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Here’s what the American Conservation Coalition hopes to hear at the first Republican debate.
After the first Republican presidential debate wraps up in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, the candidates will be invited to an unusual reception. The official afterparty has been sponsored by the American Conservation Coalition, a young conservative advocacy group that has made a name for itself advocating for Republican Party leaders to act on climate change.
The group was founded in 2017 by Benji Backer, a student at the University of Washington who wanted to see the party return to its Rooseveltian environmental roots, and was convinced that his peers felt the same. While polls consistently show that climate change is not a priority for Republican voters — many don’t even consider it a threat — the picture changes when broken down by age, with younger generations wanting the government to do more on the issue.
The ACC has since grown into a network of about 20,000 members and helped pass a handful of bipartisan bills under both the Trump and Biden administrations, including the Great Outdoors Act, which directed billions to the National Parks Service for deferred maintenance, and the Growing Climate Solutions Act, designed to help farmers engage in carbon markets. In general, the ACC wants to see the government invest more in innovation, conservation, and domestic energy production, and mostly get out of the market’s way. Most recently, it has been pushing for Congress to streamline environmental reviews to speed up energy development, an issue often summarized as “permitting reform.”
But the ACC has faced an uphill battle. Climate change is still polarizing in Congress, and solutions are increasingly framed by conservative officials and pundits in culture war terms. Now, gearing up for the first presidential election since the group’s founding, the ACC hopes to convince Republican candidates, who have been mostly reticent about the warming planet, to start talking about it. “Fewer than half of Americans believe that Biden's climate policies are taking the country in the right direction,” the ACC’s new president, Christopher Barnard, told me, citing a recent Pew survey. “That offers an incredible opportunity for Republicans to offer a more compelling alternative, and right now, we're not really doing that.”
I spoke to Barnard just after he landed in Milwaukee on Tuesday about the "electoral ticking time bomb" Republicans face, what questions he wants candidates to speak to at the debate, and the group's hopes for sponsoring the afterparty. Our conversation has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.
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What has the American Conservation Coalition been up to in 2023 so far?
The 118th Congress marks the first time in quite a while that we've had Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives. We've looked at that as an opportunity for Republicans to take a seat at the table when it comes to pushing for policy that can help tackle climate change, strengthen energy security, and reduce emissions. And so we've done a lot of engagement on Capitol Hill on things like permitting reform, nuclear energy, the farm bill, nature-based solutions, critical minerals.
We feel like we're in a really interesting moment right now, where, from our perspective, all of the top solutions to climate and energy problems are things that conservatives can not only get behind, but can actually lead on.
When you say the top solutions are things that Republicans can lead on, are you seeing that leadership in this Congress?
Yeah. Especially on the policy side of things, we saw how much McCarthy and Congressman Graves and Chairman Westerman have been pushing for permitting reform. We obviously got a taste of that in the debt ceiling negotiation. We would like to see much more and that's something that Republicans are still pushing for, which I think is the number one thing right now we can do to tackle climate change.
There is still a little bit of a disconnect between that and their rhetoric on the issue. When it comes to nuclear or critical minerals or permitting reform, there's really a huge opportunity for Republicans to retake the climate and environmental conversation and say, Look, these are conservative, limited-government, small market-based solutions, that would actually really help climate change more than say, the Green New Deal. And they're not really putting it that way. So while I've been pleased with some of the policy progress, we want to see Republicans be bolder and more ambitious and really start saying the things that are going to win them back the youth vote that they've lost.
What kinds of questions do you hope to see the presidential candidates asked about climate change tomorrow?
If I were to ask them a question, I would ask, what do you tell a young conservative, who loves America, who is also concerned about environmental and climate issues? What is your positive vision of the future to tackle this problem?
I think there's a tendency for questions around climate change to be loaded with words that are quite partisan. For example, the term climate crisis is incredibly unpopular with Americans in general and obviously Republicans don't respond very well to that. But asking about things like how do you tackle pollution? How do you make sure that we have a thriving planet for future generations? How do you ensure clean energy, all-of-the-above energy? Those are all things that Republicans are actually very on board with.
Also, what their plan is for American strength on the international stage. Battery technologies, EVs, wind and solar, critical minerals, all these crucial components of the clean energy future are being taken over by China because they see what's going to happen. They want to be the Saudi Arabia of clean energy, and we cannot allow that to happen. So any Republican answer on foreign policy should include, what are we going to do to be the most innovative country in the world? To have secure supply chains? To work with our allies? I think those are interconnected with other issues that Americans and Republicans care about, which is national security, energy security, etc.
What other climate-related messages or policies does the ACC want to hear the candidates talk about?
