Through the passage of IRA and CHIPS, the Biden administration has invested billions of dollars and created more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs in purple and red districts that have been hard-hit by globalization and disinvestment. In this episode, Julian Spector of Canary Media, reporting from these communities, shares about local reactions to this influx of new money and opportunities, and the reality that Trump’s Project 2025 wants to roll back the tax credits fueling this growth.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
The Biden administration is creating manufacturing jobs precisely in those areas of the country that have been hit hardest by globalization, disinvestment, and the subsequent politics of resentment and reaction. Since IRA and CHIPS were passed, there has been some $382 billion worth of new investment in manufacturing in the US, creating well over 100,000 new jobs.
Some 75 percent of that investment has gone to Republican Congressional districts. Yet even as red and purple states welcome the benefits, Trump’s Project 2025 is promising to cancel and undo all of the tax credits that are spurring that investment. Trump’s own rural constituents would be hardest hit.
How is all this playing out on the ground? Julian Spector, a senior reporter over at my sister publication, Canary Media, has been traveling to these red districts to find out. His first story is from Dalton, in northwest Georgia, which is home to a gargantuan and rapidly expanding QCells factory making solar panels.
He's been talking with the locals about what they make of it. Next he's off to Michigan and Pennsylvania. I thought I would chat with him about what he's seeing and hearing from the communities affected by all this new money.
With no further ado, Julian Spector, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.
Julian Spector
Yeah, thanks for having me. Love to talk about this stuff.
David Roberts
Let's just start. I think, you know, this is Volts. I think most of the audience here knows the basic backstory. But just maybe for people who are coming to this fresh, just tell us what's happening here. What sparked this idea for a trip? What is the broader macro phenomenon that you're looking into here?
Julian Spector
Yeah, the broader macro phenomenon is just that we're actually starting to manufacture clean energy in the United States in an appreciable way since the passage of the IRA. Like, you've been following the space for years and — what, five years ago, ten years ago? That just wasn't a conversation.
David Roberts
It sounded very utopian and space-agey, let's say, to say five years ago, "Yeah, let's bring manufacturing back to the US." It was something that everybody would constantly say, but I think also everybody just sort of accepted it, that it was just a thing everybody always said.
Julian Spector
They always said it. And we had tariffs on solar panels going back to the Obama days, but they were sort of just — it didn't lead to some renaissance across the country. These are all technologies we largely invented in the US. The solar panels, and a lot of the key battery IP, came out of here. And then we just kind of, as a country, let it go overseas. And there's a huge industrial bases over in China and Asia. And it seemed like kind of a foregone conclusion that we just lost that manufacturing race on these things. But then the IRA totally flipped that around.
So, a lot of my work the last few years has been, "Okay, we're doing it."
David Roberts
We're doing this thing.
Julian Spector
We're doing this thing. What's that like? What's going on? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities?
David Roberts
We should say here, just kind of to level set. Like, this is the beginning of turning things around. But there are hundreds of billions — I mean, we're so far behind. If we achieved 3%, 4%, 5% of the global supply of any one of these things, it would be a massive accomplishment. So, it's not like we're evening the scales. We're just crawling out of the hole.
Julian Spector
Yes, we're very much just getting started. And, you know, it's actually getting some results pretty quickly, although there's a lot of ways to look at it. So, you know, if you're looking just at, like, solar panel factories, we've built a lot in a couple of years. I talked to an analyst at Wood Mackenzie who counted that we had like, eight gigawatts of solar panel production in the US before, and now that's up to 30 gigawatts already. So, like three x.
David Roberts
Yeah, not bad for two years.
Julian Spector
Yeah, not bad for two years. And then the caveat to that is that's the easiest part. That's like taking cells that are still being made across the sea and sort of putting them together into a solar panel. So, there's still a lot more work to do to, like, bring the whole supply chain and the high-value stuff.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah.
Julian Spector
And, you know, batteries, we've got, like, a huge ramp-up in battery production. But again, it's a hard industry. These are pretty thin margin, competitive, commodified. So, yeah, I think that's the key takeaway is factories are coming, manufacturers are investing billions and billions of dollars. The long-term success, we don't know yet. They're getting started, but there's a lot of competition from abroad, and they really need these incentives to even have a hope of kind of —
David Roberts
Yes, we should say there are competitive forces involved. Like, the subsidies sound like big numbers when you just say them in isolation. But, relative to global macroeconomic forces that we're up against here, it's not really that much.
Julian Spector
Exactly, yeah, and we're in this period of what they call oversupply in the solar panel market. So even though we have these nice kinds of incentives for domestic production, the overall market just dropped a lot faster in price than everyone expected. Even though, you know, like, everyone in this industry knows prices just keep getting squeezed and squeezed, pushed down, but it somehow sort of leapt ahead of even those expectations. So, like, the prices right now are, it's very hard to, like, make much money as an American producer. But the hope is, you know, as you scale up that industry, you get better, you get more efficient and more scale and things like that.
David Roberts
We'll return to this in a minute. But, like, one of the things going on in the background here is, I think everybody knows at this point that China, that the Chinese government, is committed to this in a serious, long-term, multi-decadal way. And so, even though America's kind of gotten religion on it under Biden, I think we are a long way from establishing that we have anything like the commitment to sort of ride through these waves of price fluctuations and, you know, geopolitical forces and all this. Like, we're a long way from committing that we have a Chinese-style commitment to this.
You know, we might even drop it all next year.
