Is a Six-Billion-Dollar Loan for a Georgia Electric Vehicle Plant a Sliver of Hope for Climate Policy?

By Dave Levitan | November 26, 2024 | 11:07am

Photo via Rivian

Climate Energy

Is a Six-Billion-Dollar Loan for a Georgia Electric Vehicle Plant a Sliver of Hope for Climate Policy?

As we have covered here before, the incoming president’s stated climate policy platform is to make everything about the problem worse. He wants to pull out of the Paris Agreement again, roll back various executive orders and undermine if not outright repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, eliminate subsidies and other carrots for clean energy development, and so on. The only thing really stopping him is inertia and momentum, and, maybe, billions of dollars in government money flowing to red states and districts.

That’s the theory at least partially behind an apparently-fast-tracked $6.57 billion loan from the Department of Energy to Rivian, to help the company build a massive electric vehicle factory about an hour east of Atlanta. The loan, when finalized, would be locked in likely regardless of any Trump administration moves; getting that done before January 20 seems like a solid plan.

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“Rivian will work closely with D.O.E. to close the loan quickly,” the company said, according to the New York Times.

Obviously this is just one plant, but it is at very worst emblematic. Rivian, which only makes EVs, says its plant in Georgia will eventually be capable of producing 400,000 units per year; it will employ 2,000 people through the construction phase, and then 7,500 people at the functioning plant. These are not the sorts of numbers even the Trumpiest of politicians can reasonably ignore.

“We hear from industry and our constituents who fear the energy tax regime will once again be turned on its head due to Republican [Inflation Reduction Act] repeal efforts,” wrote 18 Republican Members of Congress, in an August letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. “Prematurely repealing energy tax credits, particularly those which were used to justify investments that already broke ground, would undermine private investments and stop development that is already ongoing. A full repeal would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return.”

The GOP support for, if not climate policy, at least the money and jobs it tends to create, is not some bullet-proof force field, of course. Trump doesn’t know what the Department of Energy actually does, is hell-bent on destroying the economy in general, and has proven that the tangible, real-world results of his policies are fundamentally divorced from his electoral prospects. That isn’t quite as true, though, for his down-ballot cohort; this Rivian loan may end up on the books before January, but it may depend on the aggressive support from the places where the money would flow to ensure the prospects of the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. It is a dark and frightening place to find ourselves in, where the questionable spines of red district Republicans represent the bulwark against an all-out assault on the climate, but it is, for the moment, all we have.