Randolph County, a rural square of green woods and farm fields in the middle of North Carolina, is the unlikely home of one of the biggest electric vehicle battery projects in the world.
Over the past two years, Toyota has announced a series of expansions that could invest more than $12 billion in the area, where it owns a manufacturing plant.
It’s part of the biggest announced investment — a total of $17.6 billion — that any congressional district has received since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, according to E2, a nonprofit group that collects data on clean energy projects tied to the bill.
Over the last two years, Biden’s landmark climate bill has ushered in more than $120 billion in announced investment across the country, per E2, supercharging spending in a burgeoning clean energy industry — think batteries, electric vehicles and solar — largely through tax credits.
In Randolph, most of that money has pooled into the tiny, 2,650-person town of Liberty, where the only chain restaurant is a Subway attached to a single grocery store. Once dominated by the textile industry, Liberty had seen “minimal industry” until Toyota came to town in 2021, said Scott Kidd, Liberty’s town manager. Liberty is now sandwiched between the Toyota plant and a $5 billion semiconductor manufacturer in a neighboring county.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to repeal the I.R.A., and despite the more than 330,000 jobs that could result from the law, swing states that got billions from the plan like North Carolina still moved toward the G.O.P. in 2024.
In Randolph County, 78 percent of voters cast their ballot for Donald Trump. The area’s congressional district is led by Rep. Richard Hudson, a Republican who won his re-election bid in November after closely aligning himself with the MAGA movement.
The Effects of the Inflation Reduction Act
Many Americans still have not heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act, which is expected to pour as much as $1.2 trillion into the U.S. economy over the next decade.
“We didn’t lose the election because of the I.R.A., but we also didn’t win because of it and we should have,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action, a climate nonprofit.
But rolling back such investments could be a challenge for red states — about 85 percent of the announced investments from the bill have come in Republican districts, according to E2 data from August.
“We’re at the advent of an economic revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country in generations,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2. “If it gets rolled back or reduced, it’s not liberals that’ll be hurt, but working people in rural places.”
More than half of 900 clean energy companies surveyed by E2 in October said they would lose business or revenue if the I.R.A. was repealed. Businesses in rural America would suffer the most, according to the survey.
The politics of the I.R.A.
In 2022, Rep. Hudson voted against the I.R.A., calling it a way to “throw money at woke climate and social programs that won’t work.” In an emailed statement on Wednesday, Hudson called the law “a highly partisan scam that cost too much.”
“Republicans are focused on policies that encourage investments and job growth without spending our country into oblivion,” added Hudson, who did not respond to questions about whether he would support a repeal of the law.
In Liberty, residents are “pretty vocal about politics” as Trump supporters, Kidd said. But the consensus in Liberty about the Toyota plant is positive.
“People’s kids have a reason to stay in town and have jobs locally that could benefit them instead of leaving for better jobs,” Kidd said.
Randolph County is planning for upgrades to its water and sewer system to support the growth brought by Toyota, but those could be threatened by an I.R.A. repeal.
“All these future plans we’ve worked on for two or three years could just kind of come to a halt,” Kidd said.
Emily Holland, a spokeswoman for Toyota North America, said its investments are not dependent on politics, but respond to market needs and “are for the long-term benefit of our business, team members, suppliers and dealers.”
Smaller I.R.A.-related projects, especially those dependent on grants or loans, could face more risk than tax incentives, which require changing the law itself, said Jay Turner, an environmental studies professor at Wellesley College.
In August, 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson that called a full repeal of the law “a worst-case scenario.”
“If a handful of Republicans are unwilling to play ball, that could make it hard to undo the I.R.A.,” Turner said.
Karoline Leavitt, the Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman, said in an email that “the American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail.”
She added, “he will deliver.”
In Liberty, the first Toyota plant already employs 1,000 people, the majority of whom are from North Carolina, Kidd said. Under subsequent expansions, the work force could eventually grow to more than 3,000. The factory is expected to start producing and supplying electric vehicle batteries early next year.
The carbon dioxide pipeline problem
The problem: To hit climate goals and decarbonize, many experts say the world must capture hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. But much of that CO2 will need to be transported, sometimes over distances of hundreds of miles.
The fix: Companies in recent years have tried to launch projects for expansive pipelines to transport the CO2 from industrial sites to where it will be stored underground or used.
For about three years, Summit Carbon Solutions has been working to set up a 2,500-mile project across five Midwestern states to transport as much as 18 million tons of carbon dioxide per year captured from 57 ethanol plants. The company aims for much of that carbon dioxide to be stored underground in North Dakota.
Last week, North Dakota’s Public Service Commission granted Summit’s route permit for the project, and earlier this week, Summit submitted a permit application to South Dakota’s Public Utilities Commission.
The obstacles: Summit and others have run into significant opposition from the public and environmental groups over concerns about pipeline safety, access to private land and what will be done with the captured carbon dioxide. The regulatory process for multistate pipeline projects is also complex because companies need approvals from each state, or sometimes county, involved.
That means Summit still needs permits from North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota, and from counties in Nebraska where it also plans to operate. Lee Blank, Summit’s C.E.O., said getting the necessary approvals has taken longer than expected, but that the company has improved its community engagement.
“It’s taken time for us to do that,” Blank said. “As we’ve done that, we’ve started to see some of these regulatory hurdles come down.”
Some projects that ran into similar opposition have ended up being scrapped altogether.
And a carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in 2020 in Satartia, Miss., forced an evacuation and sent dozens of people to the hospital, exacerbating pipeline safety concerns.
What’s next: If it can obtain the right permits, Summit plans to start building the infrastructure for the pipeline project in early 2026 and hopes to have it up and running by 2027.
But if carbon capture is going to take off in the United States, CO2 pipeline construction will have to ramp up significantly. By 2050, the U.S. hopes to be able to transport up to 1 gigaton of CO2 a year, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory. — Allison Prang
A tug of war at U.N. climate talks
A two-week marathon of climate talks has entered its grueling final dash. Developed and developing nations were still deadlocked over how many hundreds of billions of dollars wealthy countries should invest to help speed the global transition to cleaner energy and protect the most vulnerable countries against the drumbeat of catastrophes that accompany global warming.
The seemingly sleepless deliberations at the summit, which is scheduled to end on Friday, resemble a tug of war: The world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries have banded together with newly industrialized economic giants like China and India to demand that history’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters, including the United States and Europe, come up with a plan to provide $1.3 trillion in climate financing per year. — Max Bearak
More climate news:
The Guardian investigates how McKinsey & Company, the world’s largest consulting firm, helps fossil fuel companies, despite its climate claims.
The Washington Post reports on a new project in Oregon to harness the power of ocean waves and turn them into electricity.
Tesla has been slow to live up to its promises to make its chargers accessible to other electric vehicles, Bloomberg reports.
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