President-elect Donald Trump says he plans to gut Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act when he takes office in January, deriding the IRA as part of the “green new scam.”
But as Forbes’ Alan Ohnsman reports, he’s unlikely to pull it off. The IRA is the single biggest effort to combat climate change in American history, and has already provided billions of dollars to clean energy projects—many of them related to battery production.
“For the battery industry, $110 billion has been handed out and can’t be repealed,” Simon Moores, CEO of London-based Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told Forbes. “The vast majority will come online during the Trump 2.0 years, so whether President-elect Trump likes it or not, he will oversee the great U.S. battery boom.”
The incoming president has continually touted his plans to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., after all, and it just so happens that many of the new battery factories are being built in red states that Trump carried in November—with General Motors alone committing more than $4 billion to battery ventures in such states.
Still, with Trump’s promises for tariffs and the potential elimination of the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicle purchases, there’s no guarantee that America’s EV industry will continue its rapid growth over the next four years. Read more about how the president-elect’s administration could impact America’s battery boom here, and keep reading below for more great journalism from the Forbes newsroom. |
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