This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The seven swing states that will decide the upcoming election have received nearly half of the torrent of clean energy manufacturing dollars unleashed by a landmark 2022 climate bill, a new analysis shows, amid stuttering Democratic efforts to translate new factory jobs into political support.

Since the passage of clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a bill called the “most significant climate law in the history of mankind” by Joe Biden, nearly $150 billion has been announced for a flurry of new American facilities producing electric cars, batteries, and components for renewable energy.

Of this, $63 billion, or nearly half, will flow to just seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that form the battleground fought over by Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for November’s presidential election, bringing more than 50,000 new manufacturing jobs, according to an analysis carried out for the Guardian by Atlas Public Policy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer.”

“The steady drumbeat of announcements over the past two years has been remarkable, and time and time again they are going to swing states,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas.

“The election will decide the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and the election will be decided by the states that have benefitted the most from the manufacturing incentives in the law.”

Two years on, the IRA has delivered “the biggest US economic revolution in generations—and it’s all because America finally, finally decided to do something about climate change,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan business group.

Nearly half a trillion dollars in total public and private investment, when deployment of wind and solar farms is included, has occurred nationally, creating more than 300,000 new jobs. Clean energy now accounts for more than half of total US private investment growth, while jobs in the industry are multiplying at double the rate of the overall American economy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Biden’s top climate advisor when the IRA was passed. “It’s flipped the climate conversation on its head. It’s been a remarkable success.”

Yet despite this green boom being centered upon some of the most politically contested parts of the US, there is little evidence the IRA is set to deliver electorally for Democrats. The swing states remain on a knife-edge between Harris, who cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the bill but barely mentions it while campaigning, and Trump, who has called it a “green scam” and vowed to abolish its spending.

Only four in 10 American voters have even heard anything much about the IRA, polling has shown, with a minority of voters expressing any confidence it will aid the economy, their families, or them personally. “Most people don’t even know about it, so clearly there’s a communication problem, they’ve just not done a good job on that,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in public climate opinion at Yale University.

Leiserowitz said it’s “remarkable” only 49 percent of liberal Democrats, those most concerned about the climate crisis, have heard of the IRA, highlighting the struggles in selling a wonky tome of tax credits amid a fevered news cycle that lurches from one eye-popping crisis to the next.

Criticism has seeped into this vacuum—among major cable news channels in the past two years, half of all mentions of the IRA have been on Fox News, where it has been portrayed as wasteful and likened to far-left totalitarianism.

“Imagine if Trump had passed this,” said Leiserowitz. “He is a salesman, he made damn sure his signature was on those stimulus checks. Republicans are just much better at crowing about their successes than Democrats. There’s been a lack of focused messaging and the media is not inspired to do the job for them.”

Nadine Luci, a 60-year-old resident of Pennsylvania’s Rochester township who usually votes Democrat, worries about pollution and the climate but said she hasn’t “heard much at all” about the “Inflation Act.” In fact, she wasn’t even sure it had passed.

“I thought it was shut down a couple years ago by Republicans,” she said. “But if it goes through I think it would be a positive thing for Pennsylvania.”

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed.”

When told the bill earmarked historic levels of funding for green technology, Luci said it sounded “really good.”

“We all could use it, everybody could use it,” said Luci. “But no, I haven’t heard much.”

Frustratingly for Democrats, this appears to be a trend. Leiserowitz’s polling has found that when voters are actually provided a description of the IRA an overwhelming three-quarters of them support it. “It’s just an enormous wasted opportunity,” he said.

Proclaiming the Inflation Reduction Act has been a challenge from its birth, which required assent from Joe Manchin, the coal baron senator and most conservative Democrat in Congress. It was bestowed a clumsy name that belies what it is—an enormous climate and energy bill with some healthcare add-ons—and has befuddled basic public recognition. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” Biden lamented last year.

“It has been challenging because it’s technical in nature,” McCarthy said of the bill. “It’s been a little slow to energize people and for it to become a personal thing for people to grab onto. It’s a big bill but I do think we are beginning to see momentum gathering around it.”

The dense, 274-page bill outlines some Manchin-friendly measures controversial with environmental groups—mandated oil and gas drilling leases, dollops of cash for unproven carbon capture projects—but at its core was a shot of adrenaline to the heart of the climate movement and to an economy ravaged by Covid.

Uncapped tax credits for clean energy for the next decade that could top $1 trillion, grants for industrial emissions reduction, rebates for Americans to buy electric cars, incentives for people to get heat pumps or electric stoves at home—the IRA almost has it all in terms of support for clean energy, if not penalties for the fossil fuel pollution causing the climate crisis.

