You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
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.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Investing in red states doesn’t make defying Trump any safer.
In the end, it was what the letters didn’t say.
For months — since well before the 2024 election — when asked about the future health and safety of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, advocates and industry folks would point to the 20 or so House Republicans (sometimes more, sometimes fewer) who would sign on to public statements urging their colleagues to preserve at least some of the law. Better not to pull out the rug from business investment, they argued. Especially not investment in their districts.
These letters were “reassuring to a lot of folks in clean energy and climate communities,” Chris Moyer, the founder of Echo Communications and a former staffer for longtime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told me.
“I never felt reassured,” Moyer added.
Plenty of people did, though. The home solar company Sunrun, for instance, told investors in a presentation earlier this monththat a “growing number of Republicans in Congress — including 39 overall House members and four Senators — publicly support maintaining energy tax credits through various letters over the past few months.” The company added that “we expect a range of draft proposals to be issued, possibly including draconian scenarios, but we expect any extreme proposals will be moderated as they progress.”
Instead, the draft language got progressively worse for the residential solar industry, with the version that passed the House Thursday morning knocking billions of dollars off the sector, as tax credits were further squeezed to help make room for other priorities that truly posed an existential threat to the bill’s passage.
What Sunrun and others appear to have failed to notice — or at least publicly acknowledge — is that while these representatives wanted to see tax credits preserved, they never specified what they would do if their wishes were disregarded. Unlike the handful of Republicans who threatened to tank the bill over expanding the deduction for state and local taxes (each of whom signed one of the tax credit letters, at some point), or the Freedom Caucus, who tend to vote no on any major fiscal bill that doesn’t contain sizable spending cuts (so, until now, every budget bill), the tax credit Republicans never threatened to kill the bill entirely.
Ultimately, the only Republicans to outright oppose the bill did so because it didn’t cut the deficit enough. All of the House Republicans who signed letters or statements in support of clean energy tax credits voted yes on the legislation, with a single exception: New York’s Andrew Garbarino, who reportedly slept through the roll call. (He later said he would have voted for it had he been awake.)
“The coalition of interests effectively persuaded Republican members that tax credits were driving investment in their districts and states,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me in a text message. “Where advocates fell short was in convincing them that preserving energy tax credits — especially for mature technologies Republicans often view skeptically — should take precedence over preventing Medicaid cuts or addressing parochial concerns like SALT.”
The Inflation Reduction Act itself was, after all, advanced on a party-line basis, as was Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Combined, those two bills received a single Democratic no vote and no Republican yes votes.
In the end, Moyer said, Republican House members in the current Congress were under immense political pressure to support what is likely to be the sole major piece of legislation advanced this year by President Trump — one that contained a number of provisions, especially on SALT, that they agreed with.
“There are major consequences for individual house members who vote against the president’s agenda,” Moyer said. “They made a calculation. They knew they were going to take heat either way. They would rather take heat from clean energy folks and people affected by the projects.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
White House officials and outside analysts frequently touted job creation linked to IRA investments in Republican House districts and states as a tangible benefit of the law that would make it politically impossible to overturn, even as Congress and the White House turned over.
“President’s Biden’s policies are leading to more than 330,000 new clean energy jobs already created, more than half of which are in Republican-held districts,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told reporters last year, previewing a speech President Biden would give on climate change.
Even after Biden had been defeated, White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi told Bloomberg that “we have grown the political consensus around the Inflation Reduction Act through its execution,” citing one of the House Republican letters in support of the clean energy tax credits.
One former Biden White House climate official told me that having projects in Republican districts was thought by the IRA’s crafters to make the bill more politically sustainable — but only so much.
“A [freaking] battery factory is not going to save democracy,” the official told me, referencing more ambitious claims that the tax credits could lead to more Democratic electoral victories. (The official asked to remain anonymous in order not to jeopardize their current professional prospects.) Instead, “it was supposed to make it slightly harder for Republicans to overturn the subsidies.”
Congresspeople worried about jobs weren’t supposed to be the only things that would preserve the bill, either, the official added. Clean energy and energy-dependent sectors, they thought, should be able to effectively advocate for themselves.
