Trump is scaring Republicans away from saving planet Earth
His popularity has led his party members to deny climate change
is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. clean-energy backtracking is costing jobs. Trump has called for the elimination of the clean-energy tax credits contained in the Inflation Reduction Act and promised to slash incentives for EVS if he is elected. It’s become uncool for anyone who supports Trump to own an EV. So it’s no surprise that EV sales are far below expectations and that automakers have scaled back or delayed production.
The decline in EV sales led Rivian Automotive to indefinitely pause construction of a $5 billion production plant in Georgia. And in South Carolina, Albemarle suspended plans to break ground on a $1.3 billion plant to manufacture EV batteries.
This short-sighted thinking is going to hurt more than jobs. Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who lost his seat in 2010 because he campaigned on fixing the climate crisis, says precious time is being lost in the fight to adopt policies aimed at halting the damaging changes.
“The scientists are ringing in my ears saying, ‘Faster, Inglis faster.’ We don’t have time for to wait,’’ he told me. He founded an advocacy organization, republicen.org, to work with conservative climate activists. “A majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, and an even larger majority of young Republicans, believe the science of climate change, and want to see our leaders put forward serious solutions,” George Behrakis, vice president of Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends said.
Despite being out of touch with most Americans, Trump has doubled down on his derision for climate change “because it excites some part of his base,” Inglis said. The result is a Republican Party stuck between advancing an optimistic marketdriven solution to the problem and angering the retribution-driven Trump.
With the loudest mouth on the planet spewing misinformation with his anticlean-energy narrative, it is no surprise that Trump’s followers are parroting him. Of course, that won’t matter when another hurricane blows through the US south this summer. But never mind talk of policies aimed at preventing the destruction these events bring. It’s all just a hoax we should ignore to ‘make America great again,’ as Trump’s slogan goes.