An electric vehicle charges up at a Georgia Power station located in the parking lot of a Burger King in Columbus. Jill Nolin/Georgia Recorder
Two years ago this week, President Joe Biden signed into law the strongest climate action in history – the climate and clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act .
It’s since become one of the most successful congressional measure in decades, positioning the country to cut climate pollution and driving a heartland manufacturing renaissance with clean energy at its core.
No state has fared better than Georgia, fast becoming a domestic clean energy superpower.
Since the measure was enacted, companies have announced a staggering $15.3 billion in new and expanded Georgia factories to make solar panels, electric vehicles and advanced batteries.
That’s putting more than 15,000 Georgians to work creating the building blocks of a clean energy economy , further strengthening a statewide clean energy workforce that’s already nearly 80,000 strong .
And it’s setting up Georgia workers and businesses to be winners in the fast-growing global clean energy market, worth a staggering $1.8 trillion last year alone.
What’s important now – in Georgia, and across the country – is to build on this progress in the critical years ahead, when what we do, or fail to do, could mean the difference between widening disaster and a climate-safe world.
Close to home, the Republican majority in the Georgia legislature, and Gov. Brian Kemp, are better at celebrating clean energy jobs than at supporting clean energy itself.
Even as Georgia is fast becoming the epicenter of electric cars and battery manufacturing, the state lags behind in supporting drivers of the vehicles and, in some ways, punishes them.
Georgia residents are eligible, of course, for the $7,500 federal tax credit the Inflation Reduction Act provides for new electric cars built in this country and the $4,000 credit for used electric vehicles. Georgia provides, though, no similar state tax incentive, like those in Virginia and 18 other states.
Instead, Georgia hits up electric vehicle owners with a $211-per-car penalty – added to annual registration fees. In January, Georgia will add a tax to electricity from public charging stations.
Nationally, this year’s presidential elections offer a stark choice between moving forward with clean energy investments and jobs growth, or bogging down and stalling out.
With two decades of public service on the frontlines of climate and justice leadership, Vice President Kamala Harris is ready to advance clean energy gains from day-one as president, lead by example abroad, and confront the climate crisis with the urgency it demands.
Bowing to billionaire oil and gas donors and other big polluters, Republican candidate Donald Trump has vowed to slam climate and clean energy progress into reverse .
Every member of Trump’s party, in the Senate and the House , voted against the popular climate and clean energy legislation two years ago. Since it passed, they’ve voted more than 40 times to gut it, and the MAGA manifesto Project 2025 calls for it to be repealed.
The stakes are too high for that.
This month dangerous heat waves put Georgians and nearly 150 million other Americans at risk of the kind of exhaustion or heat stroke that led to 2,300 deaths across the country last year, the hottest on record .
We’re seeing the results all around us, as seas rise , species collapse , croplands turn to desert and wildfires , storms and floo ds rage, in cascading climate disasters that threaten our capacity to cope – as communities, as a nation, and as a community of nations.
The Biden-Harris administration recognized the crisis and took action to address it, with climate and clean energy incentives that are strengthening the economy, cutting costs for our families and making the country stronger, more equitable and more energy secure .
To complement these incentives, the Biden-Harris administration put in place new standards to cut climate pollution from our nation’s largest sources: methane emissions from oil and gas operations and carbon pollution from cars, trucks and dirty power plants .
Taken together, and done right, these measures have positioned the country to cut greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 56 percent below 2005 levels by 2035.
It’s a far cry from where things stood less than four years ago.
As president, Trump waged the worst White House attack ever against the environment and public health, made a mockery of the fight for a climate-safe future and broke our promise to the rest of the world.
He’s vowed to do even worse if elected again. His playbook, Project 2025 , is a right-wing roadmap to environmental ruin and runaway climate disaster, a plot so dark that Trump, who once hailed its “ detailed plans ” for his second term, now tries to hush it away from public view.
Nobody, though, is fooled.
Trump, who’s called climate change a hoax , said wind turbines cause cancer , and urged drivers t o burn more gasolin e, has pledged to scrap the climate and clean energy standards and incentives the Biden-Harris Administration put in place, setting back climate action a decade or more in a second term.
It’s often said that elections are about the future – not destroying the future, but making it better. We’ll do that by confronting the climate crisis, not surrendering to it.
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