Dems couldn't save Biden's energy programs — so they'll try to make them a weapon against the GOP

Yahoo

3 days ago

Democrats failed to excite voters last year with the promise that former President Joe Biden's clean energy tax breaks would lower prices, expand the power grid and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
But the passage of the GOP megabill is giving them a chance to try the economic sales pitch again — this time, by warning that Republican policies will cost Americans money.
That message represents an attempt by Democrats to craft a winning political argument out of President Donald Trump's newly signed tax and spending law, which eviscerated Biden-era incentives for clean technologies such as wind and solar power. It's also an effort to flip the usual partisan energy debate by portraying Republicans as the party of electricity shortages and rising prices.
Their targets would include the moderate Republicans who spent months urging Congress to preserve the Biden tax breaks because of their projected economic gains for GOP-held districts — only to fold and vote for Trump's bill anyway. Trump is moving aggressively to enforce the law, ordering agencies to hasten the phase-out of green energy incentives despite a widespread consensus that the U.S. will need to ramp up electricity from all sources to meet the growing power demands of artificial intelligence.
'Democrats now have the high ground of price and Republicans are now the party of electricity shortages,' Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview. 'We're just not going to have enough electrons to go around and the prices will go up — and that will be 100 percent because Republicans passed this ridiculous bill.'
Schatz added that Democrats don't need to lead with their traditional message that clean energy is essential for dealing with climate change. 'The people who care about climate are already with us,' he said.
Besides Schatz, Democratic climate leaders aligned on the new messaging include Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida. Eleven Democrats said in interviews that an emerging consensus in their party is cohering around a new campaign emphasizing pocketbook issues.
Some of the Democrats' environmental allies are going all-in on the message. Clean Energy for America, an advocacy group, plans to plaster billboards with ads in seven swing districts attacking Republican House members who 'just voted to raise your electricity bill.' Climate Power, a Democratic-aligned strategic communications operation, launched a six-figure national advertisement playing heavily on Fox News contending that the GOP's policies renege on Trump's promise to lower prices.
Republicans scoffed at the notion that Democrats will succeed in promoting themselves as energy price populists.
'It's tough for the Democrats because they've made climate their energy priority for decades,' said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former aide to then-Sen. Marco Rubio who is a partner at Firehouse Strategies. 'Voters associate liberals with prioritizing climate change over energy affordability.'
Also inconvenient for the Democrats is the fact that oil prices are hovering near four-year lows, GOP strategist Ford O'Connell said. So even if Democrats cling to a message that Republican policies raise energy prices, he said, those price hikes are unlikely to show up in the real world before the midterms.
'That's just something that Democrats keep saying over and over, but it's just not going to be true because the argument defies gravity,' O'Connell said.
Blaming Republicans for future energy price increases is 'too abstract,' said David Victor, an expert on climate change and energy markets who works as a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego. He added that for people who simply believe that green energy is expensive, the Democratic counterargument will be drowned out.
'People don't believe it,' he said. 'All kinds of claims are being made.'
The Democrats' plans to seize on the energy argument is part of a larger effort to hammer Republicans over projections that the megabill will steer huge tax breaks to the wealthy while kicking millions of poorer Americans off Medicaid.
It also recognizes the new realities of the U.S. energy markets, including the rise of AI data centers and the fact that U.S. power consumption is moving up after almost 20 years of nearly flat demand.
Democrats believe the time is ripe to revive the call to speed the growth of wind and solar power — and bash the Republicans for taking the green power incentives off the table. They also contend that Trump's law will spike power prices by making renewable electricity more expensive.
'We're going to need to build assets for a growing grid. Choosing not to build things is fucking stupid,' Rep. Sean Casten (D-Illinois) said.
Castor agreed with the messaging approach, adding that her Tampa-area constituents are already well aware of how climate change is affecting their lives. But when she talks to them about what's at stake in the Capitol and the White House, she said she focuses on 'higher costs, higher electric bills.'
'Bread and butter, kitchen table issues — costs, their electric bills — are not going to see relief from Republicans,' said Castor, who chaired the now-defunct House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis when Democrats controlled the House from 2020 through 2022.
Of course, the jobs-and-prosperity message failed Democrats at the ballot box last year, possibly because the slow rollout of Biden's $1 trillion-plus in energy, climate and infrastructure spending meant that many of its projected economic gains had not yet appeared. The Biden administration's gargantuan spending initiatives also played little role in the campaign messaging by his would-be successor, then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
One economic data point in the Democrats' favor this time: Power bills have increased an average of 9 percent since January, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, giving Democrats a chance to try to tie any utility bill increases to the Republican law.
That upward pressure on prices is likely to accelerate, given that the U.S. doesn't have enough power supply to meet a nearly 20-percent projected increase in demand during the next five years. And the new Republican budget law raises costs on wind and solar — even though those sources, combined with batteries, accounted for 93 percent of all new power added to the grid last year, according to the EIA.
Republicans have vowed to plug the gap with fossil fuels and nuclear energy. (Trump's new law includes policies to boost production from those sources, for example by slashing royalties for fossil fuel production on federal land.) But orders for natural gas turbines face a years-long delay. New nuclear energy faces cost challenges and long lead times. And no utility has announced plans to build new coal-fired power plants, which still face an uncertain regulatory environment and stiff competition from other energy sources.
Environmental and clean energy groups have largely swung behind the economic message.
One group in the pro-pocketbook crowd, Climate Power, called Republicans' bill a 'National Rate Hike' in a memo last month. It cited an analysis by the Clean Energy Buyers Association, a trade group working with data center developers, that said repealing tax credits would raise household power bills $110 annually as early as next year.
But John Marshall, CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition, said the most persuasive way to get people to care about transitioning to clean energy and tackling planet-heating emissions is to talk about climate change more, not less.
On a matter that may be instructive for energy policy, voters prefer positions that encourage more options, not fewer, said Marshall, whose nonpartisan, nonprofit organization conducts research on climate communication. Grounding conversations in how climate change affects pocketbooks — such as rising insurance premiums — also moves people. But talk of future jobs at the national scale sounds too theoretical, he said.
'Climate is not a dirty word,' he said. 'The smart play is to talk about the issue, but just talk about it in a slightly different way and make it relevant to different people's lives.'
During last year's campaign, supporters of the Democratic policies faced 'a continual challenge' in trying to warn that Republican policies would kill future clean energy jobs and investments, said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups. But he said enough of those jobs have since materialized that it's possible to hold GOP lawmakers accountable for businesses that close or construction projects that shut down.
'The new thing is we are moving from the abstract and the conceptual to, 'This is what they did,'' Walsh said.
Democrats' environmental allies also need to confront the lingering reputation of a 'green premium' that leads many people to believe that wind and solar power are expensive, said Holly Burke, spokesperson for the green group Evergreen Action. In fact, wind and solar are cheaper per megawatt-hour than coal, and in many places they're even competitive with natural gas, the United States' dominant electricity source.
Those facts give Democrats a potential opening, Burke said.
'In October 2026 I'd be surprised if candidates are messaging on this specific bill, but what they will be messaging on is the impacts,' she said. 'Your utility bill is your utility bill. Folks know Trump ran on lowering electricity costs and that Republicans are in charge.'