Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Biden-Harris Administration Investments Driving Expansion of American Energy Jobs

Thank you, Mayor Schember, for your leadership and for your partnership. As an Erie County native, an Edinboro kid, I am especially be grateful to be here – to be back home.

Today, we stand together to lift up and reflect on the progress we are making as a nation, progress propelled by the hard work of the American people – endowed with the inventiveness to imagine a better future and inspired with the willingness to roll up our sleeves and build it.  

Over the last few years, we have come together around this hopeful calling – united in this important task at this important time. We are building back not only from an awful economic crisis, but also from decades of underinvestment in our infrastructure, our communities, and our industrial strength – truly, an underinvestment in America.

So many times, each of us has driven by that idled factory or blighted plot, some place where the loss of opportunity is fenced in and the chance for a comeback seemingly fenced out. These are monuments to underinvestment and a failed economic policy that promised prosperity will just trickle down – but never delivered.

Folks – if we invest in America, there is a better way forward.

Under President Biden and Vice President Harris’s leadership, that is exactly where we are headed – bringing down the barriers to economic opportunity, lowering costs for American families, and, in just three and a half years, creating 16 million jobs with rising wages and with unemployment at its lowest level in 50 years.

We see the bet on America’s promise, our potential and possibilities, paying off as we reclaim the lead in the global race on clean energy and in the interconnected fight against the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.

In places like Weirton, West Virginia, where once a steel plant had shuttered, now electric batteries are being forged; or in Dalton, Georgia, where thousands worked in the sofa industry – now jobs are coming back to make solar; or in Madison, Maine, where a hollowed-out timber mill is now back to life making hi-tech insulation. Communities like these are mounting a clean energy comeback.

Economic revival, a path to prosperity, a way to return opportunity to places it once left – all unlocked by harnessing the urgent climate challenge in front of us and the clean energy solutions we invented – an advantage we had squandered until Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decided it was time to bring those jobs back.

In three and a half years, we have started to write a new chapter that starts with an unprecedented expansion in American energy production. Under President Biden and Vice President Harris, we have gone big, refusing to settle for small or incremental.

This year alone, America will add more capacity to the electricity grid than we have in nearly two decades – and 97 percent of that will be clean power that doesn’t put an ounce of pollution in the air we breathe.

Together, we are setting new records on solar and batteries, achieving new breakthroughs in geothermal and hydropower, and producing new fuels from waste and biomass. It’s gamechangers everywhere.

Take nuclear, for example.

Until recently, a number of nuclear plants, like those in Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, were slated to be shut down. Supply chains for fuel were moved almost entirely overseas, and we were losing the edge on next generation technologies. Under President Biden and Vice President Harris’s leadership, we’ve changed course – we’ve found a better way forward. In Beaver Valley, those plants will now stay online.

In Georgia, this year, we plugged in the first new nuclear plants in decades. In Michigan, a plant retired years ago is coming back, and, in Ohio, union workers are making the fuel we need, breaking our reliance on hostile countries like Russia. And at sites across the country, advanced nuclear is getting ready. A new American industry is standing up.

These are big moves. That Georgia plant, which took 100 million craft hours to build with skilled union workers, will supply as much power as the Hoover Dam. And in this new chapter we’re writing together, that massive scale is not unique.

Off the coast of Virginia, IBEW workers are building an offshore wind farm, that’s another Hoover Dam worth of power. In Arizona, I joined Vice President Harris, both of us with shovels in hand, to break ground on a new transmission line that is now online and delivering more than a Hoover Dam worth of power. Clean power. Cheaper power.

I provide these comparisons because some folks like to suggest that our best days are behind us, that we only did big things decades ago, that we’ve lost our ability to imagine big and bold. Well, they’re wrong. We’re doing it every day. And under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s leadership, we aren’t just imagining. We are building.

This new chapter we’re writing also marks an American manufacturing renaissance – unprecedented and historic – especially for new energy technologies. For too long, technologies were invented here and manufactured somewhere else. No more.