The benefits are set be profound. Goldman Sachs, which has said “so far at least, the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” forecasts $3 trillion in clean energy spending as a result of the bill, with the US treasury coming up with an even more eye-watering figure—$5 trillion—in global economic benefits by 2050 from reduced carbon and air pollution.

Battery factories are sprouting in faded corners of St Louis, Missouri; Weirton, West Virginia; and in rural Georgia. At-risk auto manufacturing plants are being retooled for electric cars across eight states; a former paper mill in Lincoln, Maine, is being reimagined as a massive energy storage facility; solar farms are blanketing parts of Arizona and Texas and Indiana; clean aluminum production is starting in Kentucky and green steel in JD Vance’s Ohio hometown.

Many of the dozens of new projects are in “places where opportunity has left,” as Ali Zaidi, the White House climate adviser, has put it, with a vision of reinvigorated blue-collar towns helping the US close the gap on the clean energy powerhouse of China.

“We are already looking at it as a real pivotal moment,” said Dawn Lippert, chief executive of Elemental Impact, a nonprofit investor in climate tech, who added that “our portfolio companies see extraordinary opportunity in rural areas of the US” because of their manufacturing history.

Politically, Republican rural and exurban areas have received the lion’s share of the spending, a fact that’s causing growing nervousness among some GOP members of Congress over the prospect of Trump reversing new job creation in their districts, even after they voted against it.

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed,” said Keefe. “It’s working-class people in Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina that are going to get hurt because that’s where these these projects are going.”

If it survives intact over the next decade, the IRA could help create 9m new jobs, one analysis shows, while pushing down emissions 40 percent by 2030, putting the US within reach of its target to cut planet-heating polling in half by this point.

Young people, people of color, and suburban women do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls.”

This progress is incremental and often invisible, though, with only a fraction of IRA funding already committed. In the former steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, for instance, many residents said they have not yet seen a resulting surge in the economy.

“We’ve been made a lot of promises here [that] haven’t been met,” said Dave, a retiree of the former Weirton steel mill in an interview at Dee Jay’s barbecue restaurant, adding he is “no fan” of Bidenomics or the Inflation Reduction Act.

Carol Hrabovsky, who owns Irish Pub, one of the only remaining bars on Weirton’s Main Street, said locals are still struggling with a lack of jobs and the high “price of everything.” Once a Democrat and now a Trump supporter, she said the IRA won’t convince her to vote for the Democratic nominee, and she believes most of her neighbors feel the same.

“They shouldn’t have even called it the Inflation Reduction Act,” she said, adding that she is worried about Biden and Harris fostering “communism.”

Other lives are starting to be touched more positively—more than 3 million American families have already used tax credits to upgrade their homes with solar panels, heat pumps, water heaters or insulation, for example. The IRA may in time become a piece of the national furniture despite Republican hostility, much like Obamacare.

But can it help win Harris the election? Climate isn’t ranked as a leading priority by many voters, but Leiserowitz said there are opportunities within three climate-conscious groups that Harris badly needs in November—young people, people of color, and suburban women. They could tip the balance in a close election.

“Those demographics do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls,” he said. “I don’t understand why they aren’t doing this. She has said that Trump thinks climate change is a hoax, which is a step in the right direction, but you need to connect the dots for people.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The seven swing states that will decide the upcoming election have received nearly half of the torrent of clean energy manufacturing dollars unleashed by a landmark 2022 climate bill, a new analysis shows, amid stuttering Democratic efforts to translate new factory jobs into political support.

Since the passage of clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a bill called the “most significant climate law in the history of mankind” by Joe Biden, nearly $150 billion has been announced for a flurry of new American facilities producing electric cars, batteries, and components for renewable energy.

Of this, $63 billion, or nearly half, will flow to just seven states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—that form the battleground fought over by Kamala Harris and Donald Trump for November’s presidential election, bringing more than 50,000 new manufacturing jobs, according to an analysis carried out for the Guardian by Atlas Public Policy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer.”

“The steady drumbeat of announcements over the past two years has been remarkable, and time and time again they are going to swing states,” said Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas.

“The election will decide the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and the election will be decided by the states that have benefitted the most from the manufacturing incentives in the law.”

Two years on, the IRA has delivered “the biggest US economic revolution in generations—and it’s all because America finally, finally decided to do something about climate change,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan business group.

Nearly half a trillion dollars in total public and private investment, when deployment of wind and solar farms is included, has occurred nationally, creating more than 300,000 new jobs. Clean energy now accounts for more than half of total US private investment growth, while jobs in the industry are multiplying at double the rate of the overall American economy.

