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There’s a decent chance that whoever the Republican Party nominates for president in 2024 will eventually win the White House.
That means they will have a huge sway over how — and whether — the United States pursues its energy and climate goals during this decisive decade for decarbonization. So while some — but not all — Republican officials reject the reality of climate change, key differences exist in the way each GOP presidential candidate talks about the issue.
Ahead of the first Republican primary debate, here is a guide to each of the major candidates and where they stand on climate change and energy questions. We plan on updating it through the campaign.
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Who is he? The 45th — and maybe the 47th — president of the United States. A four-time criminal defendant.
What he says about climate change: That it’s a “hoax,” “a total hoax,” “an expensive hoax,” and “a total, and very expensive, hoax.” Then in 2018 he told “Sixty Minutes” that “it’s not a hoax.” But recently he’s been saying it’s a hoax again.
What he did about climate change: Oh, what didn’t he try to do? He rolled back more than 100 climate or environmental regulations, pulled America out of the Paris Agreement, and expanded oil drilling in Alaska. He declined to regulate toxic particulate air pollution and tried to subsidize the coal industry. That said, his rollbacks were rarely as effective as he hoped because the court system often blocked them for lack of paperwork.
What he wants to do next: More of the same. He has promised to end any support for electric vehicles, pull America out of the Paris Agreement again, and build more oil refineries and gas pipelines. “Nobody has more liquid gold under their feet than the United States of America. And we will use it and profit by it and live with it,” he said.
Who is he? The 46th governor of Florida.
What’s his deal? DeSantis hates the effects of climate change, but doesn’t want to touch the causes.
What he says about climate change: DeSantis would prefer not to use that phrase — it’s too left-wing. “This idea of, quote, ‘climate change’ has become politicized. My environmental policy is just to try to do things that benefit Floridians,” he said in 2019. A year earlier, he offered: “I am not a global warming person. I don’t want that label on me.”
But he sometimes brags about his green record, even if he never says climate or carbon. “In Florida, we’ve seen emissions go down dramatically in the last 10 years,” he told Trey Gowdy, the Fox News host, this spring. “But that’s through market and innovation, that’s not through mandates.”
What he’s done about climate change: Despite his personal reticence to use the c-word, he lifted an alleged state-level ban on saying climate change, appointed Florida’s first state resilience officer, and has signed millions of dollars into law to fight flooding and sea-level rise. He also ordered the state environmental agency to base its decisions on the best-available science.
Yet lately he’s declined hundreds of millions in federal energy-efficiency funding and vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have saved Florida $277 million by replacing some state-owned cars with electric vehicles.
What he wants to do as president: DeSantis has promised to “reverse the federal government's attempt to force people to buy electric vehicles.” He has also pledged to “unleash our domestic energy sector” and “modernize and protect our grid,” although he hasn’t said how he would do either.
You probably didn’t know: DeSantis implemented a fracking ban soon after becoming governor, but hasn’t gotten the legislature to enact it.
Who is he? The 48th vice president of the United States and a likely star witness at one of Donald Trump’s criminal trials.
What he says about climate change: Back when he was running for the House in 2000, he said climate change was “a myth.” More recently, he’s recognized that human activities have “some” impact on the climate, but rejected the idea that climate change is a threat to national security.
What he’s done about climate change: As vice president, he helped Trump repeal dozens of climate protections. He praised the president’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement, saying it was “so refreshing to have a presidents who stands without apology ... for America first.”
What he wants to do: Pence has proposed perhaps the most detailed energy policy of any GOP candidate. Although he has promised increasing production of “all forms of U.S. energy,” much of his policy would boost fossil fuels: He wants to open up oil-and-gas drilling on federal land, loosen permitting rules to speed pipeline construction, increase oil refining capacity, and repeal much of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Who is she? The former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley was President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018.
What she says about climate change: That it’s real, man-made, and that it could present threats to the United States.
What she’s done about climate change: As Trump’s UN ambassador, she helped orchestrate America’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the nonbinding global climate treaty. Back when she was South Carolina’s governor, she allegedly suppressed a state-level climate report.