Julian Spector
Exactly. Yeah. No, that's such a crucial point because China's been doing these super long-term industrial plans and really strategically trying to take over certain industries and just muscle people out. We've had two years of strong industrial policy on this. It's just getting started. And, yeah, leading us back to the election topic. It's very much on the chopping block, depending on how things go in November.
David Roberts
So, you are going down — this is the task you've set yourself, is to go down and visit some of these areas where this new manufacturing is happening. Tell me, sort of like where you've been and where you're going to go.
Julian Spector
Yeah, so I started in Dalton, which is northwest Georgia. So, if you imagine, there's the I-75 corridor kind of going up from Atlanta all the way up to Chattanooga, Tennessee.
David Roberts
I used to live in middle Tennessee, and my extended family lived in Atlanta. So, we would drive that I-75 corridor past Chattanooga like two or three times a year from the time I was tiny. That whole area is —
Julian Spector
Oh, that's fascinating.
David Roberts
So familiar with it.
Julian Spector
What do you remember of it? Like, what?
David Roberts
I remember Chattanooga The one thing that stands out in my memory is that Chattanooga was just an absolute s- hole. It was like a smear, a kind of a dirty, smelly, wide spot in the road, and that place has completely transformed. It is wild to go there now. It's like a cute little Seattle. They have their cute little waterfront.
Julian Spector
Yeah, and mountains and forests.
David Roberts
That whole area. There's been a ton of wealth, kind of, generally speaking, coming into that area, but, yeah.
Julian Spector
And do you have any memories of Dalton?
David Roberts
No, no, Dalton did not stick in my memory. I'm sure we stopped to pee in Dalton at some point, but no, I did not remember it. But didn't you do — before this current trip you're on — a swing through the battery belt, too, with the same kind of basic mission?
Julian Spector
That's true. Yeah. So, that was last year, I think, in May. And the idea for that trip was to sort of trace the whole battery supply chain that had come alive in the Southeast, starting from — there's actually this historic lithium mining area outside of Charlotte that was the largest lithium mine in the world for most of the 20th century. Which, it was a much smaller market back then, but there's kind of this rock formation of lithium close to the surface.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Julian Spector
So, we had that. Guess what? We offshored it in the eighties and nineties. We're like, "Eh. Who needs lithium?" Yeah, what's that all about? So, they're not operational, but there are some companies trying to restart mining there. And then you go down the road, and SK, the South Korean company, has a huge billion-dollar battery plant. It's kind of like an hour north of Atlanta. So, you get the batteries being made there. Then there's multiple EV factories, like Volkswagen in Chattanooga and then BMW in Spartanburg, and then there's a bunch more that have been built across Georgia, like Hyundai and Kia and stuff.
David Roberts
So, just by way of background, Georgia is — am I correct in saying that Georgia is the top recipient of tax credit money so far, manufacturing tax credit money?
Julian Spector
So, the stats I've seen are more about measuring the private investment in the factories that are prompted by the tax credit.
David Roberts
That's what I meant.
Julian Spector
Yeah, so they've been a top recipient, I think, by some counts, Michigan gets more money, but I think Georgia's got the most jobs created by the tally. I see there's a group, Climate Power, actually just put out a new report about it, and they counted 32,000 jobs for the clean energy factories in Georgia. So, yeah, I think Michigan has gotten a bit more, a few more billions of dollars in factories because there's so many, like, battery and car ones up in Michigan.
But, yeah, Georgia, Michigan, clearly, are the two biggest winners in terms of —
David Roberts
Interesting. That's so politically interesting, which we will return to later. But let's start with Dalton. Why Dalton? What's going on in Dalton? And also, just tell us, what the heck is Dalton?
Julian Spector
"What the heck is Dalton?" Right. So, it was on the side of I-75 that you were driving through. It's a small town dating back to the mid-1800s and currently has about 34,000 residents. So, you might expect from that size kind of, like, a quaint rural community, sort of sparse, but it actually —
David Roberts
I know better, Julian, having driven through those places many, many times, I'm guessing it mostly looks like strip malls and, like, gas stations and O'Charley's?
Julian Spector
Well, so it's actually got something different going on because it's the heart of the carpet industry. They call themselves "The Carpet Capital of the World," and that's on murals and manhole covers.
David Roberts
I think I have seen those billboards.
Julian Spector
Yeah, so, they kind of developed from this cottage, basically a quilting industry in 1900, from people sewing these things on their front porch. And that became this kind of bustling carpet manufacturing hub, where they say it's like, 80% of the tufted carpets made in America are from within a few miles of Dalton. So it actually has this very cute downtown core, and there's some wealth being generated there because of this industrial hub that employs tens of thousands of people, actually. So you have a cute, historic downtown, and then on the outskirts, these hulking, enormous factories, where people are extruding yarn, and then the yarn's getting cut up and glued to the carpet backing.
David Roberts
So, is the industrial base in Dalton one of the reasons why new manufacturing is targeting Dalton, going there? Like, is it infrastructure?
Julian Spector
It's definitely a part of it, because in Georgia, a lot of the clean energy factories are greenfield developments. Trying to find that SK battery factory was very disconcerting because you basically hop off the freeway and are driving through fields, and suddenly there's a big clearing.
David Roberts
Is it on Google Maps yet?
Julian Spector
It is, yeah. The SK one is this giant fortress-looking building just plopped in a rural field off a freeway somewhere, so it really doesn't feel connected to a broader landscape. But Dalton has all these factories, and so they have this workforce that's used to manufacturing things, and then they have a pretty organized local economic development team who got really scared about how concentrated their local economy was in carpets, because when the recession hit and home building really took a nosedive, no one needs new carpets and new floorings. They were actually one of the unemployment capitals of the country.