To the extent that business interests were able to win a hearing with House Republicans, they were older, more traditionally conservative industries such as nuclear, manufacturing, agriculture, and oil and gas.The biofuels industry (i.e. liquid Big Agriculture) won an extension of its tax credit, 45Z. The oil and gas industry’s favored measure, the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration, was minimally fettered. Nuclear power was the one sector whose treatment notably improved between the initial draft from the House’s tax-writing committee and the version voted on Thursday. Advanced nuclear facilities can still claim tax credits if they start construction by 2029, while other clean energy projects have to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be in service by the end of 2028.
“I think these outcomes are unsurprising. In places where folks consistently engaged, things were protected,” a Republican lobbyist told me, referring to manufacturing, biofuels, and nuclear power, requesting anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. “But assuming a project in a district would guarantee a no vote on a large package was always a mistake.”
“The relative success of nuclear is a testament to the importance of having strong champions — predictable but notable show of political might,” a second Republican lobbyist told me, who was also not allowed to speak publicly about the bill.
But all hope isn’t lost yet. The Senate still has to pass something that the House will agree with. Some senators had made noises about how nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal were treated in the initial language.
“Budget reconciliation is, first and foremost, a fiscal exercise,” Venkatakrishnan told me. “Energy tax credits offer a path of least resistance for hitting lawmakers’ fiscal targets. As the Senate takes up this bill, the case must be made that the marginal $100 billion to $200 billion in cuts seriously jeopardizes grid reliability and energy innovation.” Whether that will be enough to generate meaningful opposition in the Senate, however, is the $600 billion question.
A loophole created by the House Ways and Means text disappeared in the final bill.
Early this morning, the House of Representatives launched a full-frontal assault on the residential solar business model. The new language in the budget reconciliation bill to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed Thursday included even tighter restrictions on the tech-neutral investment tax credits claimed by businesses like Sunrun when they lease solar systems to residential buyers.
While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”
This is how you kill a business model in legislative text.
“Expect shares of solar companies to take a significant step back,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning, calling the exclusion “scathing.” Investors are “losing the now false sense of security that we had 'seen the worst' of it with the initial House draft.”
Joseph Osha, an analyst for Guggenheim, agrees. “Considering the fact that ~70% of the residential solar industry is now supported by third-party (e.g. lease or PPA) financing arrangements, the new language is disastrous for the residential solar industry,” he wrote in a note to clients. “We believe the near-term implications are very negative for Sunrun, Enphase, and SolarEdge.”
Shares of Sunrun are down 37.5% in mid-day trading, wiping off almost $1 billion worth of value for its shareholders. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Shares of fellow residential solar inverter and systems Enphase are down 20%, while residential solar technology company SolarEdge’s shares are down 24.5%.
“Families will lose the freedom to control their energy costs,” Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement, in reference to the last-minute alteration to the investment tax credit.
When the House Ways and Means Committee released the initial language getting rid of 25D by the end of this year but keeping a limited version of the investment tax credit, analysts noted that Sunrun was an unexpected winner from the bill. It typically markets its solar products as leases or power purchase agreements, not outright sales of the system.
The reversal, Dumoulin-Smith wrote, “comes as a surprise especially considering how favorable the initial markup was” to the Sunrun business model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
The new bill, Dumoulin-Smith writes is “‘leveling the playing field’ by targeting all future residential solar originations, whether leased or owned.” The bill is “negative to Sunrun with intentional targeting of the sector.
Last year, Sunrun generated over $700 million from transferring investment tax credits from its solar and storage projects. The company said that it had $117 million of “incentives revenue” in 2024, which includes the tax credits, out of around $1.4 billion in total revenue.
But the tax credits play a far larger role in the business than just how they’re recognized on the company’s earnings statements. The company raises investment funds to help finance the projects, where investors get payments from customers as well as monetized tax credits. Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. Conversely, the financing “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote to clients that “this is a noteworthy change for the residential solar industry, and Sunrun in particular, which dominates the residential solar [third-party owned] market and has recognized ITC credits under 48E.”
