I'm not ready to jump up and down over the possibility that a California-based startup may take over a building at the assembly line-free Foxconn site in Mt. Pleasant and build electric cars there.
I've been following the Foxconn fiasco for nearly four years - a link to that complete archive is here.
Keep in mind that while Tesla and other corporations are putting more drivers in EVs every day, and the US Postal Service just contracted with Oshkosh Trucking to build a new fleet of delivery EVs that will echo Amazon's plans, too - startups on this scale face big challenges that are often too big to overcome.
Do you remember when Walker threw - and threw away - big state money at a airplane startup that was supposed to energize his failed job-creating promises and also jump start the City of Superior's economy?
I'm also not yet celebrating because we've been teased before about what Foxconn might built in Mt. Pleasant - ventilators for COVID19 patients or airport coffee dispensing machines - after the original complex which state and local governments have subsidized shrank to one-twentieth its promised size.
And which never produced large flat panel screens for electronic devices.
Which were never delivered along so-called smart, driverless trucking lanes to Milwaukee's Mitchell International Airport as part of an incomplete, publicly-funded 'scale up' linked to anticipated Foxconn activity.
It would welcome news if something other than fill dirt from bulldozed farm land and scrap from demolished homes actually came off the site.
And that some actual jobs were created which were also were good for the environment that has already sacrificed wetlands and acreage for widened roadways.
Though how ironic would it be if the project created the very type of energy-efficient vehicles which the previous Republican administration had discouraged with a $75 annual registration uncharge - a move that dovetailed with Walker's long and wider attack on renewable energy that undercut solar power development and delayed wind farms.
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| A wind turbine east of Waupun, Wisconsin - though developed by an out-of-state firm. |
Much of that history is here:
Walker's hostility to alternative energy and other benefits to the environment are catalogued by the dozens, here, and in a recently-concludes blog series, here - - despite his propagandizing 'our legacy.'