In the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession, something like a quarter of all the jobs in Dalton disappeared within a couple of years of the '08 crash. And so, downtown became a ghost town.
David Roberts
Very familiar.
Julian Spector
They lost more jobs than any other metropolitan area in 2012 or something. So, the town planners and leaders got together and said, "Okay, we can't just be the carpet capital. That's dangerous, we're seeing." So, they started planning an industrial park, basically clearing the land and making sure it had all the water and electricity that a future factory would need. Then, they started looking around for who could come and be our new industry. That took a few years, but basically by 2018, Trump was in office and started these new tariffs on Chinese solar panels.
Once those went into effect, QCells basically made the call, like, "We want to build in America as soon as possible." They showed up in Dalton and saw the site, and were like, "Yeah, that looks great," and basically started building. It was less than a year from the kind of, "Okay, let's do this," to actually producing panels there.
David Roberts
Is there anything interesting to say about QCells? I mean, are they just a big solar panel manufacturer?
Julian Spector
It's owned by Hanwha, which is a South Korean big conglomerate. They're popular. They perform very well in the US market for the rooftop panels. They pride themselves on being more of a high-quality product and high efficiency and that kind of thing. They're not trying to be a race to the bottom, the cheapest thing there is. This is perhaps an irony that they're now one of the faces of American solar manufacturing, and it is a foreign company. Some people think, "Hey, why are we getting all excited about some other foreign company coming in?" But they're doing the work.
They're investing in Georgia, and they're hiring all these Georgian workers. It is American-made solar, whether or not the corporate headquarters or the owners are based here.
David Roberts
The initial sighting then was in response to the tariffs. The tariffs did have some brute force effect.
Julian Spector
There were a couple of factories that got built because of those tariffs, but it wasn't a full-fledged industrial policy, so it was enough to push — I think the other one was Jinko in Florida. So, you got a couple of these ones announced, but it wasn't a nationwide groundswell of manufacturing coming back. So, that's what happened when the IRA passed. And it just sort of — there's like a kind of fascinating "right time, right place" situation here where QCells could have gone sort of anywhere in the US. They happened to pick Georgia. Fast forward to 2020, Georgia picks two Democratic senators and breaks for Biden.
So suddenly, the Georgia senators are the people who, like, are making the difference and giving the Democrats the majority. Suddenly, they have all this kind of political capital, and they want to do something that'll really help Georgia's economy and kind of play to Georgia's strengths as a great place that businesses love to work. They have deep water ports, shipping, logistics, rail lines, and technical universities, all that stuff. So, it's actually Senator Ossoff, Jon Ossoff, and Senator Warnock who were the ones who started crafting the manufacturing credits specifically.
David Roberts
I forgot they wrote that bit of it.
Julian Spector
Yeah.
David Roberts
It's all kind of a little closed circle here, isn't it?
Julian Spector
"It is, yeah. So, you know, QCells was very, very involved in advocating for this stuff, and I don't know if they'd set up shop in, like, Wisconsin or, I don't know, New York or somewhere else — like, it might not have had that ability to enact these changes."
David Roberts
Yeah, history might have gone in a different direction.
Julian Spector
Yeah. So, yeah, so it did start with the Trump tariffs. Then once the IRA passed and they had these credits locked in for ten years, they drastically expanded the size of the facility. So when I went there last year, there was the factory, and then next door across the park, there was a huge construction site. And then I'm back this year, and that's now a full operating new factory next door to the old factory. And it's like the automated manufacturing is sufficiently advanced in that year or maybe a couple years between the first one being built, they're now, like, 1.5 times as efficient per manufacturing line.
So, there's more robots, more high-tech stuff is spitting out more panels faster. And then, they also announced a whole new facility down the road in Cartersville that's going to be slicing the silicon wafers and making cells and then also making more panels.
David Roberts
Oh, so the QCells facility in Dalton is still taking cells from someone else and assembling panels.
Julian Spector
Yes.
David Roberts
But they're going to start making cells in Cartersville.
Julian Spector
Yeah, and so that's crucial for the kind of full-fledged onshoring of the whole supply chain.
David Roberts
Yeah. Because, I mean, this is one of the sort of tricky things about all this is that if you have, like, even if you claw back, like, 50% of most stages, but China still owns 99% of one particular stage, they might as well have control over the whole thing, right?
Julian Spector
Exactly.
David Roberts
You really do have to have at least a little bit of every part of this, or else you don't really have the independence here.
Julian Spector
Right. So, it's like if there's a bottleneck on the silicon or graphite in batteries. Totally. So that's kind of the backstory. And then, basically, they're now employing 2000 people in Dalton, drastically exceeding all the promises that they made to the local economic development team; because there's also a long history of factories taking all these tax credits and promising to change everyone's lives and then not. But, yeah, no, I was talking with the local economic development team there, and they said, "QCells originally said, 'Hey, we promised to invest $130 million and hire 525 people in our first five years,' but they actually checked off those boxes in three months, and now there's four times as many people employed there as they initially envisioned."
David Roberts
So presumably, I mean, one might think that everyone would be happy about this. So, I'm so fascinated to find out, when you talked to people in Dalton, how are they processing this? It can't be that they all know it's happening, right? I mean, it's sufficiently of a sufficient scale that it's certainly like the whole town knows what's going on, right?
