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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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Breakthrough Energy is winding down its policy and advocacy office, depriving the Inflation Reduction Act of a powerful defender.
This is part of a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
A major chapter in climate giving has ended.
Breakthrough Energy, the climate philanthropy organization founded by Bill Gates, is closing its policy and advocacy office and has laid off much of its staff in Washington, D.C., Heatmap News has learned.
The layoffs will effectively gut an organization central to the effort to enact the package of clean energy tax cuts passed during the Biden administration. They will also silence one of the few environmental nonprofits that supported nuclear energy, direct air capture, and other new zero-carbon energy innovations.
More than three dozen employees across the United States and Europe are affected by the layoffs, including the office’s senior leadership.
The layoffs, first reported by The New York Times, come amid a wider billionaire pullback from donating to climate causes. The president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund departed last month, and the fund has yet to name a permanent replacement. Gates had already significantly diminished his climate giving earlier this year, slashing Breakthrough Energy’s grantmaking budget last month.
Gates’s investments in clean energy companies do not seem affected by the cutback. Breakthrough Energy’s venture capital and investment arm, its fellows program, and its efforts to catalyze new green products remain intact.
“Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain committed to advancing the clean energy innovations needed to address climate change,” a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson told me in a statement. “Our work is focused on accelerating the transition to a cleaner, more prosperous world.”
The closure of Breakthrough’s policy arm — and the presumed end of its grant-making operation — will alter the world of climate nonprofits. Breakthrough Energy was unusual among environmental and energy nonprofits for its enthusiastic support of all forms of zero-carbon energy, including nuclear fission, geothermal power, carbon capture and removal, and nuclear fusion. Many other prominent nonprofits — even some that have shifted to principally fighting against climate change, like the Sierra Club — are more traditional and conservation-minded, and actively oppose the expansion of nuclear power.
“The closure of Breakthrough is indicative of a broader trend that often happens when there’s a change in power in Washington, which is a retreat from federal policy and also often a retreat from the center,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way, told me. The Third Way energy team was funded in part by grants from Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough played a critical role in elevating and making clean energy innovation policy very mainstream. That’s going to continue — in part because of … the partners who they brought together, who remain committed to working on this,” Freed added.
The unwinding of Breakthrough Energy’s policy and advocacy arm means that the group will not see the coming battle over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean tax cuts, which some Republican lawmakers hope to repeal later this year as part of President Trump’s broader package of tax cuts. Gates was seen as instrumental to the lobbying effort to pass the IRA, meeting with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other lawmakers to support the 2022 legislation.
In an exclusive interview with Heatmap News in 2023, Gates warned that re-electing Donald Trump could derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s effectiveness.
“Right now, companies are responding to the IRA incentives. But you know, if you get Trump elected, and he really gets rid of it, there’s a lot of business plans that will [make people] feel foolish,” he said.
Even if Democrats ultimately enact new provisions similar to the IRA after Trump leaves office, Gates said, the damage of repealing the law would be permanent. “People [will] say, ‘Well, you’re asking me to make a 30-year investment. And half the time, I’m stupid.’”
Just over a year and one election later, Gates reportedly had a more than three-hour dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He later told Emma Tucker, The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief, that he was “frankly impressed” by the president-elect.
Tesla already looked beleaguered last week as a tumbling stock price tied to public anger at CEO Elon Musk wiped out more than a half-billion dollars in value. The slide erased all the gains the company had garnered since new Musk ally Donald Trump was reelected as president. On Monday the stock went into full freefall, losing 15% of its value in one day. By Tuesday, Trump had to pose with Tesla vehicles outside the White House to try to defend them.
With a crashing market valuation and rising rage against its figurehead, Tesla’s business is in real jeopardy, something that’s true regardless of Musk’s power in the federal government. If he can’t magically right the ship this time, this self-sabotaging MAGA turn will go down as one of the great self-owns.