What she wants to do as president: Haley has been vague, although she has said most liberal climate policies would “cost trillions and destroy our economy.” She’s backed efforts to capture carbon dioxide from industrial facilities. She also wants to plant more trees.
Who is he? A former insurance salesman, Tim Scott has served as a senator from South Carolina since 2013. He is the first African-American senator to be elected from the South since Reconstruction.
What he says about climate change: He has recognized that human activities are having some influence on the climate. “I am not living under a rock,” he said.
What he’s done about climate change: Scott’s decade-long Senate record is notably unfriendly to the climate. He voted against the Kigali Amendment, a global climate treaty that phased out the use of hydrofluorocarbon pollutants, even though 19 of his GOP colleagues supported it. He also opposed the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funded EV chargers, public transit, and carbon removal experiments. And he has opposed messaging bills that recognized that human activity is driving climate change, even when his colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham, supported them.
What he wants to do about climate change: He’s been vague. A prominent Republican donor told Axios that he supports building out the next-generation nuclear-power industry. Scott has said it’s “ridiculous to talk about a climate emergency when we have a border emergency that is an existential threat right now.”
Who is he? Christie was the governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018.
What he says about climate change: That it’s real. “There’s undeniable data that CO2 levels and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing … When you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts,” he said more than a decade ago.
What he’s done about climate change: As governor, he pulled New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions from the power sector. But he also fought to cut emissions from a Pennsylvania coal plant.
What he wants to do about climate change: Like many candidates, he supports an “all-of-the-above” energy plan, although he has been kinder to climate goals than other Republicans and shown a particular interest in nuclear power. “We can’t disarm ourselves economically while we convert to cleaner energy,” he told a New Hampshire crowd in August. He supports increasing domestic oil production to help Ukraine.
Who is he? The son of Indian immigrants, Ramaswamy is the former chief executive of Roivant Sciences, a biotech company. The 38-year-old billionaire rose to prominence in conservative circles by opposing ESG investing — that is, environment, sustainability, and governance.
What he says about climate change: A lot. He told The Washington Post that he is “not a climate denier” but that global warming will not be “entirely bad.” He has also claimed that fossil fuels are “essential to human flourishing,” seeming to reject the modern scientific consensus that carbon pollution is causing climate change.
What he’s done about climate change: Ramaswamy has never held elective office. But as an anti-ESG activist, he wrote letters to Chevron telling it to stop supporting a carbon tax or monitoring some of its emissions.
What he wants to do about climate change: He appears to support almost no restrictions on carbon pollution. He wants to “drill, frack, and burn coal.” He also wants to “abandon the climate cult and unshackle nuclear energy,” even though it generates zero-carbon electricity.
Who is he? Hutchinson, a lawyer, was the governor of Arkansas from 2015 to 2023.
What he says about climate change: He told The New York Times that climate change is real and that human activities are “a contributing factor” to it. He doesn’t see it as an existential threat to the United States.
What he’s done about climate change: When campaigning for governor, Hutchinson promised to fight President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have cut carbon pollution from power plants. He praised some of President Trump’s environmental rollbacks.
What he wants to do about climate change: Hutchinson supports “energy independence” and opposes any effort to restrict carbon emissions. He told the Times that he would pull America out of the Paris Agreement and loosen rules on pipelines and drilling.
Who is he? Burgum is a former software executive and the 33rd governor of North Dakota.
What he says about climate change: Burgum told the Sioux City Journal that climate change is real, but that he doesn’t want to talk about the role that humans are playing in causing it. “The debate we're having between the different edges is one where cancel culture is alive and well because if anybody questions any aspect of this, they're immediately ostracized,” he said.
What he’s done about climate change: North Dakota is one of the country’s leading fossil-fuel producers, but Burgum has pledged to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2030 without losing that commanding position. He wants to use carbon-capture technology, which his government has helped subsidize, to meet that goal within the state.
He also created North Dakota’s first Department of Environmental Quality.
What he wants to do about climate change: He’s been vague. “Anyone who cares about the climate should want as much energy produced in America as possible and sold around the globe,” his spokesman told The Washington Post.