Julian Spector
Definitely, yeah. And it's kind of like the new kid on the block as far as large industrial employers. And so, yeah. So for this trip, I wanted to spend some quality time in town because on the previous tour, it's like, we sort of sped in. I actually did visit the factory, but it was like driving up from Atlanta and, like, running through the factory tour and then got to get back on the freeway, get out, you know? So you really couldn't get a feel for the location, just kind of zooming in and out like that. So, I spent a week there.
David Roberts
Did you go to diners, Julian? Did you visit the diners?
Julian Spector
I did go to diners.
David Roberts
Yes!
Julian Spector
Yeah. The diner has — you could get, like, an egg and grits and biscuit, like, breakfast for, like, $3.65.
David Roberts
Man, it takes me back.
Julian Spector
Yeah, it was right across from the little new boutique hotel that just opened up in downtown. And it's actually the same owner who developed the hotel and has been running this diner with his wife, and then has a brewery down the block. So, this — and it's like a local state legislator.
David Roberts
Getting a microbrewery.
Julian Spector
Oh, they've got a few. They've got a few microbreweries.
David Roberts
You know you're coming up.
Julian Spector
Yeah. Oh, no, it's a — I had a great time. Like, it was, you know, staying right in town and kind of walking around, you got several different cafes with some very luscious baked goods in the morning. There's an excellent cocktail bar that's in this kind of cool, I think, art deco building.
David Roberts
Well, I'm so curious what people think and say.
Julian Spector
Yes, besides the travelogue.
David Roberts
On the one hand, from a sort of town's perspective, a town's economic perspective, this is all to the good. But, you can imagine all kinds of things that might rub people the wrong way. So, what did you hear?
Julian Spector
Yeah, so I spent the week kind of just asking around everyone I met, like, "Oh, you hear about QCells, you know what that is?" And yeah, people know what it is. There are a few main reactions. So one was just like, "Oh yeah, they got those higher starting wages." If you're walking in with no background in manufacturing, no skills that you could point to, the starting wages are in the like $17.50 to $22 an hour range depending on the role and —
David Roberts
Right, which is minimum wage in Seattle, but in Dalton, Georgia, I imagine it's on the high end.
Julian Spector
I looked it up. The minimum wage in Georgia is like $5 and change, and it's actually so low that, yeah, $5.15 an hour. So, there's a federal minimum of $7.25 that overrules states that are lower.
David Roberts
Hilarious.
Julian Spector
So, yeah, we're talking about if you spread that out to a year of work, you know, in the like $30,000 a year range, higher kind of mid, mid $30,000 or $40,000 or, you know, so it's not like a huge amount of money, but compared to where the minimum wage is at and kind of, you know, if you're in a place where the diner breakfast is three and a half bucks.
David Roberts
Are you in a position to compare those with the carpet jobs, like the other kinds of manufacturing jobs?
Julian Spector
Yeah, well, that was what the local economic development leader told me: They pushed up the wages at all the carpet factories.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting.
Julian Spector
Because the starting wages were sufficiently higher, they were just attracting all the workers who would have gone to the carpets lacking a solar factory there. And so, the carpet factories had to start pushing up their wages to keep pace with that. And he was kind of like, "Yeah, so I think maybe the carpet factories didn't love that, but we were pretty happy." You know, share the wealth. Everyone's making a bit more money in town and then spending more money in town.
David Roberts
Exactly. It's not just the manufacturing businesses. Right. It's like everybody's got more money. And so, every other business gets a little bit.
Julian Spector
And those are just the starting wages. But they made a big point of, you know, they like to encourage on-the-job learning, and there's all sorts of technical skills because you're dealing with these robots and automated things. So there's a lot of ways to grow your earnings and your role at QCells. Whereas, it sounds like the carpet, there's just sort of, it's harder to advance up the ranks in a carpet factory. There's just sort of jobs that just have to be done and they don't necessarily give you new marketable skills. And it's also just the physical work is very different because actually, both my tour guides at the QCells factory had worked in carpets before, and they were talking about these —
You might be on a machine where it's just like cooking the carpet to lock in the different components you're gluing together. And it feels like you're in 100-degree heat while you're up there tinkering with the machine, and you can't get away from that. And the thing that everyone in town seemed to know about QCells, besides the wages, was actually, "Oh, they got all those air conditioners on the roof. That's that one with all the air conditioners on the roof." And I was like, "I mean, yeah, I guess so." I hadn't focused on that. 'Cause that's just sort of the building has air conditioning, but it turned out it's 'cause it's a very comfortable, cool room to be in, if you're at QCells.
David Roberts
And it's mostly robots. I'm guessing it's like mostly what you're doing is managing robots. I mean, is that roughly accurate?
Julian Spector
Yeah, and so that's the other part of the sort of physical comfort of it is — all the heavy lifting and the really physical work has been shifted onto the robots. So, the human role is — I don't normally use the word human to describe just workers, but in this case, it's to distinguish the robot workers and the human workers. The human jobs are really tending to the robots. And if they get confused or there's some sort of error, an alert goes off and they go and troubleshoot. And I thought that might be sort of, I don't know, maybe you feel like you're having your value sort of replaced by these machines and stuff.
But actually they were like, "Oh, it's really nice to not have to strain my back or my knees."
David Roberts
What? They're not besotted by the nobility of manual labor. The people actually doing the manual labor are not into the nobility of manual labor.
Julian Spector
Yeah, no, they seem pretty enthusiastic about the robots, you know, and they're still employing a lot of people because there's 2,000 people there. So, they seem to have found a way to use a lot of robots in a way that still supports a large human workforce. Sounds so strange to say.
