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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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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.