ACC has a platform called the Climate Commitment with six big ideas to tackle climate change rooted in limited government, market-based, conservative ideals. Some of those that I think would make perfect sense for a Republican candidate to bring up would be the importance of unleashing all American energy. So it's not just fossil fuels, but it’s unleashing nuclear energy, unleashing wind and solar, getting the government-imposed barriers out of the way of these energy sources and allowing them all to thrive and compete in the marketplace.
I think another one is how America's rural communities, farmers, ranchers, hunters, can be part of tackling climate change and protecting the environment. Those are super conservative, red parts of the country that actually have a huge role to play, whether it's farmers implementing sustainable practices on their land that reduces emissions, or rural communities hosting clean energy sites. There's so much that rural communities can do to be part of the solution.
What does it mean for ACC to be sponsoring the afterparty for the debate? What are you hoping to get out of it?
It’s to show that Republicans take this issue seriously now. They understand that they have a huge electoral ticking time bomb if they don't talk about it. We've seen already in the last few months how some of the impacts of climate change, whether it's heat waves, or whatever else it might be— people are realizing the importance of this.
ACC hosting this shows that it's entirely possible to be both an environmentalist and a conservative. They are, in many ways, two sides of the same coin. That's really the message that we want to bring to this, and to push Republicans, especially those standing up on the stage, to come up with a compelling vision of how they're going to tackle this issue that young conservatives can get excited about.
What did you mean when you said they have an electoral ticking time bomb?
If you look at demographic numbers, by 2028, millennials and Gen Z will be a majority of potential voters. By next decade, they will be over 60% of potential voters. Polling routinely shows that climate and environment are the top three, top five issues for them.
And young people are increasingly swinging elections. We saw in the midterms that in all the key Senate races that Republicans lost, young people showed out in historic numbers and overwhelmingly voted for Democrats. If Republicans don't regain the trust of young people on this issue, they face losing an entire generation of voters that are increasingly prioritizing this.
At this after-party, if you're coming face to face with the candidates, and you're trying to convince them why they should make climate change a bigger part of their campaign, what’s your argument? When right now, the majority of the Republican Party does not see it as a priority?
We know that this is an issue that matters enormously in general elections, whether it's trying to peel off independent voters, whether it's suburban moms, whether it's young voters. In some districts, it's just a few thousand votes that can make the difference. So I would tell them you need to, at the very least, have a bit of a platform to go off if you were to get to a general. I think DeSantis is really well-positioned for this, because he can point to his strong conservation track record in Florida in his time as governor — a lot of work on clean air, clean water, healthy communities. Base voters won't be upset about that, but that also allows him a jumping off point for a general election.
There's plenty of examples around the country of red states where governors have embraced things like EVs or wind and solar because they're creating jobs in their state. Wind and solar are much more popular with Republicans than people might think. And so I think there's ways that you can talk about this issue that don't evoke a negative reaction.
Which candidates are you most looking forward to hearing from tomorrow night?
I'm interested in seeing what DeSantis has to say after his campaign faltering, and seeing if he can stage a comeback and what that might look like. And in the past, ACC has been impressed by things that Tim Scott has said and done. I'll be interested to see what his “happy warrior” approach will look like in the debate. We did a video with Nikki Haley about what the conservative alternative to the green New Deal looks like, and so I’m interested to see what she's going to bring to the table.
What does it say to you that Donald Trump has decided not to participate in the debate tomorrow?
I was honestly very disappointed by it. Because my general sense is that if you want to have the American people vote for you, you should be willing to stand on stage and make that case why they should vote for you.
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And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.
Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.
The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.
“This is something that we’re just starting to see,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow with the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s one thing for environmentalists to support wind and solar projects if the idea is that those projects will eventually replace coal power plants. But it’s another thing if those projects are purely being built to meet incremental demand from data centers.”
We’ve started to see evidence of this backlash in certain resort towns fearful of a new tech industry presence and the conflicts over transmission lines in Maryland. But it is most prominent in Virginia, ground zero for American hyperscaler data centers. As we’ve previously discussed in The Fight, rural Virginia is increasingly one of the hardest places to get approval for a solar farm in the U.S., and while there are many reasons the industry is facing issues there, a significant one is the state’s data center boom.
I spent weeks digging into the example of Mecklenburg County, where the local Board of Supervisors in May indefinitely banned new solar projects and is rejecting those that were in the middle of permitting when the decision came down. It’s also the site of a growing data center footprint. Microsoft, which already had a base of operations in the county’s town of Boydton, is in the process of building a giant data center hub with three buildings and an enormous amount of energy demand. It’s this sudden buildup of tech industry infrastructure that is by all appearances driving a backlash to renewable energy in the county, a place that already had a pre-existing high opposition risk in the Heatmap Pro database.