David Roberts
Get used to it, buddy.
Julian Spector
But they're more productive, they're more — so it's like the extra productivity supports hiring more people, and then they're doing higher-value work, too, so it gets paid more and stuff.
David Roberts
Because I'm thinking about all the different ways, theoretically, that a foreign manufacturer coming into a town could step on toes. It sounds like QCells has more or less avoided that; people are more or less happy. They're more or less good jobs. They're more or less good job conditions. You know, like, is everybody more or less on board? Did you hear any sour notes?
Julian Spector
I think an important part is they did invest in the local workforce. So, one of the main people I talked to for the story is Lisa Nash, who's the general manager. She's born and raised in northwest Georgia, grew up in Cartersville, down the road, and she talked about growing up there. Her family was in manufacturing, but they kept warning her, like, "Don't do it. Don't, whatever you do, get out of here. Go to college, don't get stuck in manufacturing."
David Roberts
It's like my parents in higher education.
Julian Spector
Oh, they were like, "Don't do this. Don't do this." Okay. Yeah. So, and I actually heard that sentiment, like, from basically everyone I talked to, who kind of, like, later on in their middle age and above, folks in the area seem to really have grown up with this sense of, like, it's not the, like, nostalgic, glorified vision of American manufacturing. It's like, it's sweaty, it's kind of low wage. It doesn't really go anywhere. "It's the only option we got up here." And there used to be more factories, but the region was going through that classic decline of offshoring, and then the jobs that were left were the ones that were cheap enough that they could kind of, it wasn't worth shutting it down and moving to some other country.
So, there's this whole community there who grew up sort of feeling a bit of shame around the manufacturing and that it wasn't the pathway to a fully fulfilling life and everything. And the folks at QCells are really trying to reset that and say, "Okay. This isn't your parents' and grandparents' manufacturing. It's clean. It smells fine. It's air-conditioned. There are robots."
David Roberts
Good wages.
Julian Spector
Yeah, and a big part is kids can stay. Kids can graduate high school and be like, "Okay, I don't have to leave, necessarily. I could just go down the road and start working there."
David Roberts
Totally. Yeah. This is why I'd love for you to go back in, like, five years or whatever, because a lot of these effects are going to play out over longer timescales. And this is the notorious thing that people in these towns hate more than anything else: it's just all their young people leave. Right. Because all the young people leave to go find opportunities. And so the idea that you could build a decent middle-class life in place, it's really a huge thing, but it's, like, hard to, you know, it's hard to get your head around it when it's so early in the game.
Julian Spector
Yeah, and I chose Dalton specifically because it's further along in the game because it got that head start back in the Trump years. So, that is one of the tricky things to pin down with the IRA today is, like, many of the really transformative projects haven't broken ground yet. And this is frustrating for me, trying to plan a reporting trip where I'm calling up these factories, and they're like, "Oh, we don't exist yet. We haven't started digging anything." And I'm like, "Well, how can I go and do the on-the-ground reporting then?"
David Roberts
I know there are so many reporters who want so badly to report the story out, but the story itself is very big, slow-moving, and kind of glacial. It's hard to grab a piece of it.
Julian Spector
Yeah, exactly. So, it's like Dalton is special because it's like they fast-forwarded a few years, and they're starting to actually see the benefits of an entrenched — once the factory is a fully up and running part of the community. Cause, yeah, they've had it for, I guess, five years now, and you start feeling the difference from that.
David Roberts
What about, and I'm thinking about this, the Georgia manufacturing thing generally? These are good jobs. They pay well, and the conditions are good. What about unionization? Is there any such thing in Georgia? Did you speak the word in Dalton? Did you hear the word?
Julian Spector
I did speak the word, but there was not much to go off of there in terms of... Yeah, definitely. This is sort of part and parcel with Georgia being considered a great landscape to do business in. Yeah, not a strong union state. This is why I'm excited to go to Michigan very soon. Those are kind of like the yin and the yang of this EV build out as you got Michigan with the home of UAW and all the strong labor history there. And then Georgia is where all the, not all the other, but the center of gravity for EV manufacturing outside of Michigan is very much Georgia where they're very much going there because they don't have to deal with that.
David Roberts
Well, what about the IRA tax credits? There's an extra level that you get if you have work plans and use union labor and all this. There's a whole set of incentives in the IRA that's meant to nudge employers toward unionized jobs. I'm guessing that these are just not big enough to overcome the other considerations about cheap labor and cheap everything else.
Julian Spector
Yeah, I need to, you know, do the disclaimer of not being a tax attorney, but I think those benefits show up on the project development side. So, it's like if you're building a solar farm in the desert or wherever, you get the adder for —
David Roberts
Oh, you don't, you don't have those on the manufacturing, on the manufacturing credits?
Julian Spector
I don't think they apply on the manufacturing side because we know QCells is getting them. So, yeah, no, I think it's specifically that's the investment tax credit for when you're installing this stuff. And it's to get the full 30%, I think you have to hit the labor requirements and apprenticeship. No, there's definitely some arguments to be had there about investment going to Georgia in some ways and end run around employers having to deal with organized union workforces. I think that's certainly a part of it. That said, they did raise, they came in and they're employing 2000 people and paying them more than what the other employers were. And so it seems like it's clearly adding some good things in its own way.
David Roberts
So, did you hear, or have you in Dalton or anywhere else, heard — because again, on the project side, you get a lot of NIMBYism for various reasons. Is there anything like that on the manufacturing side? Like, is anybody out there complaining like, "This factory is going to cast shade on my favorite street!" Or, what about the tree canopy? This kind of thing. Have you heard any NIMBYism at all on the manufacturing side?
