Analysis: The last line of defense for Biden’s climate agenda? Green investments

Wind turbines spin in Weatherford, Oklahoma. 

Will Lanzoni/CNN

Can the green shoots of clean energy break through the “brown blockade”?

The brown blockade is the phrase I’ve used to describe the hardening tendency of the states most deeply integrated into the existing oil and gas economy, as either major producers or consumers of fossil fuels, to support Republican presidential and congressional candidates who are resolutely opposed to federal action to combat climate change.

Those states moved sharply toward Donald Trump and the GOP in this month’s election. The president-elect won a stunning 26 of the 27 states whose economies are the most reliant on the fossil fuels that produce the carbon emissions driving global climate change. Each of the GOP’s four Senate pickups also came in those higher-carbon states.

In the campaign, Trump promised to take a wrecking ball to virtually all of President Joe Biden’s efforts aimed at reducing carbon emissions and accelerating the shift from fossil fuels to lower-carbon alternatives. The critical role that the states most tightly bound into the existing fossil fuel economy played in both Trump’s victory and the GOP’s success in recapturing the Senate, will only encourage him in that direction.

The only dynamic that might complicate that offensive, even at the margins, may be the green shoots sprouting across large swathes of red America. This torrent of new investments in wind and solar power, the semiconductors used in clean energy, and especially electric vehicles and their batteries – triggered by the Inflation Reduction Act and other economic development bills signed by Biden – has flowed disproportionately into Republican-held states and congressional districts.

Those huge current and planned investments in new manufacturing plants may represent the sole opportunity to preserve any elements of Biden’s blueprint for growing the domestic clean energy industry.