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The small-town Republicans who love IRA – POLITICO

Solar panels operating in Detroit. | Paul Sancya/AP Photo

Josh Siegel reports

Not all Republicans want to repeal the climate law that turns 1 today.

In fact, my colleague Kelsey Tamborrino and I spoke to dozens of people from all corners of the country and discovered that many GOP officials in rural areas are welcoming the billions of dollars in clean energy incentives coming from President Joe Bidens signature legislation.

In Rogers County, Okla., Republican Commissioner Ron Burrows looks at the Inflation Reduction Act and sees jobs 1,000 of them to be exact. At least once the Italian giant Enel opens its $1 billion solar manufacturing plant there in 2025.

Burrows is not alone. Other political and economic leaders in Oklahoma, including Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, are glad to receive the major investments they say theyd never have attracted without the climate law.

You can imagine being in a small rural community and trying to get economic development to come its a challenge, said Rosalie Griffith, a board member of the Rural Economic Development of Inola. But unless you develop, youre going to die.

Burrows said Enels decision to locate in his tiny town east of Tulsa population 1,500 would not have happened without local buy-in.

I just dont see a company making that sort of investment without some level of comfort that its not adversarial, its not split, he said.

By contrast, his local member of Congress GOP Rep. Josh Brecheen views the Inflation Reduction Act through the prism of most national Republicans. Brecheen told me he opposes the use of taxpayer subsidization to bolster Democrats favored green industries and is seeking to repeal the law.

Kelsey and I found that same disconnect between state and local GOP officials in rural areas and their federal representatives across the country.

Theres even a similar, but less dramatic, dynamic unfolding in upstate New York. GOP Rep. Marc Molinaro voted to repeal the Inflation Reduction Acts clean energy incentives, and thats made him a top target of Democrats in the 2024 election. His district is one of 18 that voted for Biden but are held by Republicans.

Inflation Reduction Act money catalyzed Canadian company Zinc8 Energy Solutions decision to locate a planned battery factory in Molinaros purple district.

The project is expected to bring up to 500 new jobs to a Hudson Valley region still suffering from the loss of its manufacturing base in the 1990s. Thats exciting James Quigley, a Republican who drives a Tesla and is the supervisor for the town of Ulster, where Zinc8 plans to locate.

Im a businessman. Ill take the money, thats all I care about, Quigley said. I will move heaven and earth to get projects done over here.

Its Wednesday thank you for tuning in to POLITICOs Power Switch. Im your host, Arianna Skibell. Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy.

A big thanks to Josh Siegel for sharing his and Kelsey Tamborrinos reporting with us today, and to my neighbors for supplying internet as Duke Energy works to restore my and thousands of other customers power following a major outage here in Durham, N.C. I am waiting, if you will, for my power switch fix.

Send your tips, comments, questions to [emailprotected]. And folks, lets keep it classy.

Today in POLITICO Energys podcast: Alex Guilln breaks down how a group of young people in Montana won a historic lawsuit when a judge ruled that the states pro-fossil-fuel laws and policies violated the state constitution.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) speaks with other Democrats and climate activists. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

Looking ahead to 2024 Biden and his Cabinet are celebrating the first year of their massive climate law. But his partys climate hawks are already planning for whats next, writes Emma Dumain.

Climate change is an existential threat, and the IRA was a modest step forward, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Emma. Many liberal lawmakers and climate advocates say Democrats must make combating global warming the partys top priority the next time they gain unified control of Congress and the White House.

If a Republican president takes the White House, however, the law could be hindered through executive action, write Hannah Northey and Timothy Cama.

That would likely hurt U.S. efforts to be a world leader on climate change and meet international commitments, while undercutting Democrats top achievement in recent years.

Bidens climate law & the state of EVs The Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest policy boost for electric vehicle production in U.S. history, but will its promise translate into actual factories and job gains, along with support across the political spectrum?

David Ferris breaks down how many jobs could be created, whether Republicans will become EV champions and if a domestic EV supply chain is within reach.

Complicating the picture is a push in Texas and other states to create punitive barriers to the EV transition, write Mike Lee and Adam Aton.

Britain declines IRA route to investments U.K. government officials say Britain will not follow in Bidens $369 billion footsteps when it comes to spurring clean energy. Instead, they will rely on existing policy levers to counter the U.S.'s domestic manufacturing incentives, writes Stefan Boscia.

U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt promised to deliver Britains official response to the Inflation Reduction Act this coming fall. The anticipated modest approach may upset U.K. businesses calling for more interventions to compete with Bidens law, but a minister told POLITICO that the money just isnt there.

Delivered hot: Millions of app delivery drivers are feeling the strain as the nation experiences some of the hottest months in recorded history.

Damage control: A new study found that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would save half the worlds glaciers.

A showcase of some of our best subscriber content.