“We thought it would be a big step forward on clean energy, but honestly we never understood how quickly it would turn into a game changer,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Biden’s top climate advisor when the IRA was passed. “It’s flipped the climate conversation on its head. It’s been a remarkable success.”

Yet despite this green boom being centered upon some of the most politically contested parts of the US, there is little evidence the IRA is set to deliver electorally for Democrats. The swing states remain on a knife-edge between Harris, who cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the bill but barely mentions it while campaigning, and Trump, who has called it a “green scam” and vowed to abolish its spending.

Only four in 10 American voters have even heard anything much about the IRA, polling has shown, with a minority of voters expressing any confidence it will aid the economy, their families, or them personally. “Most people don’t even know about it, so clearly there’s a communication problem, they’ve just not done a good job on that,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in public climate opinion at Yale University.

Leiserowitz said it’s “remarkable” only 49 percent of liberal Democrats, those most concerned about the climate crisis, have heard of the IRA, highlighting the struggles in selling a wonky tome of tax credits amid a fevered news cycle that lurches from one eye-popping crisis to the next.

Criticism has seeped into this vacuum—among major cable news channels in the past two years, half of all mentions of the IRA have been on Fox News, where it has been portrayed as wasteful and likened to far-left totalitarianism.

“Imagine if Trump had passed this,” said Leiserowitz. “He is a salesman, he made damn sure his signature was on those stimulus checks. Republicans are just much better at crowing about their successes than Democrats. There’s been a lack of focused messaging and the media is not inspired to do the job for them.”

Nadine Luci, a 60-year-old resident of Pennsylvania’s Rochester township who usually votes Democrat, worries about pollution and the climate but said she hasn’t “heard much at all” about the “Inflation Act.” In fact, she wasn’t even sure it had passed.

“I thought it was shut down a couple years ago by Republicans,” she said. “But if it goes through I think it would be a positive thing for Pennsylvania.”

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed.”

When told the bill earmarked historic levels of funding for green technology, Luci said it sounded “really good.”

“We all could use it, everybody could use it,” said Luci. “But no, I haven’t heard much.”

Frustratingly for Democrats, this appears to be a trend. Leiserowitz’s polling has found that when voters are actually provided a description of the IRA an overwhelming three-quarters of them support it. “It’s just an enormous wasted opportunity,” he said.

Proclaiming the Inflation Reduction Act has been a challenge from its birth, which required assent from Joe Manchin, the coal baron senator and most conservative Democrat in Congress. It was bestowed a clumsy name that belies what it is—an enormous climate and energy bill with some healthcare add-ons—and has befuddled basic public recognition. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” Biden lamented last year.

“It has been challenging because it’s technical in nature,” McCarthy said of the bill. “It’s been a little slow to energize people and for it to become a personal thing for people to grab onto. It’s a big bill but I do think we are beginning to see momentum gathering around it.”

The dense, 274-page bill outlines some Manchin-friendly measures controversial with environmental groups—mandated oil and gas drilling leases, dollops of cash for unproven carbon capture projects—but at its core was a shot of adrenaline to the heart of the climate movement and to an economy ravaged by Covid.

Uncapped tax credits for clean energy for the next decade that could top $1 trillion, grants for industrial emissions reduction, rebates for Americans to buy electric cars, incentives for people to get heat pumps or electric stoves at home—the IRA almost has it all in terms of support for clean energy, if not penalties for the fossil fuel pollution causing the climate crisis.

The benefits are set be profound. Goldman Sachs, which has said “so far at least, the reality is living up to or even exceeding expectations,” forecasts $3 trillion in clean energy spending as a result of the bill, with the US treasury coming up with an even more eye-watering figure—$5 trillion—in global economic benefits by 2050 from reduced carbon and air pollution.

Battery factories are sprouting in faded corners of St Louis, Missouri; Weirton, West Virginia; and in rural Georgia. At-risk auto manufacturing plants are being retooled for electric cars across eight states; a former paper mill in Lincoln, Maine, is being reimagined as a massive energy storage facility; solar farms are blanketing parts of Arizona and Texas and Indiana; clean aluminum production is starting in Kentucky and green steel in JD Vance’s Ohio hometown.

Many of the dozens of new projects are in “places where opportunity has left,” as Ali Zaidi, the White House climate adviser, has put it, with a vision of reinvigorated blue-collar towns helping the US close the gap on the clean energy powerhouse of China.