Current conditions: A late-season nor’easter could bring minor flooding to the Boston area• It’s clear and sunny today in Erbil, Iraq, where the country’s first entirely off-grid, solar-powered village is now operating • Thursday will finally bring a break from severe storms in the U.S., which has seen 280 tornadoes more than the historical average this year.
1. House GOP passes reconciliation bill after late-night tweaks to clean energy tax credits
The House passed the sweeping “big, beautiful” tax bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote, mostly along party lines. Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no, while House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present;” two additional Republicans didn’t vote.
The bill will effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written — although the Wednesday night manager’s amendment included some tweaks to how, exactly, as well as a few concessions to moderates. Updates include:
The bill now heads to the Senate — where more negotiations will almost certainly follow — with Republicans aiming to have it on President Trump’s desk by July 4.
2. FEMA cancels 4-year strategic plan, axing focus on ‘climate resilience’
The combative new acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, rescinded the organization’s four-year strategic plan on Wednesday, per Wired. Though the document, which was set to expire at the end of 2026, does not address specific procedures for given disasters, it does lay out goals and objectives for the agency, including “lead whole of community in climate resilience” and “install equality as a foundation of emergency management.” In axing the strategic plan, Richardson told staff that the document “contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission.”
A FEMA employee who spoke with Wired stressed that while rescinding the plan does not have immediate operational impacts, it can still have “big downstream effects.” Another characterized the move by the administration as symbolic: “There are very real changes that have been made that touch on [equity and climate change] that are more important than the document itself.”
3. Energy Department redirects Puerto Rican rooftop solar investment to upkeep of fossil fuel plants
The U.S. federal government is redirecting a $365 million investment in rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico to instead maintain the island’s fossil fuel-powered grid, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday. The award, which dates to the Biden administration, was intended to provide stable power to Puerto Ricans, who have become accustomed to blackouts due to damaged and outdated infrastructure. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority declared bankruptcy in 2017, and a barrage of major hurricanes — most notably 2017’s Hurricane Maria — have destabilized the island’s grid, Reuters reports.
In Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s statement, he said the funds will go toward “dispatching baseload generation units, supporting vegetation control to protect transmission lines, and upgrading aging infrastructure.” But Javier Rúa Jovet, a public policy director for Puerto Rico’s Solar and Energy Storage Association, added to The Associated Press that “There is nothing faster and better than solar batteries.”
4. EDF, Shell, and others to collaborate on hydrogen emission tracker
The Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday that it is launching an international research initiative to track hydrogen emissions from North American and European facilities, in partnership with Shell, TotalEnergies, Air Products, and Air Liquide, as well as other academic and technology partners. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that, through chemical reactions, can affect the lifetime and abundances of planet-warming gases like methane and ozone. Despite being a “leak-prone gas,” hydrogen emissions have been poorly studied.
“As hydrogen becomes an increasingly important part of the energy system, developing a robust, data-driven understanding of its emissions is essential to supporting informed decisions and guiding future investments in the sector,” Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist and senior vice president of EDF, said in a statement. Notably, EDF took a similar approach to tracking methane over a decade ago and ultimately exposed that emissions were “a far greater threat” than official government estimates suggested.
5. The best-selling SUV in America will now be available only as a hybrid
Toyota
The bestselling SUV in America, the Toyota RAV4, will be available only as a hybrid beginning with the 2026 model, Car and Driver reports. The car will be available both as a conventional hybrid and as a plug-in that works with CCS-compatible DC fast chargers, meaning “owners can quickly fill up its battery during long road trips” to minimize their fossil fuel mileage, The Verge adds. The RAV4 will also beat the Prius for electric range, hitting up to 50 miles before its gas engine kicks in.
Toyota’s move might not come as a complete surprise given that the automaker already introduced a hybrid-only lineup for its Camry. But given the popularity of the RAV4, Car and Driver notes that “if you ever wondered whether or not hybrids have entered the mainstream yet, perhaps this could be a tipping point.”
Nathan Hurner/USFWS
The Fish Lake Valley tui chub, a small minnow threatened by farming and mining activity, could become the first species to be listed as endangered under the second Trump administration.