What Happened When I Asked Maryland’s Larry Hogan About Climate Change

I may have met the future of conservative climate politics on Tuesday, and he was standing next to piles of dead fish.

Larry Hogan, a Republican former governor of Maryland, is campaigning for an open Senate seat in one of the bluest states in the country. He faces an uphill run against Angela Alsobrooks, an acolyte of Vice President Kamala Harris and a Black woman who runs one of the state’s most populous and diverse counties, Prince George’s. Before President Biden dropped out as the Democrats’ nominee for president, internal polls indicated that Hogan had a chance; since Biden’s exit, despite Hogan’s name ID from eight years in Annapolis, his chances for victory now appear uncertain.

So I was surprised when, out of the blue, as Democrats were convening in Chicago around Harris as their nominee, Hogan’s team invited me out to a campaign stop along the Chesapeake Bay. Hogan was going to announce new plans on how he’d fight for protecting the Bay if elected, and I’d get to ask the candidate whatever I wanted about … climate. Not the usual offer from a Republican congressional campaign.

Hogan, however, has a long track record of bucking his party on climate change, and could be regarded as one of the most aggressive Republican governors on the issue in modern American history. In 2017, he signed into law one of the nation’s few state-wide fracking bans. In 2018, after then President Trump began pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, he joined with other states to meet the goals of the accord regardless. Three years later, he oversaw the creation of a plan to reduce Maryland’s emissions 50% by 2030 and achieving “net-zero” by 2045. Those emissions targets happen to be the same ones Alsobrooks has endorsed, too.

I went to his campaign website to see what it says about climate and found almost nothing. Nowhere on Hogan’s website is there a discussion of emissions or energy policy, and climate-related laws like the Inflation Reduction Act barely come up. The only possible reference I can find is one paragraph saying he’d “stand against unaffordable spending and mandates raising [the] cost of energy, food, and basic necessities.”

So I said yes. Not just because I’m a Marylander who deeply cares about the future of the planet, but also because of Hogan’s importance for the future of the IRA. If he somehow found a way to win, he’d be a crucial voice on the future of the landmark climate law, the fate of which will be decided next year as lawmakers look to rewrite tax policy.

That was why, on Tuesday I woke up at the crack of dawn and drove two hours to Tilghman Island, a bucolic enclave popular for fishing and tourism along the eastern shorelines of Maryland. It might’ve been a rural part of the state, but every now and then along my route I’d see an array of solar panels in front of a farm or a house. I arrived at the meeting place to find it was a seafood plant along the water. Hogan arrived right after me in a jet black SUV and exited in attire so casual you’d hardly recognize him as a two-term governor: a simple baseball cap, a dull blue shirt, and, believe it or not, shorts.

I walked alongside Hogan and people who ran the processing plant as they surveyed flats of oyster shells and the guts of catfish I was told were an invasive species in the area. Finally, Hogan and I settled down to chat in an open garage. There are “more Republicans who actually are more environmentally sensitive than you think,” he told me, “but they’re certainly not in the majority, and they’re not the ones getting all the attention. My hope is to try to be a voice to get them to do some of the things we did and focus on.”

Of the IRA himself, he told me, “It concerns me that it was rushed through in a very partisan way without a single Republican vote. I think there are some really good things in it. I think there’s some things that weren’t very well thought out.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Things that are going to have a more harmful effect on the economy and killing jobs,” he said, adding that “we ought to at least look at how to tweak it.”

That statement puzzled me — recent analysis indicates at least 334,000 new jobs have been created since the law was enacted in 2022. But writ large, the transition to clean energy will mean people lose jobs in the oil and gas industry — was that what he was referring to?

“Yeah. I mean, we’re not ready,” Hogan replied. “It was going to shut down existing industries without any transition period when we didn’t have the ability to provide enough energy to accomplish what we wanted. We just gotta figure out a way to make the transition, but you can’t do it too rapidly or it’s going to have the opposite impact.”

Deciphering the GOP

The funny thing about Republicans talking about climate and the IRA is that you essentially need a translator to know their positions. Lawmakers will say one thing on the record to a reporter and then the next minute say the exact opposite thing off the record. The truth is — and I know this from many years of covering Capitol Hill — many Republican politicians support the vast majority of this law and will never admit it.

Most voters today still do not know much about the IRA, or even what the Biden administration has done on climate change. That’s unlikely to change soon as Democrats have so far eschewed mentioning the topic much at all, including during their convention in Chicago this week. Congressional Democrats put a lot of time and effort over the last year into messaging the law and their other signature industrial policy achievements. But for now, it seems it’ll be largely absent from the campaign trail.

Should Republicans take full control of Congress and the presidency, the IRA is in legitimate danger from influential coalitions on the furthest flanks of the right-wing. Think the Heritage Foundation. The Freedom Caucus. The Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Jim Jordans and Lauren Boeberts roaming the halls of the Capitol. These power-brokers have proven through fights over the debt ceiling and government funding that they appear willing to put their votes where their mouths are to satisfy a political base of support that cares less about corporations and climate change than sticking it to liberals and the left. Hogan is correct that the IRA was passed entirely by Democrats without a single Republican vote, making it a ripe target for partisan pummeling.

And yet there’s so much in the IRA that Republicans typically should like. Climate policy that’s heavy on carrots for big business and light on penalties for corporate pollution has long been Republicans’ preferred route. Why does the most moderate Republican candidate for Senate in one of the nation’s bluest states have to bash the climate law at all, let alone claim its killing jobs? I’ll be honest, when I went out to the Bay to meet Hogan, I thought I was about to hear the first major Republican endorsement of the IRA.