“We are already looking at it as a real pivotal moment,” said Dawn Lippert, chief executive of Elemental Impact, a nonprofit investor in climate tech, who added that “our portfolio companies see extraordinary opportunity in rural areas of the US” because of their manufacturing history.

Politically, Republican rural and exurban areas have received the lion’s share of the spending, a fact that’s causing growing nervousness among some GOP members of Congress over the prospect of Trump reversing new job creation in their districts, even after they voted against it.

“It’s not tree-huggers and environmentalists in San Francisco or New York that are going to get hurt if the IRA is repealed,” said Keefe. “It’s working-class people in Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina that are going to get hurt because that’s where these these projects are going.”

If it survives intact over the next decade, the IRA could help create 9m new jobs, one analysis shows, while pushing down emissions 40 percent by 2030, putting the US within reach of its target to cut planet-heating polling in half by this point.

Young people, people of color, and suburban women do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls.”

This progress is incremental and often invisible, though, with only a fraction of IRA funding already committed. In the former steel town of Weirton, West Virginia, for instance, many residents said they have not yet seen a resulting surge in the economy.

“We’ve been made a lot of promises here [that] haven’t been met,” said Dave, a retiree of the former Weirton steel mill in an interview at Dee Jay’s barbecue restaurant, adding he is “no fan” of Bidenomics or the Inflation Reduction Act.

Carol Hrabovsky, who owns Irish Pub, one of the only remaining bars on Weirton’s Main Street, said locals are still struggling with a lack of jobs and the high “price of everything.” Once a Democrat and now a Trump supporter, she said the IRA won’t convince her to vote for the Democratic nominee, and she believes most of her neighbors feel the same.

“They shouldn’t have even called it the Inflation Reduction Act,” she said, adding that she is worried about Biden and Harris fostering “communism.”

Other lives are starting to be touched more positively—more than 3 million American families have already used tax credits to upgrade their homes with solar panels, heat pumps, water heaters or insulation, for example. The IRA may in time become a piece of the national furniture despite Republican hostility, much like Obamacare.

But can it help win Harris the election? Climate isn’t ranked as a leading priority by many voters, but Leiserowitz said there are opportunities within three climate-conscious groups that Harris badly needs in November—young people, people of color, and suburban women. They could tip the balance in a close election.

“Those demographics do care about climate change and Harris needs to motivate them to get to the polls,” he said. “I don’t understand why they aren’t doing this. She has said that Trump thinks climate change is a hoax, which is a step in the right direction, but you need to connect the dots for people.”

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.

A total of 123 elected federal representatives—100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators—deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.

“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, which wrote the report.

The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming, or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.

It also highlights examples of denial from representatives. “Of course the climate is changing,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”

Just because politicians “say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Other instances are more recent. “We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”

Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52 million in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.

The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23 percent of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.

Even as a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public has been moving significantly in the other direction. Fewer than one in five people in the US reject the findings of climate science, according to various studies, with long-running polling by Yale University showing that those they class as “dismissive” stand at just 11 percent.

While this slice of the American public opinion has remained largely unchanged in recent years, a much larger, growing cohort is worried about the climate crisis following a string of record hot years and a parade of wildfires, storms and other climate-fueled events. More than half of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, the Yale surveys find.

“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum—alarmed and dismissive—were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.

Though the portion of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is stunning, it has been steadily declining in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denied the crisis. But many elected officials who don’t deny the crisis still use anti-climate rhetoric and work to thwart greenhouse gas curbing policies.

“There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

The Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart, for instance, previously used the language of climate denial, but more recently described climate change as being “more of a religion”—a different form of “climate obstruction,” the report says. He has also continued to oppose climate aid.

“There are lots of harmful ways to talk about climate and act on it,” said So. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”

Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.

“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”

She noted, however, that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used a variety of messaging to rebuff concerns about the climate. She said she was unsure those other forms of rhetoric were any less harmful.

“As far back as the 1990s, they were saying renewable energy isn’t reliable enough, or they were saying that wind power…kills whales,” she said. “Is it really so different from climate denial if you don’t deny the science but you deny the possibility of solutions?”

Among ordinary people, Leiserowitz said the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are warming, or tie climate science to conspiracy theories involving Al Gore or the United Nations, are often exaggerated both politically and throughout US society.

“This small minority of Americans are really vocal, they are more likely to vote and clearly they are more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said. “They are punching above their weight and having an undue influence on the public square, to the extent that most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half of the country doesn’t believe in it. There’s a culture of silence—climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”

Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to hew to more extreme views in order to secure key party primary contests, have helped entrench this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fossil fuel industry.