It’s not just data centers causing the ban in Mecklenburg, but it’s worth paying attention to how the fight over Big Tech and solar has overlapped in the county, where Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter has worked locally to fight data center growth with a grassroots citizens group, Friends of the Meherrin River, that was a key supporter of the solar moratorium, too.
In a conversation with me this week, Tim Cywinski, communications director for the state’s Sierra Club chapter, told me municipal leaders like those in Mecklenburg are starting to group together renewables and data centers because, simply put, rural communities enter into conversations with these outsider business segments with a heavy dose of skepticism. This distrust can then be compounded when errors are made, such as when one utility-scale solar farm – Geenex’s Grasshopper project – apparently polluted a nearby creek after soil erosion issues during construction, a problem project operator Dominion Energy later acknowledged and has continued to be a pain point for renewables developers in the county.
“I don’t think the planning that has been presented to rural America has been adequate enough,” the Richmond-based advocate said. “Has solar kind of messed up in a lot of areas in rural America? Yeah, and that’s given those communities an excuse to roll them in with a lot of other bad stuff.”
Cywinski – who describes himself as “not your typical environmentalist” – says the data center space has done a worse job at community engagement than renewables developers in Virginia, and that the opposition against data center projects in places like Chesapeake and Fauquier is more intense, widespread, and popular than the opposition to renewables he’s seeing play out across the Commonwealth.
But, he added, he doesn’t believe the fight against data centers is “mutually exclusive” from conflicts over solar. “I’m not going to tout the gospel of solar while I’m trying to fight a data center for these people because it’s about listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then not telling them what to say but trying to help them elevate their perspective and their concerns,” Cywinski said.
As someone who spends a lot of time speaking with communities resisting solar and trying to best understand their concerns, I agree with Cywinksi: the conflict over data centers speaks to the heart of the rural vs. renewables divide, and it offers a warning shot to anyone thinking AI will help make solar and wind more popular.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is one signature away from becoming law and drastically changing the economics of renewables development in the U.S. That doesn’t mean decarbonization is over, experts told Heatmap, but it certainly doesn’t help.
What do we do now?
That’s the question people across the climate change and clean energy communities are asking themselves now that Congress has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would slash most of the tax credits and subsidies for clean energy established under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Preliminary data from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project (led by Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins) forecasts that said bill will have a dramatic effect on the deployment of clean energy in the U.S., including reducing new solar and wind capacity additions by almost over 40 gigawatts over the next five years, and by about 300 gigawatts over the next 10. That would be enough to power 150 of Meta’s largest planned data centers by 2035.
But clean energy development will hardly grind to a halt. While much of the bill’s implementation is in question, the bill as written allows for several more years of tax credit eligibility for wind and solar projects and another year to qualify for them by starting construction. Nuclear, geothermal, and batteries can claim tax credits into the 2030s.
Shares in NextEra, which has one of the largest clean energy development businesses, have risen slightly this year and are down just 6% since the 2024 election. Shares in First Solar, the American solar manufacturer, are up substantially Thursday from a day prior and are about flat for the year, which may be a sign of investors’ belief that buyer demand for solar panels will persist — or optimism that the OBBBA’s punishing foreign entity of concern requirements will drive developers into the company’s arms.
Partisan reversals are hardly new to climate policy. The first Trump administration gleefully pulled the rug from under the Obama administration’s power plant emissions rules, and the second has been thorough so far in its assault on Biden’s attempt to replace them, along with tailpipe emissions standards and mileage standards for vehicles, and of course, the IRA.
Even so, there are ways the U.S. can reduce the volatility for businesses that are caught in the undertow. “Over the past 10 to 20 years, climate advocates have focused very heavily on D.C. as the driver of climate action and, to a lesser extent, California as a back-stop,” Hannah Safford, who was director for transportation and resilience in the Biden White House and is now associate director of climate and environment at the Federation of American Scientists, told Heatmap. “Pursuing a top down approach — some of that has worked, a lot of it hasn’t.”
In today’s environment, especially, where recognition of the need for action on climate change is so politically one-sided, it “makes sense for subnational, non-regulatory forces and market forces to drive progress,” Safford said. As an example, she pointed to the fall in emissions from the power sector since the late 2000s, despite no power plant emissions rule ever actually being in force.
“That tells you something about the capacity to deliver progress on outcomes you want,” she said.
Still, industry groups worry that after the wild swing between the 2022 IRA and the 2025 OBBA, the U.S. has done permanent damage to its reputation as a business-friendly environment. Since continued swings at the federal level may be inevitable, building back that trust and creating certainty is “about finding ballasts,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director for Advanced Energy United’s federal priorities team, told Heatmap.
