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To change minds, first you have to understand them.
Evangelicals have a reputation as America’s biggest climate change deniers, religious obsessives who’ve let ancient prophecies for the end of the world preclude rational acceptance of environmental science. The “climate alarmist cult want[s] you to think the world is gonna end in 12 years,” longtime Fox host Sean Hannity, apparently eager to fulfill the stereotype, said last year. “My feeling is: If it really was gonna end in 12 years, to hell with it all! Let’s have one big party for the last 10 years, and then we’ll all go home and see Jesus.”
That language won’t surprise anyone familiar with long-standing polling data and political theorizing on (white) evangelicals and climate change. “In general,” as a 2022 Pew Research study summarized, “evangelical Protestants tend to be the most likely of all major U.S. religious groups to express skeptical views” of climate science. And by Pew’s count, evangelicals are both the single largest religious group in the country and markedly more homogenous as a voting bloc than the two next largest factions, “nones” and Catholics. For environmental activists looking for the single greatest public obstacle to climate policy progress, then, evangelicals are the obvious pick.
But American evangelicals aren’t uniformly skeptical of climate science, and even among those who say climate change is real but caused by “natural patterns” (36 percent) or who deny the change altogether (17 percent), a straightforward narrative of wild-eyed apocalypticism is misleading at best. Yet so too is a simple story of political partisanship, a glib assumption that evangelicalism is irrelevant if we’re already dealing with Republicans.
For many evangelical climate skeptics, particularly those who came of age in the last quarter of the 20th century, theology, politics, history, and culture are tightly interwoven on this issue, reinforcing one another in ways that may not be apparent outside the subculture. There’s no way to untangle those factors, to address politics and ignore theology or vice versa. To understand — let alone shift — evangelical thinking on climate change, you have to see the whole tapestry of influences.
Imagine a white evangelical boomer who votes Republican and is skeptical of anthropogenic climate change. He may have first heard about global warming in the 1970s, perhaps in connection to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, a dire prediction of explosive overpopulation, environmental degradation, and mass famine. (The book is newsy again because of Ehrlich’s recent appearance on 60 Minutes, but suffice it to say the forecasts didn’t exactly hold up.) Or maybe this boomer started paying attention to climate policy in the early 2000s, when lifestyle changes like recycling were going mainstream and the climate cause was championed by former Vice President Al Gore, newly loosed from his role as second-in-command to evangelical bête noire Bill Clinton.
It wasn’t inevitable, at this point, that our imagined evangelical Republican would reject the notion of human-caused climate change.
We can envision, for example, an alternate history in which free market types opposed pollution on private property grounds; gun-toting cultural conservatives followed in Teddy Roosevelt’s footsteps as rugged conservationists; and evangelicals — as many have, in fact, done — became champions of “creation care” whose end times theology told them to partner with God in restoring the world.
Of course, that’s not what happened. Our evangelical boomer likely learned about climate change from people who were already his political and social opponents: people with whom he disagreed on a host of other issues, people who protested wars he supported and maybe denounced the religion that gave his life meaning, people who might have even told him he was killing the planet by having his third kid. Evangelicals see climate activism “as another political movement out to get them, one that hates big families,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson toldThe Washington Post in 2017.
Meanwhile, evangelicals’ political allies — which, with increasing uniformity, meant Republicans — insisted climate science wasn’t a sure thing. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly,” advised an early 2000s memo by GOP strategist Frank Luntz. “Therefore you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.'”
Republicans talking to evangelical constituents wouldn’t have had a hard sell here, because evangelicals’ recent history made skepticism about climate science unusually easy to swallow. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 and subsequent political scuffles over the origins of the Earth had long since primed the movement to be leery of scientific expertise.
And then there’s the eschatology: theological beliefs about the end of the world as we know it. Our imagined boomer came of age when Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earthwas “the top-selling nonfiction book” of the decade. He’d probably read it and come away convinced that signs of the nearing apocalypse would be reported on the nightly news.
“Christian fascination with the end of the world has existed for a very long time,” as evangelical scholar Mark A. Noll explained in his landmark work, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, first published in 1994, but “recent evangelical fixation on such matters — where contemporary events are labeled with great self-confidence as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies heralding the End of Time — has been particularly intense.” In the framework of Late Great and its many imitators, any crisis could be interpreted as birth pangs of the apocalypse.
But despite the many images of environmental catastrophe in the book of Revelation, Christians’ primary apocalyptic text, the end of the world couldn’t come from manmade global warming. It would come from God (and probably the Soviet Union). The scientists were talking up the wrong apocalypse. And anyway, the story ends happily, with God “making everything new.” As theologian N.T. Wright has summarized the Christian anti-environmentalist position: “Why wallpaper the house if it’s going to be knocked down tomorrow?”
For outside observers, it might appear that evangelicals’ religious beliefs are driving their policy preferences. But the reality isn’t that tidy. The Late Great mindset was inextricably about politics and current events; its interest was as much — or more — in the leaders and headlines of the day as in the meaning of centuries-old scripture. And that kind of entanglement is a constant feature of evangelical thinking about climate.
For instance, the most comprehensive recent research into the role of evangelicals’ religious beliefs in shaping their climate politics likely comes from an October 2022 paper by political scientists Paul A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge in the Politics and Religion journal of Cambridge University Press. The authors come to two key conclusions.
First, political ideology and party affiliation are the best predictors of climate attitudes: “Democrats are more likely to agree that the [federal government should do more to fight climate change], while Tea Party and Republican identifiers are more likely to disagree.”
And second, evangelicals who accept the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change are indistinguishable from other Americans on federal climate policy. It’s only among climate skeptics that evangelicals stand out (they’re unusually opposed to federal action). This means “religious beliefs are only effective when certain secular beliefs are held,” Djupe and Burge write.
It might be tempting to thus assume that evangelical views on climate matter a lot less than Republican skepticism of science. All that stuff about God and the end times isn’t irrelevant, but it’s not the main factor.
Yet that verdict rests on a big assumption: that evangelicals’ acceptance or rejection of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change is indeed a secular belief. For many Americans, that’s a self-evidently nonreligious topic. But for lots of evangelicals, it’s not secular at all. It’s inseparable from explicit theological convictions about how God operates in history, from worries about whether “scientific materialism” leaves any room for divine purpose for humanity, and from a lingering, subconscious mindset that philosopher Charles Taylor called living in an “enchanted world,” a world in which invisible spiritual forces can have real influence over everything from intrusive thoughts to natural disasters.
Younger generations of American evangelicals are markedly more likely to be concerned about climate change and supportive of federal policy intervention. That tracks with generational, political shifts among Republicans, but it tracks with theological and cultural trends, too. Environmentally conscious lifestyle choices have long been normalized. Each generation’s mindset seems less enchanted than the last. And after 50 years of apocalypticism unfulfilled, millennial and gen-Z evangelicals are less interested in eschatology and prophecy-inflected politics. It’s “barely worth considering,” a 2009 essay on evangelical generation gaps explained, “unless, of course, we are mocking Left Behind among our peers.”
Evangelical climate politics were never just partisanship or just religion. For better and worse, it was always both. The rise of evangelical climate skepticism was a messy, multi-causal thing. Its decline among new generations of evangelicals will be too.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.