybe industrial development period as a goal

is just too difficult requires too much actual bipartisan coordination and also happens on such long

timelines and with such diffuse beneficiaries that it will never quite build up a ground up coalition

in the same way or at least if it were to build a ground up coalition it would come more from the

sense of workers participants that political support for that economic transformation was organic

that politicians wanted to keep it happening rather than that politicians had helped create

the transformation at the beginning I think that's right what I would say is that

the type of investment matters right so think about something like the auto industry the US

auto industry is going to be in big trouble unless it's able to figure out what to do with EVs

yeah the US auto industry is also a place where you actually have some local organizational

capacity through groups like the United auto workers to help communicate to workers what

these policies where they're coming from what they mean for workers so the set of investments

that could help the auto industry compete can both be framed in terms of we need this to

make sure China doesn't eat our lunch and it's also an area where these policies might

actually break through to workers and it might be easier to connect the dots because you have

these local intermediaries to help explain what's going on where they're coming from and you know

you see this in some other work I've done at surveying local union leaders in the UAW and you see

that they say we need the 45x tax credit and these local leaders are saying that they can explain

to their members on the shop floor this is what this policy means but in other contexts you don't have

those sort of pre-existing trusted messengers on the ground that can help communicate these policy

benefits the takeaways is not that investments through firms are you know ill advised sort of

politically they might actually for one be just efficient economically right so the tax credit

approach is not broken in that sense we just need to recalibrate our expectations about

when they actually could affect politics and a lot of that's going to depend on local organizational

capacity to help the message cut through I want to believe that theory that unions are going to be

essential to messaging some of this and that having representation and having

organizational structures to communicate these messages to rank and file is really important

and yet I guess I'm struck by the fact that the Biden administration did more to help that

IVW and especially the UAW then a presidential administration had done in a long time

and I agree with you to be clear that the the big three U.S. headquarters automakers

are really screwed unless they can figure out electric vehicles and yet it is the UAW that

has cheered on the Trump administration repeal of various emissions policies and the Trump's

administration repeal of these various decarbonization policies because their interests are actually

aligned with the big three and they want the big three to sell more big profitable SUVs because

that means you know more profit for them too that creates a bigger pie for them too and meanwhile

it's the non-unionized global automakers who have their manufacturing operations in the southeast

that have been the most proactive about taking on the energy transition and building a wide range of

EVs and I guess here I'm thinking specifically of Kia and Hyundai who have their own reasons to

be competitive I want to believe that unions are helpful here do you think we got evidence of it

during the Biden administration or the Trump administration or is it just that those voters are like

for cultural reasons for economic reasons don't see themselves as aligned with voters who want

decarbonization policy anymore the UAW is an interesting organization because if you look at

their 2019 white paper they come out in support of the set of industrial policies that

ultimately look a lot like what's in the inflation reduction act we want it incentivize EV plants

battery plants that use union labor we want to co-locate these next to existing engine plants

things like this right because they have a set of workers who are worried about what the EV transition

means for their members at the same time the UAW is managing different internal disagreements about

how to approach this issue so this is something that has shown other work is that the workers within

these big three auto plants and represented by the UAW are not all in the same place they do

different things some of them make pistons which will be harmed by the EV transition others are

in final assembly or less harmed and when I sort of interviewed their leaders you can see that they

have different preferences about how to approach the EV transition depending on if their workers

are harmed or not so the national UAW is somewhat of a tricky spot because it has to sort of negotiate

across these different interests other members and at least when it came to industrial policy they

they came down to the IRA initially the set of policies will be good now they're in a different

situation because of tariffs and all these other things and they are probably trying to extract

the best deal they can from the Trump administration for their members and that might mean short-term

profits I mean look at fight still antices recent financial report it was not not great and the

union members didn't get their profit sharing checks so I think they're under some financial pressure

and there is a lot of short-term thinking that's happening rather than long-term thinking which is

just understandable given their situation I think that local organizational capacity be it unions

civic leaders different civic organizations can make a difference but they need to believe that

these policies are going to credibly deliver benefits to the community they're putting their

neck out when they are saying these policies will be good because if they turn out to be repealed

or not deliver the benefits then that's bad for their reputation so I do think that these groups

could make a difference in communicating the policies but these groups also have

members who have a diverse set of political views so to the extent that these policies have

perceived as partisan it's just going to make it harder for these local messengers to communicate

the benefits this all goes back to sharing the credit mainstreaming clean energy making it

bipartisan that will make the life of local organizers much easier in explaining the benefits of

these policies and tying them back to the federal government this is the tension at the heart of

the whole project is that it would be great if this were bipartisan the less this is polarized

the better and yet if only democrats are committed to decarbonization and it's a major priority

for them then how on earth do you both get them to advance policies that accomplish these goals

when they're in power while also not polarizing this issue further it just seems like that is like

the question that so many of us are dealing with right now we want to see things improve on this

issue and frankly I do think it's a new problem because up until 2015 climate change had been one

of many environmental issues the democrats wanted to handle I think it was only in the post 2015

2016 moment that this became the supreme environmental issue that they structured all their

environmental policy around and that has actually contributed to its further polarization

I think that it's possible to design a set of justifications that don't mention climate change

that advance these policies like we're talking about big three automakers are in trouble if they

don't catch up with EVs and you can see bipartisan justification for why to compete with China

we need to invest in our auto industry in the same way that China is invested in their industry

and so I think there are arguments like that and when you could think about the same analogous

for solar and wind as we see electricity demand increasing we need a strategy that encourages

affordable cheap energy to be deployed and for solar and wind that in many locations that's

what it is grouping all this policy under the headline of economic development they actually make

it both more durable and less polarizing and also let you do more cut more emissions in the long

term I think the issue is that and this is that frankly there's a lot of people who understandably

hear that reframe and go oh but that means you're actually not going to do anything on climate

anymore like that actually means you're giving up on climate and I think that it's walking that line

between depolarizing this issue framing it as competitiveness policy or economic development policy

while not creating a kind of left flank backlash that says oh Democrats don't actually care

about climate change anymore they used to during Biden they don't even care about that anymore

is very tricky now you could decide the left flank doesn't matter electorally at all and maybe

that's where we're heading but if I was a senator from a very blue state that's what I would worry

about if you look at the Biden era policies that survived chips act yeah bipartisan infrastructure

law and these are policies that are framed in this way and you know it's not automatic 20 years

ago that you might have seen bipartisan alignment on massive industrial policy building semiconductors

in the US there have been people who actually would have preferred set free trade is fine we can just

import these chips so I think we just need to get to the point where we view clean energy technology

without saying the words clean energy is a horse and buggy moment right we're just moving from one

old technology to a newer technology that has a host of other benefits and a global economy and

that are justified on reasons unrelated to sort of save the planet we just need to build the economy

of the future and being consistent in that messaging as a whole another issue how to navigate the

democratic base politics but what we can at least say from this paper is that you the economic

benefits that are going to specific communities aren't turning out people to vote they're not changing

their opinions at least in ways that would then lead them to to vote well I think that's a great

place to leave it and this has been a great discussion and thanks so much for joining us on shift

geek thank you Rob it's been a great time

thanks so much for listening that we'll do it for shift key this week we'll be back next week

with I think two episodes I you have to say one thing before I go though which is I'm not working

this week we actually pre-recorded this conversation last week very happy it's out and so who knows

what will happen this week and if something crazy happens this week then we won't cover it

on shift key at least we won't cover it till next week until then though shift key the production

of heat map news our editors are Julie Goodman and Nico Laura Challa multimedia editing and audio

engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury our music is by Adam Kromela thanks so much

for listening to you next week