This article is excerpted from a story by Chase Woodruff posted on Colorado Newsline on November 29, 2023. Read the full article here.
Tony Salerno is a former steelworker who has worked at CS Wind’s sprawling wind tower factory outside of Pueblo for 10 years. Only a few years ago, he said Wednesday, the plant — the largest manufacturer of wind towers in the world — was struggling amid an uncertain outlook for the clean energy industry.
“We had recently been through a layoff, and our future was in question. When President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, this factory found life,” said Salerno, CS Wind America’s production manager, as he introduced Biden on the facility’s floor.
The president’s stop in Pueblo, a blue-collar town and political battleground on Colorado’s southern Front Range, comes ahead of a pivotal election year during which the Democrat will look to sell voters on the IRA and its $369 billion in clean energy spending and tax credits as he bids for a second term.
Beneath banners reading “Bidenomics” and “Investing in America,” Biden said his landmark climate law, passed by slim Democratic majorities in Congress in 2022, is already benefiting communities like Pueblo. CS Wind broke ground earlier this year on a factory expansion that the company says will double its output and add more than 800 new jobs.
“When I think climate, I think jobs,” Biden said. “That’s what climate is about — not only saving lives and saving the environment, but jobs.”
Scientists with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have warned world leaders that in order to avert the most catastrophic consequences of global warming, governments must cut global greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2030, and achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century.
Biden, who recommitted the U.S. to the Paris Agreement on climate change shortly after taking office, has endorsed those goals. In addition to tax incentives for wind and solar power generation, the IRA’s $369 billion package of clean energy measures established a new rebate of up to $7,500 for electric vehicles, along with a variety of grant programs to boost home energy efficiency and the electrification of home heating systems.
“We’re at a moment in history where 50 years from now, people are going to look back at this period as the beginning of a great transition — a global transition to clean energy, to new innovations in technology, to a better way of life,” said Democratic U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper ahead of Biden’s remarks. “And I think that this great transition is starting right here in Pueblo.”
But a report released this year by the Rhodium Group, an influential energy think tank, concluded that even with the IRA, the U.S. is likely to fall significantly short of Biden’s goal of a 50% to 52% overall emissions cut by 2030. Depending on a wide range of economic variables, the group projects that current federal law will achieve emissions reductions of between 29% and 42% by that date — though actions taken at the state and local level could push that figure higher.
“While critical, these federal regulatory policies will need to be paired with ambitious state actions,” the report’s authors wrote. “The IRA is the most substantial federal action the U.S. has ever taken to combat climate change, but it was not intended to solve every decarbonization challenge in one bill.”
Biden’s Pueblo visit came just one day prior to the opening of a major U.N. climate conference known as COP28 in Dubai on Thursday. The White House announced this week that the president will skip those talks, with Vice President Kamala Harris taking his place.
The Pueblo factory’s $200 million expansion, expected to be completed by 2028, is part of more than $1 billion in public and private investment in Colorado’s clean energy sector that has been announced in the last year, said Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat.
“We’ve come a long way. We know there’s a lot of work ahead,” Polis said Wednesday. “With this federal funding partnership with President Biden and his administration, Colorado will continue to push the limits of what’s possible (and) drive innovation here in Pueblo and beyond.”
Along with the CS Wind expansion, Polis and his fellow Democrats have touted plans by manufacturers of batteries and solar panels to open new facilities in Colorado in the wake of the IRA’s passage. In Pueblo, which is already home to the world’s first and largest solar-powered steel mill, plans are underway for major new solar projects, utility-scale battery storage and a regional “carbon sequestration hub.”