A sign indicates the presence of a pipeline below the ground in Daisytown, Pa., on Oct. 22, 2020. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Pennsylvania researchers have found that children who live within a mile of an oil or gas well are five to seven times more likely to develop lymphoma, a rare form of cancer.

Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui, Hawaii, on Monday after wildfires on the island left over 100 people dead.

Extreme heat in Oregon is testing the effectiveness of new worker protections enacted after a record-shattering heat wave struck the Pacific Northwest in 2021, killing at least 800 people.

Thats it for today, folks! Thanks for reading.

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The small-town Republicans who love IRA - POLITICO

August 22nd, 2023

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AI Isn’t Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are. – The Intercept

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speak on a book tour in Des Moines on March 10, 2023.

Photo: Rachel Mummey for The Washington Post via Getty Images

It reads like a headline pulled from a dystopian near future: Artificial intelligence is being used to ban books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou from schools. To comply with recently enacted state legislation that censors school libraries, Iowas Mason City Community School District used ChatGPT to scan a selection of books and flag them for descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act. Nineteen books including Morrisons Beloved, Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale, and Khaled Hosseinis The Kite Runner will be pulled from school library collections prior to the start of the school year.

This intersection of generative AI and Republican authoritarianism is indeed disturbing. It is not, however, the presage of a future ruled by censorious machines. These are the banal operations of reactionary social control and bureaucratic appeasement today. Unremarkable algorithmic systems have long been used to carry out the plans of the power structures deploying them.

AI is not banning books. Republicans are. The law with which the school district is complying, signed by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds in May, is yet another piece of astroturfed right-wing legislation aimed at eliminating gender nonconformity, anti-racism, and basic reproductive education from schools, while solidifying the power of the conservative family unit.

Bridgette Exman, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at the Mason City Community School District, noted in a statement that AI will not replace the districts standard book banning methods. We will continue to rely on our long-established process that allows parents to have books reconsidered, Exman said.

At most, the application of ChatGPT here is an example of an already common problem: the use of existing technologies to give a gloss of neutrality to political actions. Its well established that predictive policing algorithms repeat the same racist patterns of criminalization as the data on which theyre trained theyre taught to treat as potentially criminal those demographics the police have already deemed criminal.

In Iowas book ban, the algorithmic tool a large language model, or LLM followed a simplistic prompt. It didnt process for context. The situation in which a school district is looking to ban texts with descriptions of sex acts had already shaped the outcome.

As Iowa newspaper The Gazette reported, the school district compiled a long list of commonly challenged books to feed to the AI program. These are books that fundamentalist Republicans taking over school boards and leading state houses have already sought to ban. Little surprise, then, that books dealing with white supremacy, slavery, gendered oppression, and sexual autonomy were included in the algorithms selection.

Further comments from Exman reveal more about the operations of authority at play, which have little to do with powerful AI control. As she told Popular Science, Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books. At the same time, we do have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law. Our goal here really is a defensible process.

Both casually dismissive of the Republican legislation, yet willing to scramble with tech shortcuts to appear in swift compliance, Exmans approach reflects both cowardice and complicity on the part of the school district. Surely, protecting students access to, rather than protecting them from, a rich variety of books is what school systems should be doing with their time. But the myth of algorithmic neutrality makes the book selection defensible in Exmans terms, both to right-wing enforcers and critics of their pathetic law.

The use of ChatGPT in this case might prompt tech doomerism fears. Yet focusing on concerns about generative AI as a potentially all-powerful force ultimately serves Silicon Valley interests. Both concerns about AI safety and dreams of AI power fuel companies like OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, with millions of dollars going into researching AI as an allegedly existential risk to humanity. As critics like Edward Ongweso Jr. have pointed out, such narratives look, either fearfully or hopefully, to a future of AI almighty, while overlooking the way current AI tools, although regularly shoddy and inaccurate, are already hurting workers and aiding harmful state functions.

From management devaluing labor to reactionaries censoring books AI doesnt have to be intelligent, work, or even exist, wrote Patrick Blanchfield of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on Twitter. Its real function is just to mystify / automate / justify what the powerful were always doing and always going to do anyways.

To underline Blanchfields point, the ChatGPT book selection process was found to be unreliable and inconsistent when repeated by Popular Science. A repeat inquiry regarding The Kite Runner, for example, gives contradictory answers, the Popular Science reporters noted. In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseinis novel to contain little to no explicit sexual content. Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book does contain a description of a sexual assault.

Yet accuracy and reliability were not the point here, any more than protecting children is the point of Republican book bans. The myth of AI efficiency and neutrality, like the lie of protecting children, simply offers, as the assistant superintendent herself put it, a defensible process for fascist creep.

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AI Isn't Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are. - The Intercept

August 22nd, 2023

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Tracking the invisible primary: Three lanes to victory in the … – Brookings Institution

Editor's note:

In this series, we track key election metrics for presidential candidates throughout the campaign period known as the invisible primary.

