Post-debate, IRA-repeal anxiety is peaking

When news broke in the spring that former-President Donald Trump was courting oil executives by promising to reverse Biden-era environmental rules “on day one” of a potential second term, it didn’t immediately raise alarm among clean energy business leaders. 

Two weeks ago, though, when the first presidential debate came to a close, it was a completely different story, said political consultant Jesse Lee. President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance — and the resulting understanding among Democrats that a Trump return to the White House is a real possibility — hit home for clean energy leaders in a way that congressional Republicans’ 42 votes to repeal the IRA across House and Senate committees failed to do.

“I think it actually did take some time to set in,” he told Latitude Media. Lee, who most recently served as senior advisor for communications on the Biden administration's National Economic Council, said that in the wake of the debate, the tenor of conversations has changed dramatically, and the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act is now top of mind for the clean energy industry.

The sense that the IRA is “immune to repeal efforts” because many of its investments are in Republican districts has dissipated, he said.

“It might be easy to defeat [repeal efforts] in a vacuum,” he added, but in the likely context of a proposed Trump tax cut, those efforts could have a real impact. “The first place they’re going to look for money to pay for those tax cuts is going to be the Inflation Reduction Act.” 

And for Republicans in the House, Lee added, it will no longer be a question ”Do you want the factory or not?” but rather “Do you want the factory, or do you want to kill Trump’s signature tax bill?” 

Given that potential trade-off, he said, “suddenly you’ve got a hill to climb.”

Messaging crunch time

Though the IRA anxiety is building amid the more widespread debate over whether President Biden should remain the Democratic party’s nominee, Lee said there isn’t yet any uniformity in the clean energy world on that question.

However, there’s a “pretty unanimous” understanding that a Trump presidency, particularly one armed with billion-dollar support from the oil and gas industry, would attempt to “extinguish” domestic clean energy.

“The only strategy [moving forward] is to make the stakes clear, and to some extent put a political price on repealing the clean energy investments and incentives,” he said, adding that those stakes are present regardless of whether Republicans take the White House and a Congressional majority.

Lee, who also served in the Obama administration, said clean energy should be taking notes from the defeat of efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Those attempts were unsuccessful not because Republicans failed under their own weight, he said, but rather because of a mass-communications campaign that made the stakes clear even to those who might not have understood the law.

“And there is nobody involved that has a better microphone to talk about the importance [of the IRA] than the clean energy business leaders themselves,” Lee said. 

In June, Lee worked with leaders from more than 300 clean energy-adjacent businesses to send a joint letter opposing an IRA repeal to Congressional leaders. That said, he’s not certain that the entire industry will be willing to speak out for the IRA.

“They know Trump’s willing to go after individual companies in a way that presidents typically are not,” he said. “That’s one thing you hear a lot of...and there’s a natural inclination to just want to make nice with everybody, not have any enemies.”

In many cases, industry leaders might be “seduced” by assurances from Republican aides discouraging them from “making a bunch of noise” about the IRA, saying it may make things harder for their representatives to support it. 

“But that’s just lulling people to sleep,” Lee said. “When Trump puts out his tax cut, and it’s funded by repealing these incentives, even though those Republican House members thought they were telling the truth at the time, they’re not going to stand up and vote down President Trump’s signature tax bill.”

The path of least resistance for the clean energy industry, Lee added, is staying silent.

Bad news is better

Lee pushed back against the take that the Biden administration has so far had a messaging failure when it comes to the IRA and its accomplishments.

Recalling his time on the White House communications team, he said there wasn’t a storytelling failure on the part of the administration: “I don’t think that people failed to tell a good story…the stories got written!”

“I could print you out 100 pages of amazing stories about the huge investments…I could show you the charts showing that clean energy investments had driven factory investments to an all-time high in America by far.”

But, he acknowledged,those stories failed to gain traction, a fact he attributed to the fact that good news doesn’t travel well in the social media era. With the new sense of urgency in clean energy, fueled by Biden’s debate performance, though, the industry has an opportunity to flip the administration’s positive media strategy on the IRA.

“It’s important to start talking about how bad it would be to rip the IRA away,” Lee said. “You need a little bit of friction.”