The first ballast groups like AEU will be looking to shore up is state policy. “States have to step up and take a leadership role,” he said, particularly in the areas that were gutted by Trump’s tax bill — residential energy efficiency and electrification, transportation and electric vehicles, and transmission.
State support could come in the form of tax credits, but that’s not the only tool that would create more certainty for businesses — considering the budget cuts states will face as a result of Trump’s tax bill, it also might not be an option. But a lot can be accomplished through legislative action, executive action, regulatory reform, and utility ratemaking, Godfrey said. He cited new virtual power plant pilot programs in Virginia and Colorado, which will require further regulatory work to “to get that market right.”
A lot of work can be done within states, as well, to make their deployment of clean energy more efficient and faster. Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, pointed to Texas’ “connect and manage” model for connecting renewables to the grid, which allows projects to come online much more quickly than in the rest of the country. That’s because the state’s electricity market, ERCOT, does a much more limited study of what grid upgrades are needed to connect a project to the grid, and is generally more tolerant of curtailing generation (i.e. not letting power get to the grid at certain times) than other markets.
“As Texas continues to outpace other markets in generator and load interconnections, even in the absence of renewable tax credits, it seems increasingly plausible that developers and policymakers may conclude that deeper reform is needed to the non-ERCOT electricity markets,” Norris told Heatmap in an email.
At the federal level, there’s still a chance for, yes, bipartisan permitting reform, which could accelerate the buildout of all kinds of energy projects by shortening their development timelines and helping bring down costs, Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Heatmap. “Whether you care about energy and costs and affordability and reliability or you care about emissions, the next priority should be permitting reform,” he said.
And Godfrey hasn’t given up on tax credits as a viable tool at the federal level, either. “If you told me in mid-November what this bill would look like today, while I’d still be like, Ugh, that hurts, and that hurts, and that hurts, I would say I would have expected more rollbacks. I would have expected deeper cuts,” he told Heatmap. Ultimately, many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits will stick around in some form, although we’ve yet to see how hard the new foreign sourcing requirements will hit prospective projects.
While many observers ruefully predicted that the letter-writing moderate Republicans in the House and Senate would fold and support whatever their respective majorities came up with — which they did, with the sole exception of Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick — the bill also evolved over time with input from those in the GOP who are not openly hostile to the clean energy industry.
“You are already seeing people take real risk on the Republican side pushing for clean energy,” Safford said, pointing to Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who opposed the new excise tax on wind and solar added to the Senate bill, which earned her vote after it was removed.
Some damage has already been done, however. Canceled clean energy investments adds up to $23 billion so far this year, compared to just $3 billion in all of 2024, according to the decarbonization think tank RMI. And that’s before OBBBA hits Trump’s desk.
The start-and-stop nature of the Inflation Reduction Act may lead some companies, states, local government and nonprofits to become leery of engaging with a big federal government climate policy again.
“People are going to be nervous about it for sure,” Safford said. “The climate policy of the future has to be polycentric. Even if you have the political opportunity to make a big swing again, people will be pretty gun shy. You will need to pursue a polycentric approach.”
But to Godfrey, all the back and forth over the tax credits, plus the fact that Republicans stood up to defend them in the 11th hour, indicates that there is a broader bipartisan consensus emerging around using them as a tool for certain energy and domestic manufacturing goals. A future administration should think about refinements that will create more enduring policy but not set out in a totally new direction, he said.
Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, was similarly optimistic that tax credits or similar incentives could work again in the future — especially as more people gain experience with electric vehicles, batteries, and other advanced clean energy technologies in their daily lives. “The question is, how do you generate sufficient political will to implement that and defend it?” he told Heatmap. “And that depends on how big of an economic impact does it have, and what does it mean to the American people?”
Ultimately, Fishman said, the subsidy on-off switch is the risk that comes with doing major policy on a strictly partisan basis.
“There was a lot of value in these 10-year timelines [for tax credits in the IRA] in terms of business certainty, instead of one- or two- year extensions,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The downside that came with that is that it became affiliated with one party. It was seen as a partisan effort, and it took something that was bipartisan and put a partisan sheen on it.”
The fight for tax credits may also not be over yet. Before passage of the IRA, tax credits for wind and solar were often extended in a herky-jerky bipartisan fashion, where Democrats who supported clean energy in general and Republicans who supported it in their districts could team up to extend them.
“You can see a world where we have more action on clean energy tax credits to enhance, extend and expand them in a future congress,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The starting point for Republican leadership, it seemed, was completely eliminating the tax credits in this bill. That’s not what they ended up doing.”