Another example of Democrats being really poor communicators on specific important issues—they could easily frame renewables as a protectionist issue and make it relevant but instead they don't know how to talk about it so they just avoid it whenever possible.
I do wonder whether democrats will shift to post-conservative messaging. "Let's preserve what we have left of our beautiful American forests" might be able to resonate. Idk.
That exact message has been tried and energy independence/stick-it-to-OPEC remains fairly common way of trying to sell it. Actual measures to onshore renewable industry were successfully demonized as corrupt, didn’t go over well.
I'm sure in some meeting somewhere someone floated that exact idea and then got promptly laughed out of the room by a bunch of people who live in a filter bubble in which protectionism is too politically close to populism to be palatable.