Musk’s heel turn has also upended EV culture and meaning. Tesla ownership, once a signal of climate virtue for those who bought in early, has been rebranded as a badge of shame. I’m annoyed that a vehicle I chose for the purpose of not burning fossil fuels has become a political albatross, and that many drivers are resorting to self-flagellating bumper stickers in the hopes it will stop vandals from spray-painting their doors. I wish I knew then what we know now, of course. But what would have become of the EV revolution if we had?
When, exactly, we should have seen Elon’s true self is a question that will inspire countless arguments amid the wave of Tesla hate. Signs were there early. By 2018, before the Model 3 even hit the road, Musk had been hit by so much criticism of his bad tweets and weird behavior that the magazine I worked for at the time felt the need to publish a contrarian defense of him as just the kind of risk-taking innovator the world needs.
That angle aged like milk, but within it lay a few grains of truth. Tesla truly did the bulk of the work in transforming the image of the electric car from a dumpy potato that only climate advocates would ever own, like the original Nissan Leaf, into a desirable consumer product. This is the company’s signature achievement, one that kickstarted the widespread adoption of EVs.
As I’ve written before, Musk wasn’t exactly untainted by 2019, when I bought my own Model 3. The Tony Stark luster of the new space age entrepreneur had worn off as the man sullied himself with pointless “pedo guy” accusations leveled at a rescuer in the Thailand cave incident. But the man had the best electric vehicle on the market, and more importantly, the best charging network. Having just moved to Los Angeles and in need of a vehicle, I wanted an EV to be my family’s only car. Without a home charger in the apartment, I simply couldn’t have lived with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV and the inferior charging networks they relied on at the time.
Millions of people who bought Teslas between then and now made the same choice. Some did it because a Tesla became a status symbol; many others were like me, simply interested in the most practical EV they could get. The ascendance of the Model Y to the world’s best-selling car of any kind in 2023 — a fact that feels astonishing in this flood of horrible vibes and MAGA antagonism just two years later — turned countless people into EV drivers.
After Musk’s far-right reveal, sales are tanking in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and other places that just saw a Tesla boom. Many owners, at least those with the financial wherewithal to buy a new car based on the prevailing political winds, are trying to unload their Musk-affiliated vehicles.
All those people in search of a new ride have a much better selection of electric vehicles to choose from than I did in 2019, which, weirdly, is thanks to the legacy carmakers and new EV startups that raced to catch up to Tesla. If I hadn’t bought a Model 3 in 2019, I would’ve had to get a hybrid and keep burning gasoline. If you want to avoid Musk in 2025, there are great Hyundai, Chevrolet, and other EVs waiting for you.
This isn’t to say there’s no alternate history where electric vehicles take off without Tesla. It didn’t invent the EV. Other automakers were experimenting with EVs before Musk’s company took off and conquered the market, and government environmental goals pushed carmakers toward electrification. Yet it’s hard to argue we’d be where we are now, with tens of millions of EVs on the world’s roads, without the meteoric rise of Musk’s car brand.
It stinks, simply put, to say anything nice about Tesla now, even if one is stating facts. Yes, Musk’s success buoyed electrification on multiple fronts: selling tons of EVs, forcing the other automakers to get serious about their electrification goals, and building a charging network that let his vehicles go just about anywhere a gas car would go. It also made him the world’s richest man, giving him the resources to buy and ruin Twitter and then help Trump get re-elected and undo federal policy support for the very cars he helped popularize. He made the world a better place for a moment, then ruined it because he could.
As an EV advocate, I can’t ignore the fact that Tesla got us to here. But as a human, I eagerly await the time Musk’s company no longer dominates the market it created. Thank goodness, that time seems to be coming soon.
On Lee Zeldin’s announcement, coal’s decline, and Trump’s Tesla promo
Current conditions: Alaska just had its third-warmest winter on record • Spain’s four-year drought is nearing an end • Another atmospheric river is bearing down on the West Coast, triggering evacuation warnings around Los Angeles’ burn scars.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said yesterday he had terminated $20 billion in congressionally-approved climate change and clean energy grants “following a comprehensive review and consistent with multiple ongoing independent federal investigations into programmatic fraud, waste, abuse and conflicts of interest.”