Julian Spector
Not for this particular factory. And again, it's in an industrial park that the, I think, county-level economic development group specifically said, "We want manufacturers here." So, yeah, I don't think the NIMBYism was a factor in this area. I was following elsewhere in Georgia, I think it was Rivian, was trying to build a really big electric pickup truck and an SUV factory in a different kind of rural part of Georgia. And then that ended up becoming kind of an internal political battle where Governor Kemp, who's a Republican, really likes bringing these factories in, and it secured some tax credits and some things for that. And there's, like, a state court that was trying to invalidate the incentive package because there's a group of folks who don't want the EVs being made in their neighborhood and stuff. So, yeah, I think that it does come up sometimes, but just didn't seem to be an issue in Dalton.
David Roberts
You know, what everybody's wondering about, and what I'm wondering about, is the politics of all this, the politics on the ground, and the political implications of it all. And so, one thing you might wonder about is, is anyone receiving this news differently because it's a bunch of woke stuff they're building? Do you know what I mean? Like, is anyone, like, are they objecting to an EV factory because it's EVs and not like, real American gas cars? Like, is there any of that sort of anti-renewables, anti-woke energy stuff? Or is it just like, when there's money on the table, all that goes away?
Julian Spector
I think, at some level, that's the conflict that's brewing for Georgia specifically this election cycle.
David Roberts
I mean, it's really like everything Georgia really is, like you say, all the forces are intersecting.
Julian Spector
It's really fascinating.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's super fascinating.
Julian Spector
They're both a pivotal swing state.
David Roberts
Yes, recently moved into the toss-up category.
Julian Spector
Yeah, no, it just got, and that was a factor. I was reporting this earlier this summer, and the whole idea was to go to swing states where there's a ton of clean energy investment that could be a factor, and then it wasn't a swing state anymore. Biden was trailing by like six points in the polling in late June. So that was kind of a scramble because, like, "Uh-oh, is this whole reporting project kind of beside the point because, like, clearly it's not making a difference?" And then the whole shakeup with Vice President Kamala Harris coming in, all the top pollsters now have put Georgia back in the toss-up category.
David Roberts
You know, it's amusing, I think, to people who follow politics — or I don't even know if amusing is the word — but that, like, literally billions of dollars of investment can more or less kind of just, like, sneak in in the background, but, like, change the vibes and all of a sudden the polls are just flipping. Reality doesn't matter at all.
Julian Spector
It kind of seems that way.
David Roberts
It's insane. It drives me insane. But I guess what everybody wants to know is, like, is this affecting the politics of the state? Like, are the people in Georgia who are benefiting in some way, firsthand basis or secondhand basis, from this new investment, associating the new investment with Democrats and giving them credit for it? That's what everybody wants to know. I don't know if you can figure that out through one reporting trip, but, like, what's your sense of that?
Julian Spector
Yeah, that's sort of the crucial question. So, I've been trying to find a good, evidence-based way to approach this. I'll say, certainly, the Democrats know they need to get more people familiar with the IRA and what it contains, which is a hugely complicated, massive, massive piece of legislation.
David Roberts
Terribly named.
Julian Spector
Terribly named. So, yeah, they know that they need to get the word out more. And basically, I talked to Representative Nikema Williams, who's the head of the Georgia Democrats, and I talked to Senator Ossoff. Their strategy is it's an economic issue. Don't be hung up on, "We're doing climate change policy." Just say, "We're saving you — we're saving you money, we're creating jobs. We're doing all this." And so they say that's how they're approaching it. And that, like you said, that's the obvious thing. People are worried about the economy and inflation. So, like, make it a —
David Roberts
This is what I wanted to ask. Like, Georgia Democrats, as you describe in your piece, on the one hand, you have billions of dollars flooding into the state in new investment, new factories, new economic activity, etc. And you have Governor Kemp, who is a Republican, sort of cutting ribbons and sending out press releases and kind of like, "Look at all the new investment in our state." On the other hand, the Republican candidate wants to axe all of it, wants to kill all of it. Now Kemp is stuck. He's just stuck in this untenable position, which, I hate to give him credit, but to give him some credit, he's tap dancing his way through it fairly well, but he's got to kiss Trump's ass and he's got to tout these things and awkwardly dance around the fact that Trump wants to end it all.
Now, in my mind, that looks like a giant political vulnerability, a big old target. Why aren't Georgia Democrats using this as a wedge issue? It could not be clearer. Like, we've got billions coming in. One party wants to send more, one party wants to cut off the flow. To me, that sounds like an incredibly potent way of dividing your opponents. Do they see it that way?
Julian Spector
Yeah. So, there's definitely a clear division there. And I think the added irony is, like a lot of Trump's at least messaging now, is also about bringing back manufacturing jobs. His speech at the RNC was like, "We're going to make things in America. We're going to lift up our workers in our middle class by forcing companies to build things here if they want to sell it here." And these Biden policies are actually having that exact effect in a lot of districts that are predominantly Trump voters. So, it's a very bizarre situation where you have these counties that are directly benefiting, they historically picked Trump by a huge margin.
But this time, if they do that again and then Trump does what he has said he wants to do, and the Republicans in Congress have said they want to repeal the IRA, then they'd be in the position of cutting off the flow of billions of dollars to their districts to create tens of thousands of jobs.
David Roberts
Seems like political gold to me. Like, he couldn't set up a better wedge issue.