The list of presidential candidates included is based on the candidates listed in AP News, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Politicos descriptions of the 2024 field.

Throughout his political career, Donald Trump has weathered scandals that would have cratered other presidential candidates. He has displayed remarkable Teflon in the face of personal scandals, business misconduct, and now his fourth criminal indictment, which, if convicted of racketeering charges, would send him to jail for at least five years.

Throughout this marathon of legal turmoil, Trump remains the undisputed leader of his party. In many polls, both at the state and national levels, he leads his opponents by 40 points or more, making him the undisputed frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Even in the face of news that would have buried any other politician, his base within the Republican Party remains strong and few of his challengers are taking him on directly. A recent New York Times/Siena poll helps explain the GOP dilemma. That survey reveals that likely primary voters are divided into three categories: those who strongly support Trump and view him very favorably, about 37% of the Republican electorate; those who are persuadable to Trump (37%); and those firmly opposed to him (25%).

Based on this segmentation of GOP voters, candidates are jockeying around the possible routes to victory within this political configuration. Given the politics, the first strategic option is to out-Trump the former president himself. This means playing to his populist base, focusing on cultural issues, and attacking Democrats for unfairly targeting Trump. The second option, typified by Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, is to stand in clear opposition to Trump. And the third lane is a murky one where candidates oppose Trump on some things but support him on others.

To examine the various candidate strategies, we studied the extent to which each Republican candidate is courting Trumps base. We researched each candidates proximity to Trumps rhetoric and policy positions and visualized the 2024 Republican field as a kind of solar system in which Trumps policy positions and rhetoric form the sun, with the other candidates orbiting at varying distances based on how closely aligned they are with Trumps platform. With Trumps voter base acting as a Republican candidates potential golden ticket to the nomination, the essence of a candidates campaign strategy lies in their decision to resist or embrace Trumps gravitational pull or to try and straddle the murky middle.

Several ideological and political features define Trumps base, differentiating it from the rest of the Republican primary electorate. The first is a persistent belief in Trumps innocence: 75% of Trump supporters believe he did nothing wrong in his handling of classified documents and 92% believe his actions following the 2020 election were within his rights. Second, the Trump base embraces America First policy positions, with 63% opposing further aid to Ukraine, 76% supporting less U.S. involvement in world affairs, and 67% opposing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Third, the former presidents voters are drawn to existential and dystopian rhetoric about the state of the country. Trumps base is more likely than non-Trump Republicans to anticipate a civil war in the next few years (30% to nine percent) and to believe the nation is on the brink of collapse (75% to 54%). Lastly, they embrace a populist view of American politics, with 84% saying elected officials should prioritize the common sense of ordinary people over the knowledge of experts (compared to 61% of non-Trump supporters, on average) and 26% (versus 6% of non-Trump Republicans) predicting a coming storm that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.

To define the sun of Trumpism, we analyzed Trumps campaign website and speech at this years Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). We distilled our findings into four categories to serve as our guide for evaluating each candidates proximity to Trump.

Personalistic support for Trump: How the candidate talks about Trump and the Trump presidency, and their response to the classified documents indictment in June.

Support for key Trump policies: We identified three areas where Trumps positions represent either a departure from traditional conservative positions or exaggerated versions of such positions that would have been outside the mainstream in a pre-Trump Republican Party.1

Embracing Trump-style rhetoric and tone: The degree to which the candidate replicates the language Trump uses on the campaign trail.2

Construal of the 2020 election and January 6: How the candidate talks about the results of the 2020 election and the events of January 6.

We then studied each Republican presidential candidate to see how closely they align with Trumps policy positions and rhetoric based on their campaign websites, speeches, statements, social media posts, interviews, and media coverage. If a candidate did not have a publicly stated position, we gave them a Not Applicable (N/A). We limited our search to comments made by the candidate since Trumps emergence onto the political scene in 2016. If a candidate changed their position within this timeframe, we accounted for their most recent position.

We used this data to assign each candidate a score between zero and one for each category where zero indicates a rejection of Trumps position and one indicates a complete embrace. We summed the scores across categories to calculate each candidates score out of a possible 14. Using the total scores, we determined five numeric ranges associated with the following levels of proximity: high, medium-high, medium, medium-low, and low proximity. Based on their overall score, we placed each candidate in one of these numeric ranges, then assigned them to the proximity level corresponding to that numeric range.

Based on our data analysis, we placed each candidate in the solar system corresponding to their level of proximity to Trump. Candidates in the orbit closest to Trump are the most aligned with Trumps policy positions and rhetoric, while those in the orbit furthest away are the least aligned. Note the drop-down function where you can see quotes from each candidate that illustrate where they are in relation to Trump.

High proximity candidates

Personalistic support for Trump

Support for key Trump policies