Michigan's bad bet on the green economy

Taxpayers foot the bill for a phantom payoff

it’s not easy being green these days. Consumers are shunning EVs for gas cars. The public has largely tuned out climate alarmism. And the Trump administration is exposing the incredible waste, haste, cronyism and corruption of 11th hour energy grants shoveled out to insiders as the clock ran out on Joe Biden’s presidency.

But reports of the demise of the Green New Deal may be premature, especially in Michigan. Clean Power, an advocacy group committed to “winning the politics of climate,” put together an eye popping list of clean energy projects planned or underway in the state. These “investments” we are told, promise to transform Michigan “into a solar and electric vehicle battery manufacturing powerhouse.”

Inside Climate News summed it up:

Since 2022, new clean energy projects there have garnered $27.84 billion in investments and created 26,352 jobs. There have been more new clean energy projects launched in Michigan than any other state, according to a report from Climate Power. Nearly 40 percent of those are in Republican-held congressional districts.

In the battery and EV sectors alone, according to the Clean Power accounting, some $16 billion has been committed in Michigan.

The topline numbers are not broken out to distinguish between private capital and the various grants, tax credits and loans that cascaded out of the federal treasury under the Biden administration. But there are hints in the details, like the $500 million grant to General Motors to retool a Lansing plant for EV production.

Faulty Premises

Not to politicize this or anything, but the government-renewables complex is a purely political project. Its only substance lies in its ability to capture local, state and federal funding — taxpayer dollars — for what amounts to a science experiment. What else would you call a plan to convert the world’s economy to renewables without any clear idea of how that would be accomplished or of its consequences? Here’s an admission:

How it would work? How it would keep the lights on? To be honest, many of the policymakers and advocates supporting and promoting the Green New Deal don’t have a good idea of the details of what the actual system looks like or what the impact of a transition is.

The Green Raw Deal assaults our ears with the incessant chattering of global warming panic but it was not going to do anything about global warming except raise anxiety levels. Not with China and India merrily building new coal plants and laughing at us for the deindustrialization behind our net-zero targets. Such First World naiveté!

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has committed Michigan to net-zero by 2050. She won’t be around by then to answer for her policies, but then neither will we be saddled with net-zero. It will be long gone. But still the Michigan subsidies roll on.

But what about the state’s ambitions for becoming an “electric vehicle battery manufacturing powerhouse?” Americans were never going to replace their gas cars with electric vehicles in any significant numbers. But an entire industrial ecosystem was created to produce these vehicles and automakers and their suppliers scrambled to reap juicy federal “investments.” What now?

GM “slow rolls” its EV production:

The automaker announced Tuesday that it would spend $4 billion on mostly gasoline-powered vehicles. While GM is not retreating from EVs, the investment means the company is “giving up any hope of achieving that [2035] goal,” said Sam Abuelsamid, an auto analyst at Telemetry, a Detroit-area research firm.

As recently as last summer, GM was talking about investing $12 billion in a vast EV supply chain, stretching from the mines to the assembly plants..

Hypnotized by all those billions of greenbacks streaming out of Washington, GM and other automakers forgot to ask consumers if they were interested in expensive, short-range battery cars that might not start in a Michigan cold snap. Finally, someone in Detroit spoke the truth.

That would be Tim Kuniskis:

Politics, again

Can anything be done about this?

It will take some legislative smarts and political spine, often in short supply in Washington. Fossil fuels advocate Alex Epstein laid out how to do it in a recent briefing. It starts with “terminating all IRA subsidies during Trump's presidency and closing the IRA's worst loopholes.”

The people still pushing these energy grants are talking about how the projects, including those in Michigan, help “disadvantaged” communities and bring jobs (that again) to GOP-held districts. But this is a weak political gambit and has nothing to do with the environment.

And boy does Michigan need help. Manufacturing employment showed 12,500 factory jobs lost last year, “with nearly 5,500 job losses in transportation equipment manufacturing and over 7,000 in other manufacturing.” But hold on — government employment grew by 14,700 jobs in 2024, with consistent growth forecast. From March 2024 to March 2025, the state’s unemployment rate rose by 1.3 percentage points, reaching 5.5 percent, the largest increase of any state during that period and the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation, trailing only Nevada.

What about those 26,000 green jobs created, according to Clean Power? That’s a bare faced lie. Not now, or ever.

This is what Michigan’s carnival of subsidies has returned to taxpayers. From the Mackinac Center:

Michigan’s largest corporate subsidy program, the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve, has yet to create a single job more than three years after its creation. It promised to create nearly 9,000 jobs. These facts come from an analysis of newly released documents from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which oversees the state's handouts to businesses.

Companies have already collected $670 million in taxpayer money with nothing to show for it. SOAR was created in 2021 and sold as a game-changing tool to create jobs and spur economic growth. But to date, not one of the 8,812 promised jobs has materialized.

If the state is going to pull out of its swoon, it needs to urgently create policies that promote productive economic growth — lower taxes and sensible regulations including workplace rules —and get out of the business of picking winners and losers with taxpayer dollars.

It will also take some realism and cooperation from the UAW, which radiates like a lump of automotive kryptonite to all but the auto companies stuck here. A new $7.6 billion Hyundai plant in Georgia will by 2031 employ an estimated 8,500 workers to make EVs and batteries ($2.1 billion in tax incentives and subsidies to follow). Maybe Georgia will be the new EV and battery powerhouse?

Michigan rolled the dice on the Green Economy and it’s turned up snake eyes. Time to cut our losses and walk away.