The Scene
Mark Messer is no climate activist. The Republican mayor of Lebanon, Ohio, a town of about 20,000 on the outskirts of Cincinnati, recently tweeted a photo of himself with JD Vance — the state’s junior senator — with a message to “make America make sense again.”
But as President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation turns two years old on Friday, people like Messer are emerging as an obstacle to Donald Trump and his running mate Vance’s plans to gut it.
At a rally in Wisconsin last week, Vance excoriated the Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, which he has called a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China.” Yet in his own state of Ohio, Lebanon is nearing completion of a $14 million, 18-megawatt solar array that has been a dream of Messer’s since he joined the local government more than a decade ago. The city’s population was growing faster than its power supply, and it owned a patch of unused land that would be great for a solar farm. But the project was always too expensive. That math changed after the IRA passed, Messer told Semafor, because the law made it possible for municipal governments, which don’t pay taxes, to take tax credits for renewable installations as cash instead of a write-off.
“That money took the project to the starting line,” he said. “Without it we wouldn’t have pulled the trigger.”
In Messer’s telling, the project will shave about a million dollars each year off power bills in Lebanon, put about $4 million from tax credits directly into the city’s coffers, and be a draw for ESG-conscious businesses to set up shop. He wants the Trump ticket to win in November, but also keep the tax credits intact. And he’s not alone: Messer is among a growing, bipartisan group of municipal officials in Ohio who have a vested interest in preserving IRA tax credits.
“What I want to tell Vance and Trump,” Messer said, “is that this is very beneficial for us.”
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Tim’s view
One of the most interesting things about the Inflation Reduction Act is the way in which lawmakers engineered its long-term survival by providing reasons for a broader range of people to tap into the tax credits than might otherwise. The most obvious of these are leaders of Republican-majority states, including Ohio, that have seen the lion’s share of post-IRA manufacturing investment. But a less appreciated climate constituency is tax-exempt entities — including municipal authorities, churches, tribal governments, and nonprofits — that are able to use the IRA’s direct-pay provisions to take advantage of renewable energy and EV tax credits for the first time.
The upshot is that gutting IRA tax credits would shut off a source of free money that many cash-strapped mayors — including Republicans — are thrilled to have. That’s hard to reconcile with the Trump-Vance argument that the IRA is essentially a handout to China. And it could be an increasingly damaging point of tension between the Trump campaign and an influential cohort of local leaders in critical swing states.
Vance is already getting an earful from mayors directly, and in at least one case seemed more willing to support EVs and clean energy than his public comments about Harris would suggest. Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“In my private conversations with Senator Vance, he’s been very supportive of what we’re trying to do,” said Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, who this week joined a group of 350 other US mayors in committing to electrify half their cities’ vehicle fleet by 2030. “But I’m certainly concerned about the election and the impact it could have. If [Vance] is elected we really hope to talk to him about how to support this.”
Bibb is a Democrat, but Ohio’s mayors have become a bipartisan bulwark in support of the IRA in a state where climate policy is usually much more divisive, said Joe Flarida, executive director of Power a Clean Future Ohio, an advocacy group that guides city governments on how to take advantage of IRA tax credits. Another Republican-led Cincinnati suburb, Fairfield, had planned to source solar power from a third party via a power purchase agreement but is now leaning towards doing the project itself and pocketing the tax credit, utilities director Adam Sackenheim said.
For many Ohio cities, 2023 was the first year they filed a tax return, and a number of formal and informal networks of mayors, sustainability officers, and lawyers in the state have cropped up to share tips on the paperwork for seizing IRA credits, said Oliver Kroner, director of Cincinnati’s office of environment & sustainability. Mayors are by nature and mandate among the most pragmatic of politicians, Flarida said, and political opposition to the IRA largely vanished once they started to see the numbers on their 2023 tax returns.
“When you actually see the implementation, all of a sudden that changes how it’s perceived and viewed and understood,” he said. “We’ve already seen a variety of folks, including Republicans, come out and say, ‘We want to see the Inflation Reduction Act continue into whichever administration is in office next year’.”
Room for Disagreement
Campaign rhetoric is one thing, and the presidency is another. No matter what Vance and Trump say on the trail, a full rollback of IRA tax credits is unlikely given how many Republican members of Congress have IRA-backed projects in their districts. At least 334 clean energy manufacturing and EV projects have been announced in the IRA’s two years on the books, according to a report this week from the advocacy group E2. All but one of the top 20 congressional districts for clean energy investments are held by Republicans, the report found.
Notable
- Ohio will pocket $9.4 million in IRA funding to help the state’s small and midsized suppliers of auto parts retool for EVs, under a new Department of Energy program reported by Axios on Thursday.