I asked John Hart, a fellow Marylander who helps run the conservative climate group C3 Solutions, about why Hogan would claim the IRA is killing jobs when there’s no evidence to back that up. Hart authored a campaign messaging book for Republicans trying to talk about climate change and energy policy without denying the existence of the problem, on the one hand, or alienating their own voters on the other.

“It’s an American cultural and political problem,” Hart told me. “You have to be very cognizant of those head-scratching moments, and you have to address that very clearly.”

There’s two reasons why Republicans like Hogan have to bash the IRA even if they might support a lot of the underlying climate provisions, he said: GOP voters instinctually see such ideas as “picking winners and losers,” and the climate law has been lumped in with other policies like auto regulations that Republicans largely oppose.

“Candidates are viewing it not through the narrow lens of what that legislation alone does, but how it fits into a broader agenda,” Hart added. “With the IRA, [it becomes] part of a broader effort. A lot of Republicans do believe that the Biden administration wants to ban trucks.”

Hogan did not develop his approach to climate action overnight. While as governor, he pushed for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% through 2030, he also opposed going any faster than that. (The legislature ultimately enacted the more aggressive plans without Hogan's signature.) The Alsobrooks campaign has attacked him on this, and in a statement to me said that if elected, “Larry Hogan would give [S]enate Republicans the majority they need to gut the IRA and roll back efforts to protect our environment.”

Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for the Hogan campaign, told me Hogan is “glad the [IRA] created clean energy jobs like he did as Governor in Maryland.” His concerns with the law have to do with “some of the new taxes and overspending in the bill [that] has and will contribute to inflation and job loss, and is disappointed that the bill was forced through a party line vote.”

Yelling at windmills

Governor Hogan also loudly backed wind development off the Maryland coast, which is now a contentious issue along the eastern shore.

Ocean City, a popular vacation destination, is now considering legal action against the federal government if it approves efforts by U.S. Wind, a subsidiary of an Italian wind energy company, to actually build turbines off the state’s coastline. It’s a conflict that mirrors other fights waged by beach communities, resort areas, and fishing hubs against offshore wind. These parts of the country are far removed from cities and often Republican-leaning, and the loudest champions of these grievances have also been prominent GOP politicians. Most notable, of course, has been former President Donald Trump, who’s pledged to halt new permits, but Republican policymakers at all levels from New Jersey, New York, and Virginia, among others, have all been making political hay from wind farm projects in their states.

Hogan has made a name for himself in recent years as a bulwark against Trump and his brand of politics. But when I brought up Ocean City’s legal threat, his passionate support of the town led him to interrupt my question.

“They probably will and probably should [sue]. That’s an example where I was very supportive of wind energy and creating a market for that in our state to create jobs and further the production of wind energy. But on that project, there was not very much transparency. They didn’t work with the local community very much. That’s impacting the fishing industry, the tourism industry, and they’re concerned that their entire livelihoods are going to be ruined.”

Heatmap’s own polling shows the political vulnerability renewable energy faces from the environmental impacts of development. Yet earlier in our interview, Hogan had boasted about the jobs wind has brought to the transportation and logistics hub Tradepoint Atlantic in the Port of Baltimore. He spoke effusively about the jobs in industries like welding that wind development creates. (One tidbit: His campaign released an ad a few days ago featuring a Democrat-registered welder in Baltimore who says they’re voting for Hogan, with no mention of the wind industry.)

In my mind, at least, failing to build those turbines could present a bigger risk to Ocean City in the long run than building them. If we didn’t construct them, it would take away an opportunity to dramatically increase the amount of renewable energy available for Maryland to wean off of carbon-based power. Failing to do so would pose a longer-term threat to the town of Ocean City from sea level rise and intensifying extreme weather.

So I told Hogan that while, as a Marylander, I couldn’t imagine wind turbines at Ocean City, I also couldn’t stop thinking about the trade-offs. I asked him, how does he view those tradeoffs?

Hogan stood firm. “I think you can accomplish the goals without putting them on the beach. I think you move them further out. It’s a pretty simple process. The federal government required them to put them in a place that no one wants. There’s no reason for it.”

This began to sound like some sort of Republican party line, trying to sell voters on a vision of the future that derails the energy transition along the way. But as one of my personal favorite Republican-splainers on energy, Sarah Hunt of the Rainey Center, explained to me, this kind of misconstrues how politics ordinarily works.

The normal thing is that constituents go to their representatives and voice their concerns, and a lot of these beach towns and fishing areas just happen to be Republican. In other parts of the country like Louisiana, where the politicians are more open to offshore oil, they’re similarly supportive of offshore wind.

“I think that is individual to Maryland and specific areas of Maryland,” Hunt told me. “I think offshore wind is a wonderful thing. I think it’s legitimate to say it doesn’t belong everywhere, and I think it’s reasonable to have a process for communities to provide input into the placement of such projects.”

After Hogan and I concluded our interview, I drove home in the gas-powered car I inherited from my late grandparents and passed more solar paneling in front of rural homes. Driving over the Chesapeake Bay, I tried to imagine seeing wind turbines on the horizon one day, and a world where Republicans support tax credits for renewables while fighting to make sure those projects adhere to the Clean Water Act. May we live in interesting times, I guess.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Maryland was already a member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative when Hogan became governor.