The grants were issued to a handful of nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion program that was the single largest and most flexible program in the Inflation Reduction Act. Zeldin has been targeting the funds since taking office, suggesting they were awarded hastily and without proper oversight. Citibank, where the funds were being held, has frozen the accounts without offering grantees an explanation, prompting lawsuits from three of the nonprofit groups. The EPA’s latest move will no doubt escalate the legal battles. As Politicoexplained, the EPA can cancel the grant contracts if it can point to specific and “legally defined examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by the grantees,” but it hasn’t done that. House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation yesterday into the EPA’s freezing of the funds and Zeldin’s “false and misleading statements” about the GGRF program.
In other EPA news, the agency reportedly plans to eliminate its environmental justice offices, a move that “effectively ends three decades of work at the EPA to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities,” as The New York Timesexplained.
President Trump’s 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports came into effect today. As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has explained, the move could work against Trump’s plans of making America a leader in energy and artificial intelligence. “The reason has to do with a crucial piece of electrical equipment for expanding the grid,” Pontecorvo wrote. “They’re called transformers, and they’re in critically short supply.” Transformers are made using a specific type of steel called grain oriented electrical steel, or GOES. There’s only one domestic producer of GOES — Cleveland Cliffs — and at full capacity it cannot meet even half of the demand from domestic transformer manufacturers. On a consumer level, the tariffs are likely to raise costs on all kinds of things, from cars to construction materials and even canned goods.
The European Union quickly hit back with plans to impose duties on up to $28.3 billion worth of American goods. Trump had threatened to slap an extra 25% duty on Canadian steel and aluminum in retaliation for Ontario’s 25% surcharge on electricity (which was a response to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources), but held off after the surcharge was paused and the countries agreed to trade talks.
Wind and solar surpassed coal for power generation in the U.S. in 2024 for the first time, even as electricity demand rose, according to energy think tank Ember. Coal power peaked in 2007 but has since fallen to an all-time low, accounting for 15% of total U.S. electricity generation last year, while combined solar and wind generation rose to 17%.
Gas generation also grew by 3.3% last year, however, now accounting for 43% of the U.S. energy mix and resulting in an overall rise in power-sector emissions. But solar grew by 27%, remaining the nation’s fastest-growing power source and rising to 7% of the mix. Wind saw a more modest 7% rise, but still still accounted for 10% of total U.S. electricity generation.
Ember
“Despite growing emissions, the carbon intensity of electricity continued to decline,” according to the report. “The rise in power demand was much faster than the rise in power sector CO2 emissions, making each unit of electricity likely the cleanest it has ever been.” The report emphasizes that the rise of batteries “will ensure that solar can grow cheaper and faster than gas.”
A group of major companies including tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta, as well as Occidental Petroleum, have pledged to support a target of tripling global nuclear capacity by 2050 “to help achieve global goals for enhanced energy resiliency and security, and continuous firm clean energy supply.” The pledge, facilitated by the World Nuclear Association, came together on the sidelines of the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference in Houston. According to a press release, “this is the first time major businesses beyond the nuclear sector have come together to publicly back an extensive and concerted expansion of nuclear power to meet increasing global energy demand.”
In case you missed it: Toyota plans to roll out an electric truck for the masses by 2026. At least, that’s what can be gleaned from a presentation the company gave last week in Brussels. Details haven’t been released, but Patrick George at InsideEVsspeculates it could be an electric Tacoma, or something more akin to the 2023 EPU Concept truck, but we’ll see. “While Toyota officials stressed that the cars revealed in Belgium last week were for the European market specifically, we all know Europe doesn't love trucks the way Americans love trucks,” George wrote. “And if Toyota is serious about getting into the EV truck game alongside Chevy, Ford, Ram, Rivian and even Tesla, it could be a game-changer.”
President Trump and Elon Musk showed off Tesla vehicles on the White House lawn yesterday, with Trump (who doesn’t drive) pledging to buy one and to label violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism. Tesla shares rose slightly, but are still down more than 30% for the month.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images