Julian Spector
Yeah, and then Kemp is stuck in this awkward place between it because he clearly likes these factories and he's been very effective and assertive at making them happen. But he's still a Republican and he's still on Trump's side. And then it gets even more awkward because Trump still has this grudge against Kemp for basically not illegally overturning the vote of his state. So, Trump just used his rally in Atlanta on August 3, he spent a lot of it trashing Kemp personally, called him "a bad guy, a disloyal guy, and a very average governor," which is — he's very popular.
People think he does a good job. And then Kemp responded to that on X or Twitter, saying, basically Trump is also attacking his family. He's like, "Leave my family out of it. I want to help you save our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats."
David Roberts
And then he went and looked at himself in the mirror, you know, and somehow reconciled all that and slept at night. I don't know how they do it.
Julian Spector
And I should say, I have reached out. I'd love to talk to him about this situation because it's —
David Roberts
Well, I can imagine that he extremely does not want to talk about it. I imagine he's not going to give you that interview.
Julian Spector
It's a very — cause, basically, Georgia pulled off this massive bipartisan success story here. If a lot of Americans are tired of partisanship and want people to just work together to solve the basic needs of their community, you have, like, Democratic senators, Republican governor coming together. They get the policy from Washington. Kemp, you know, uses the tools of the state to offer job training and help put these packages together to entice the factories. And it's like, literally working.
David Roberts
That's how it's all supposed to work.
Julian Spector
Almost $24 billion of investment for Georgia, for these clean energy factories. So, is this going to make a difference in the election? It's been very hard to say. So, it's clearly like, I've talked to advocates on the Democratic side and, like, climate advocates who say, "Yeah, we're, you know, we're leaning on this. We're talking about how the jobs came from the IRA."
David Roberts
Swing voters in particular. This is gold. Like, you don't have to talk about climate. You don't have to talk about, you know, woke anything. This is literally jobs and investment. Like, you could not have a better issue to target.
Julian Spector
Yeah, it's kind of a classic Republican talking point. You know, like, let the market keep doing what it's doing, and they bring in these jobs, make us competitive. So, yeah, but I guess the thing is, all of these arguments were available in May and June, and, you know, it really wasn't working when Joe Biden was the candidate. And I'm having a hard time. It's like, it seems clear that it's not a silver bullet because it wasn't saving him then. It does seem like with Kamala Harris as the messenger, people are just kind of open to hearing things in a way that they want.
David Roberts
That's a wild thing. It's not just that they're liking her. It's that they're all of a sudden being convinced by arguments that have been the same for months now. It's like they can hear them now in a way they couldn't hear them before, which is really odd.
Julian Spector
Yeah. So, I think that could be a factor now is that maybe if she's saying, "Hey, we're having this great resurgence in manufacturing, and vote for us if you want it to keep going," people are like, "Hey, that actually sounds really good." Maybe that's happening more now. Something else that's kind of a useful comparison is Georgia was decided in 2020 by a little over 11,000 votes.
David Roberts
God.
Julian Spector
And there's now, you know, by the Climate Power count, like, 32,000 new jobs created in clean energy manufacturing in Georgia. So in theory, if you could get, like, half of, just half of the people working in a solar factory or battery factory to, like, vote to keep that policy going.
David Roberts
Like, literally, this factory employs enough people to swing the effing election. That's how insanely close these things are in the most important places.
Julian Spector
And, like, there's no reason to assume that most of the people working in those factories do want to vote for Democrats because, again, they're in some very conservative districts.
David Roberts
And this is another unanswerable question, but I just love your feelings on it, which is, do you feel like the administration or Democrats writ large are doing enough to tell this story? Like, do people know that this factory is a very direct result of things that Democrats did? Like, Democrats ought to be out saying that in every available venue. Like, are they? Do people know?
Julian Spector
Yeah, from what I've seen, there's definitely a lot more they could be doing on that. You go back to, like, the New Deal era, where you had a whole section of the New Deal package was like, paying artists to go and do murals about New Deal programs and make plays.
David Roberts
Or just a sign outside of Dalton, like, "You're welcome, dudes. Like, you're welcome. This is all Democrats brought you. All this." Obviously worded differently.
Julian Spector
So, I can make an argument counter to that, which is that I think probably an important part of these factories being accepted into these parts of Georgia was that they weren't playing up that partisan thing. So, I think it's a two-edged sword in the sense that Dalton was probably a lot more accepting of QCells than they would have been if QCells came in, guns swinging, like, "Hey, we got this Biden policy that we're carrying out, and we're fighting climate change. We're gonna save the polar bears."
David Roberts
Well, you don't want QCells saying it, but it wouldn't kill Democrats to come in afterward and say, "Hey, look what we did."
Julian Spector
So, that's a good point, right? And QCells has remained — and they don't want to talk about politics, which is very understandable. They have had, actually, Vice President Harris visit the factory, and they've also had Marjorie Taylor Greene visit, who is their congressperson. I don't know if we said that, she represents Dalton.
David Roberts
Oh, that's hilarious. That's a twist.
Julian Spector
Yeah, but when I tried to ask, "Huh, so what's that like when your representative of Congress voted against the policy that sort of allowed you to expand," they're like, "We don't get into politics." Yeah, and, you know, so I think they have very good reasons to stay out of the fray. Because you don't want to alienate your workforce and you don't want to alienate your governor, and you don't want to — like, there's a lot they could lose by being more vocal about, "Hey, if you want to ensure the longevity of this workplace, like, these policies are a lot better than those policies."
