More: The single largest investment in the burgeoning US green energy supply chain involves a construction site the size of 121 football fields near Greensboro, North Carolina, and a check for $13.9 billion. By 2030, the Toyota Corp. facility could be employing more than 5,000 people cranking out enough batteries to power half-a-million new electric vehicles each year.
What's not to like about that? This seemingly rhetorical question actually demands an answer given America's partisan divide over climate change.
The Toyota project, which began with a $1.3 billion initial investment announced in 2021, massively expanded after passage the following year of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden's signature green legislation offering hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for clean technology. The IRA was unanimously opposed by Republicans in Congress. Its cousin, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, containing a smaller set of cleantech subsidies, was nominally bipartisan but only drew 13 "yeas" from House Republicans when it passed in 2021.
One Republican critic of the IRA said, using fairly typical language, that it would "raise taxes" and "throw money at woke climate and social programs that won't work." That critic, Rep. Richard Hudson, represents North Carolina's 9th district, which happens to be where Toyota is building that mammoth battery plant.
Hudson's district epitomizes a peculiarity of the US energy transition " and a growing problem for Republicans. There is a certain luxury enjoyed by politicians who can be rhetorically against something while still quietly welcoming any dollars and jobs that it brings to their constituents. Looking ahead to November, if Republicans are empowered to a point where they actually could vote those dollars away, it would present a much thornier dilemma " and a moment of truth.