Georgia has EVs and climate bills on its mind
(Butler Solar Facility in Butler, GA by Neil Wellons on Flickr)
“It’s like they wrote this for Georgia"
So says Marilyn Brown, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech, to reporter Molly Samuel about the potential climate bill deal brokered last week and now waiting-for-a-vote as lots of commentary builds up about the merits of what's inside.
I'm sure different states may feel similarly (or totally left out) in the bill, but I wanted to highlight The Current, a non-profit news organization in coastal Georgia, in partnership with local NPR affiliate WABE, for having one of the few localized pieces of coverage I've seen about what the bill means for their area. It's not totally comprehensive, but it gets at what a giant bill might actually mean to places like coastal Georgia.
The bill has tax incentives to help people under a certain income level buy electric vehicles, an industry Georgia has worked to attract with huge incentive packages for manufacturing plants near Atlanta and Savannah.
It also includes incentives for clean energy manufacturing like solar panels and batteries, both growing industries in Georgia. And there’s money for agriculture and forestry, which are already big here.
The Current also has a more in-depth story about how trying to entice EV manufacturing to the state doesn't necessarily mean easy access for Georgians to buy such vehicles.
While demand is high and supply low nationwide, Georgia is not among the states where automakers have prioritized selling electric vehicles. Instead they're favoring California and the 13 states plus the District of Columbia, which have adopted California's "zero emission" standard: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
"That has resulted in less models being available in the Southeast," Cross said. "So it's very different when you go to a showroom in Georgia, versus going to a dealership showroom in what's known as a zero emission vehicle state, like California, or New York, or any of the other dozen."
Read the full story here.
The Current is great, but they are not a huge newsroom and they only cover one area. As an experiment, I want to see if I can find the best local environmental and climate coverage for your area.
How to start? Reply to this email with a) your closest city or general region b) what you've been hoping to find out or read about locally on climate.
In return I'll do my best to either find some high-quality journalism or resource that matches your request or give you idea of who might be best placed to do more of this coverage and how to ask them about it. I will share some of the responses in an upcoming newsletter (and don't worry, I'll ask you if I can do so first).
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