Why Hasn’t the Renewables Boom Driven Consensus on Energy? — BCB #109
A reckoning between people’s livelihoods and their politics may be around the corner if the partisan deadlock over renewables doesn’t break.
Once, it was the silhouette of oil derricks and farmhouses that characterized a Texas sunset. Now the view from the I-20 takes in the sleek turbines of the Roscoe wind farm, powering a quarter million homes from West Texas cotton fields where energy is a cash crop. Texas is right on the bleeding edge of the US green energy transition. The industry is producing jobs, and renewables are cheaper than natural gas. So why is energy policy there still so polarized?

Texas is America’s leading producer of energy from renewable sources. Policy wonks have long believed that the confluence of interests between climate activists, the energy industry, and consumers would eventually lead to some consensus on American energy goals. But despite the dollars, jobs, and affordable kilowatts flowing through Texas, the political gap on renewable energy isn’t closing. If anything, it’s getting wider. Wind and solar remain a target for elected Red officials to showcase their climate skeptic credentials.
“The Biden Administration appears hellbent on force-feeding Americans failed ‘green’ policies,” wrote Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham in a letter pushing back on an offshore wind initiative. In a 2023 op-ed, she wrote:
Climate change warnings have been wrong for six decades and, given the track record, won’t ring true anytime soon. Woke, uneducated activists peddle frivolous ideas that we can run this country on moonbeams and windmills; however, fossil fuels have been a reliable, abundant, cost-effective, and powerful energy source for over a century.
In recent years, Texas Republicans have moved to increase gas production, sworn off future tax incentives for renewables, and thrown up regulations and permitting hurdles targeted specifically at renewables projects. This might seem strange, given that Republicans have long pushed for broad deregulation, but energy is an especially fraught political topic for Texans, tied up with self-determination, independence, and heritage. The Texas freeze in 2021, which killed at least 246 people, polarized energy policy even further. Elected officials rushed to pin the grid failure on renewables, despite the fact that this simply wasn’t true.
Climate change might be the most partisan topic in the US, but conventional wisdom holds that paychecks, revenues, and kilowatts will get traction where moralistic appeals do not. In the case of renewable energy, the incentives read like a shopping list of top Republican priorities: energy security, private investment, and jobs in the rural heartlands. Wind, solar, and energy storage projects are set to deliver more than $16 billion in local taxes, of which 60% will flow to rural communities, and more than $19 billion in land rents which will enrich landowners. Analysts say that Texas is biting the hand that feeds with political pushback, while the private sector gets on with delivering jobs and energy savings.
A reckoning between people’s livelihoods and their politics may be around the corner if the partisan deadlock over renewables doesn’t break.
Like it or not, America is going green
Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a practically gushing review of America’s progress towards renewable energy goals. The report also praised the US for pushing renewables investment and jobs towards communities that have taken a hit from the decline of fossil industries. Much of the progress is credited to the Biden administration’s flagship policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, which directs the lion’s share of incentives and investment towards Red states—not only Texas, but windy states like Kansas and Oklahoma, and the “battery belt” in the southeast, where manufacturing for energy storage is taking off.
Much of this boom was already underway long before Biden and the IRA. The explosion in wind generation in the Great Plains states was market-driven, and has been gathering pace since the Bush administration quit the Kyoto Protocol. Pragmatism and polarization remain unhappy bedfellows: while Trump was withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement, Wyoming was pivoting to wind. Not for the sake of the climate, but because it made economic sense.
Clean energy now accounts for more than 3% of new US jobs every year. The number of clean energy jobs in the US grew 3.9% from 2021 to 2022, outstripping the 3.1% overall job growth in the same period. What’s more, the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that “green” jobs pay about 21% more than the average, and that the pay premium is even higher in jobs that don’t require higher education. Better yet, they’re created in counties which have been badly impacted by unemployment in the wake of the fossil fuel industry’s decline.
The energy companies behind this transition have worked hard to frame clean energy as simply good business. Texas’s green energy lobby has invested somewhere between $35 and $71.1 million in befriending lawmakers since 2015. But those efforts have fallen short. Since the Biden administration took office, the partisan divide between Red and Blue attitudes to renewables has only grown.

Making America Green Again
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Blue view on Red antipathy towards renewables is scathing. “They know they’re wrong,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee told the New York Times. The prevailing assumption is that there is nothing but partisan politics at play, and this perception breeds contempt. The people closest to renewable development respond with contempt in return. In Texas, grassroots community opposition to renewables is widespread; in June this year, a public meeting in Fayette County drew a crowd of 400 in objection to a wind energy project. Communities are organizing to oppose wind and solar, seeking additional permitting and consultation requirements.
Of course, local communities aren’t the only ones involved. Campaigns opposing renewables are often organized by the fossil fuel industry, and sometimes involve falsehoods. Frustrated energy companies frame the communities spearheading the opposition to renewables projects as NIMBYs, moving against their own interests, hoodwinked by lies and propaganda. But this view is demeaning, and all too characteristic of the sort of paternalistic establishment that Red voters resent.
Where the renewable industry sees foreign direct investment, locals see international corporations bulldozing their environment, the sudden industrialization of idyllic rural districts, and badly behaved corporations getting away with breaking the rules. Where the industry sees green energy dollars, communities see their land being turned over for profit. If the pitch being made to the communities implicated in the green energy transition is economic, then the check has to be balanced, and it has to offer what the communities themselves value. In the reddest of red districts, an influx of green jobs is instead being framed as beating China to EV dominance.
Pitting global business against local communities is not a winning strategy in Red America. The profitability of green industry might win over corporate interests, but communities themselves are a different story, and ultimately they are the ones with the votes.
Quote of the Week
The only climate we should be talking about today is this country’s stalled economic and jobs climate.
— Rep. Robert Aderholt, Alabama 4th Congressional District (2013)
Great post. I'm curious to know whether local opposition to wind and solar differs--in terms of how it's framed and the tactics used -- between Red and Blue states? Would love to read some research or long form journalism on this. My sense is that it doesn't and the tactics used are pretty similar (court cases based on process oriented objections, etc.) but would love to read more.