The Bluegreen Alliance today released a new report, Then and Now: US Manufacturing Under the Trump and Biden-Harris Administrations, which compares the success and failures of the last two administrations’ manufacturing agendas.

Taking a critical look at the industrial policies of the current Biden-Harris administration and the former Trump administration, we see a dramatic shift. On several points—including job creation, investment in manufacturing, investment in cleaning up industrial emissions, and domestic momentum in growing industries—we see that the Biden-Harris administration outperformed the Trump administration.

Today marks two years since President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law—a historic investment in clean energy and manufacturing. The law is working across the nation to create good-paying, union jobs in clean energy and manufacturing for the workers and communities that need them the most, while reducing the emissions driving climate change.

It has been months since 2017’s historic hurricane season laid waste to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Texas, and Florida, in some areas destroying critical infrastructure systems, plunging millions of Americans into darkness, and further aggravating an already desperate need for safe water.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awarded $160 million in grants to spur the production of environmental product declarations (EPDs). As a critical element of the Biden-Harris administration’s Federal Buy Clean Initiative and the Inflation Reduction Act, EPDs help provide transparency around the embodied emissions associated with the production of infrastructure materials such as steel, concrete, asphalt, and flat glass. 

During an event in Lansing, MI, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced the award of $500 million under the Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grant Program to fund the retooling of General Motors’s (GM) Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant.

The U.S. Department of Energy today announced the first ever award recipients of its Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grant Program. The Inflation Reduction Act-funded program is a first-of-its-kind effort to provide direct grants to recently closed or at-risk facilities and funds the retooling efforts needed to transform production lines that were building internal combustion engine vehicles and parts into production lines building electric vehicles (EVs) and parts.

Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a state budget that includes several key funding proposals impacting labor unions and the environment. A topline win secured in the budget is maintaining funding for the California Workforce Development Board’s High Road Training Partnerships program.

New analysis commissioned by National Skills Coalition (NSC) and the BlueGreen Alliance (BGA), shows that combined historic investments in clean energy, manufacturing, and infrastructure from three new federal laws—the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act—will create more than 190,000 jobs per year combined in Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, and Oregon over the next decade.

Companies and economic development agencies around the country today tuned into a webinar series from the BlueGreen Alliance (BGA), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Evergreen Action, and the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) designed to help companies create competitive applications for the final round of funding from the 48C Qualifying Advanced Energy Project Credit. 

A promising strategy to achieve these dual goals of reducing emissions while investing in U.S. clean manufacturing is the implementation of a carbon border fee. This fee would be applied to imported industrial products that have a higher carbon intensity than their domestic equivalents, effectively rewarding domestic production manufactured under stronger environmental and labor regulations.

The BlueGreen Alliance responded to a request for information to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on how to best support mid-scale commercial direct air capture (MSC DAC) demonstration facilities.