David Roberts
There's something else that, like Ossoff and Warnock or whoever, state-level Dems could just come to Dalton. And I say straight up, "If you want to keep this, vote for us." It's pretty true.
Julian Spector
Yeah, and what the other kind of mind-blowing thing about is all the press releases when these factory announcements get rolled out. They do have Ossoff saying, "This is the Inflation Reduction Act working and doing exactly what it's supposed to do. We're bringing new jobs." And they have a Kemp quote saying, "This shows that Georgia is the best place to do business and it's a testament to the community and the workforce." So, it's all like "there" in public.
David Roberts
Well, as we know, the public is not necessarily, you know, doesn't necessarily pick up on these things. You kind of have to yell it in their face 5,000 times in a row for them to pick up on things.
Julian Spector
It does seem that way. And certainly, Trump is very good at taking credit for things repeatedly, you know, whether or not there's an accurate historical argument to be made that it was his thing to take credit for. But, it does seem like just repeating that enough times with confidence can go a long way with making people think you did a thing. So, yeah, I do think the Democrats could do more there.
David Roberts
Especially with this new dawn of good vibes, it seems like now's the time to ride that and make use of it.
Julian Spector
Yeah, well, it's just, it seems like a really good story to tell.
David Roberts
Yes, it's a little frustrating in that we're just here at the very front end of this absolutely fascinating story. You know what I mean? There's so little tangible yet to sort of grab onto, but so much on the way. The amount of investments that's come into these places. I think it's safe to say if the IRA is not repealed, if things go forward as they're going, there's lots more coming to these places. This is not the end of it.
Julian Spector
Oh, yeah. No, this is just the very beginning. And I talked a lot about Dalton, but it's really all over Georgia. There's a new solar recycling plant from the company Solarcycle that's going to a place called Cedartown. And that's kind of an hour's drive from Dalton, a much smaller town. And it's never had a big factory like that. So now they're going to have like 500 jobs there. Yeah. So it's like this sort of transformative thing. It's touching a lot of places already, but it's going to touch many, many more if it's allowed to continue.
And then there are all these kinds of permutations that are hard to anticipate. Like, you get the first factory that brings the second factory. Then you need suppliers and logistics companies that show up to transport the goods, and then you have housing for all the workers.
David Roberts
Right. And at a certain point, you have enough concentrated wealth in one place. You get a city. And we know what happens politically when you have a city, right? Like, cities equal blue.
Julian Spector
Yeah, I don't know if there's a threshold of how big the city needs to be to start.
David Roberts
I know. I'm so excited to find out. Well, I would like to find out. I mean, either way, honestly, whoever wins in November, it's going to be a fascinating political experiment, either when it continues going forward. Like, I'd love to just see what happens when all this has time to play out. You know, three or four more years, more factories, more wealth, more this and that. But also, like, as horrible as it will be, it would also be kind of fascinating to see how Trump, in a new Republican administration, tries to navigate taking these things away from people.
Julian Spector
Yeah, so we should probably, at least, float the possibility that we don't know for sure if they would follow through on the threat to rip it up entirely. And it's like, you can't, they've promised to take things away, such as the constitutional right to an abortion, and they did succeed in taking that away. So you can't really just assume they won't do the thing that he's promised to do. But then I'm reminded of the long-running promise to repeal Obamacare, which was kind of a key organizing tool for Republican candidates for about a decade. And then they, they had the power to do it.
They had majorities and they didn't do it. And then it kind of disappeared. And no one talks about that anymore. So, it is possible that if they had the votes to repeal it, and then they start hearing from folks on the ground in Georgia and from, I don't know if Kemp has the kind of sway with Trump, given the personal dynamic, but maybe the people in Congress.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, I think the way to put it is all normal, mortal political incentives would lead them to preserve these things. Right. Because they're doing very good things for their constituents, the constituents like it, and they can take credit for it. Like, any sane, rational assessment of the political incentives would have them preserve that.
Julian Spector
But you don't want to go out of your way to make life worse for specifically your support, as we know generally.
David Roberts
But we also know that Trump is not a rational person, is not rationally assessing political incentives, and that the whole party has kind of been taken over by a weird mob mentality thing and is acting very irrationally in lots of ways. So, how did the sort of rational political incentives weigh against the sort of larger irrational id of the party these days? I don't know.
Julian Spector
And another way of framing that might be, it's a test case for this sort of new populism. Got a lot of chatter when JD Vance was picked and there was all this coverage of, "Oh, they're populist now," and this would be a chance to show if you're actually interested in making manufacturing come back to America. Because clearly, tariffs are — the manufacturers will say they want the tariffs. They're very pro-tariffs as a kind of buffer, but it's clearly not enough because we had tariffs for many years without a thriving solar manufacturing scene, and it turns out proactive industrial policy to get the outcome you want is useful here.
David Roberts
Well, it's all fascinating. Utterly, utterly terrifying. I hope we don't have to find out how they would respond to those incentives. But anyway, this will be so fun to follow in the years to come. Maybe we'll have you back after a few more reporting trips and see how things are shaping up.
Julian Spector
I'd love to get back to Dalton and a few more of those cocktails at the little local bar, a few more of the breakfast platters.
David Roberts
You'll be able to get avocado toast by the time you go back.
Julian Spector
That's the marker, yeah, like an economic metric of some form of success, I suppose.
David Roberts
Awesome. All right, thanks so much, Julian.
Julian Spector
Yeah, no, this is great fun. Thanks for having me.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes my guests and I sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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