Opinion | Can Democrats already claim fighting climate change creates jobs?

Now that Democrats have actually passed a significant climate bill — the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $369 billion of climate investments — we’ll find out in a more obvious way if they were right. Because now they can point to a concrete plan that tests the premise in the real world.

In short, if and when green jobs are created, Democrats should be able to take a victory lap. But this raises a question: Can Democrats seize the populist high ground by arguing that they are proving themselves to be the party of the manufacturing jobs — that is, green energy jobs — of the future?

They’re already starting to try. The Biden administration is crowing about recent good news on the clean energy and industrial policy front:

• First Solar announced Tuesday that it will spend $1 billion to build a production facility in the Southeast, and will spend another $185 million expanding its operations in Ohio. In an announcement, the company explicitly cited the Inflation Reduction Act.
• Honda and LG announced plans to build a $4.4 billion battery manufacturing facility somewhere in the United States, likely in Ohio, with construction beginning early next year. They cited increased demand for electric vehicles, which the IRA seeks to promote. The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year also contains incentives for electric battery production.
• Corning announced Tuesday that it will build a facility in Arizona to manufacture fiber-optic cable in anticipation of the large public investment coming from the infrastructure bill, which devoted $42 billion to the expansion of broadband.

The White House is explicitly citing such announcements — and again, these are about renewable energy — as a sign that the administration is committed to creating good blue-collar jobs.

There are signs that Democrats in tough Senate races are also starting to lean into the argument that green energy investments will fund the manufacturing jobs of the future.

For instance, Rep. Tim Ryan, who is running against Republican J.D. Vance for the Senate in Ohio, has blasted Vance’s opposition to subsidizing the manufacture of electric vehicles in the state.

“This is good for manufacturing, good for jobs, good for the environment, good for Ohio,” Ryan recently said, describing Vance as “absolutely clueless.”

Ryan has touted the Biden plan’s tax incentives to encourage people to buy electric vehicles, arguing it will lead to the manufacturing of more such vehicles in Ohio, as well as the manufacture of batteries for them. And Ryan has argued that local solar-panel manufacturing jobs constitute “the future of Ohio,” while pushing for more money for vocational training for such workers.

It’s not immediately evident how Republicans can counter this. Vance has argued that subsidies for electric vehicles will only benefit rich customers (Ryan counters that working people drive electric vehicles, too) and has suggested that relying on green jobs will make us weak against China.

But that feels a lot like trying to put populist lipstick on the old GOP pig of opposing government spending on job creation because it constitutes “picking winners and losers.” It feels trapped in old GOP ideologies, which is hard to square with Vance-style populist claims to being more pro-worker than the GOP traditionally has been.

Meanwhile, Mandela Barnes, the Democrat challenging GOP Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, has offered a twist on this approach. Barnes recounts how the 1970 Clean Air Act’s emissions standards raised demand for catalytic converters for cars, and notes that his own father worked in a plant that assembled them.

Barnes links this to the notion that investments in current green technologies can also be job creators. The goal of “transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy,” Barnes says, will create “good-paying jobs” in “clean energy manufacturing.”

And Barnes’s manufacturing plan calls for more investments in green energy jobs to compete with China’s green energy industries, calling those U.S. jobs “the manufacturing of tomorrow.”

With the caveat that people seldom vote to affirm approval of policies the president’s party has passed, one has to hope this shifts some of the old paradigms. For the longest time, climate activists and Democrats struggled against the perception of an inevitable zero-sum trade-off in which any action on climate would necessarily require economic sacrifice.

But as Princeton University professor Jesse Jenkins has argued, convincingly illustrating the “economic opportunity in the energy transition” might “fundamentally change the politics of climate.” Who knows, it just might work.