Over the last three and a half years, we’ve seen over 100 factories – and counting – be announced to manufacture new energy technologies in America. It’s because our tax code, thanks to the historic legislation passed by President Biden and Vice President Harris, rewards companies for products stamped Made in America.

Take batteries for example.

The Nobel prize for this technology went to a professor here. Our national labs pioneered the breakthroughs. And yet, when President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, we barely made any.

That’s changed. Today, we’ve got over 15 gigafactories operating or under construction to make these batteries here. One of those, near here in Warren, Ohio, recently celebrated a partnership with the UAW – ensuring workers are at the center of this critical new industry.

Double click on those batteries, and we’re making those components here too: the anodes, cathodes, and separators. We’re even racing forward to supply input materials, new lithium facilities and an expansion in recycling – putting old materials back into the supply chain.

All of this progress means jobs.

Today, I am excited to announce a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy showing that, last year, we added over 250,000 new American energy jobs – with clean energy jobs growing twice as fast as the rest of the sector.

Here in Pennsylvania, that’s 5 percent growth of clean energy jobs, in a robust energy sector that stretches across technologies and end uses. It includes the machinists manufacturing hydro in York. It includes the union workers building electric locomotives here in Erie. It includes nearly 73,000 Pennsylvanians working on the energy efficiency and weatherization projects – including efficient lighting construction and renewable heating and cooling manufacturing – that are helping families cut their energy bills. A win-win.

This economic upside has another dimension. This new chapter is not just about putting steel in the ground, it’s also about putting steel into the spine of the American middle class. And that’s where unions come in.

Today’s report from the U.S. Department of Energy shows how we’re making essential progress on this metric, finding that unionization rates in American clean energy grew to their highest level in history – nearly double the union density in the U.S. economy overall. This is a big deal because we know: union density and economic competitiveness fly together.

Folks, this trend isn’t an accident. It’s because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris coded a focus on rebuilding the middle class – and strengthening unions – right into the DNA of their economic agenda. If you want the full clean energy tax credits under their policies, you need to pay a prevailing wage and pull in union apprenticeships.

Their insistence on how we grow American energy – in a way that grows our middle class and strengthens unions – is showing up in wins across the country.

In Wisconsin, laborers, members of LiUNA, have seen a doubling of their apprenticeship program since the Inflation Reduction Act passed. In Texas, IBEW Local 20 now has 400 new apprentices trained up to help be part of the solar economy. Just in the last couple of weeks, Convalt reached a neutrality agreement with the United Steel Workers, who are now going to help manufacture end-to-end a supply chain for solar in the United States. And those same United Steel Workers unionized Blue Bird in Georgia, helping those iconic yellow school bus go green.

Despite all this progress, there are some who would have us go back.

House Republicans have voted in some form or fashion to repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act more than 40 times – voted to repeal the very legislation driving this unprecedented expansion of American energy, voted to repeal the very legislation that’s brought about the American manufacturing renaissance we are seeing, voted to repeal the very legislation spurring the growth in union jobs.

It just makes no sense.

Folks, in three and a half years, we have started to write a new chapter. Instead of focusing on the gloom and doom of climate change – the sky turning orange, breathing wildfire smoke into our lungs, the destruction from hurricanes and floods – we are focusing on hope, on the possibilities.

Here in Erie, you are finding new ways to deploy new energy technologies that are not only saving people money, they’re also keeping pollution out of the sky. From the Erie fire station to local businesses and schools, you are tapping into that potential and saving millions. You are part of that bigger story of what’s happening in America. An unprecedented expansion of American energy production, a manufacturing renaissance, the essential work of rebuilding our middle class.

It’s the comeback story we deserve. The one we’re writing. The one Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been fighting for. And the one we’re going to be proud to read to our kids and grandkids. That time when we bet on America’s promise, our potential and possibilities, when we invested in America, when we rolled up our sleeves and build a better way forward – a safer, fairer, better America.

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