Read more about the politics of climate change:
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And more on the week’s most important battles around renewable energy.
1. Indianapolis, Indiana – The Sooner state’s top energy official suggested energy developers should sue towns and county regulators over anti-renewable moratoria and restrictive ordinances, according to audio posted online by local politics blog Indy Politics.
2. Laramie County, Wyoming – It’s getting harder to win a permit for a wind project in Wyoming, despite it being home to some of the largest such projects in the country.
3. Ada County, Idaho – Like Wyoming, Idaho is seeing its most populated county locking up land from being available for renewables development.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio – Activists are plotting another appeal to overturn the Ohio Power Siting Board’s decision on a solar farm.
5. Franklin County, Virginia – Constitution Solar is struggling to assuage local residents’ complaints about a proposed project in this county despite doing, well, it appears anything to make them happy.
6. Sumter County, South Carolina – One solar developer is trying for a Hail Mary with South Carolina regulators to circumvent a painful local rejection.
A conversation with Barbara Kates-Garnick, former undersecretary of energy for the state of Massachusetts
This week’s conversation is with Barbara Kates-Garnick, a professor of practice at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, who before academia served as undersecretary of energy for the state of Massachusetts. I reached out to Kates-Garnick after I reported on the circumstances surrounding a major solar project cancellation in the Western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury, which I believe was indicative of the weakening hand developers have in conflicts with activists on the ground. I sought to best understand how folks enmeshed in the state’s decarbonization goals felt about what was happening to local renewables development in light of the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credit.
Of course, like anyone in Massachusetts, Kates-Garnick was blunt about the situation: it’s quite bad.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So to start, how do you feel about the state’s odds of meeting its climate goals?
My own assumption is that it was going to be tough before all of the federal changes to meet those goals. They were highly ambitious and I really support the ambition, but now it’s going to be really, really difficult to meet the clean energy goals. It’s not that we shouldn't work hard to meet them but we have to understand that in this current state of affairs, the obstacles are going to be much greater. But when you take offshore wind off the table, the challenge becomes even more enormous.
Why is offshore wind necessary to meet the state’s climate targets?
It’s because it is a large resource that would be coming into the grid over a period of time. The significance is in the megawatts, the size and scale. It was particularly important and we’re land constrained in New England. And all of the sudden you’re taking such a large opportunity in generation off the table.
We can do energy efficiency and we can do solar but as you know from the Shutesbury situation, land is at a premium. Location – you can’t site onshore wind here. We tried really hard under former Governor Deval Patrick and that hit a lot of obstacles. So offshore wind is critical to meeting those goals.
Help me understand the conflicts over this land constraint – is Shutesbury an aberration or a bit of a tale of the tape of the problems here?
The Shutesbury situation reflects how we’re not a large geographical area. We’re not Texas. We can put solar on roofs but you need larger solar installations. We’ve encouraged the solar industry as much as possible. But the area is limited. Wind off the coast provided an alternative that was realistic and not a science experiment.
How much of this problem is state permitting? It feels like there is some land in a space like Massachusetts but people don’t want to use it for this.
Any time you try to put energy infrastructure into New England – whether it's a gas pipeline or a solar installation – there’s a lot of local environmental and permitting regulations that can really hold up a project. One of the good things Massachusetts has done is we made energy permitting easier and went through a permitting reform. We have an Energy Facility Siting Council.
There’s still ways local interests can hold up projects. I think that’s just a fact of life in New England.
So that’s why offshore wind is so important to New England.
It becomes more challenging. From a resource perspective, we are at the end of the fossil fuel pipeline. The middle Atlantic has more gas pipelines coming into it than we do in New England. Offshore wind represented a great opportunity for us.
With respect to the state permitting, it is possible to now overcome some local regulations in state permitting in ways that weren’t possible before. We did address permitting reform in Massachusetts. The Energy Facility Siting Council has played a great, important role in having that happen and [towns] can be overruled to a certain extent.
Well, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that the conflicts will still exist because land is at a premium?
Yeah. And local control will always play a role in that.
The Commonwealth signed permitting reform into law in 2024 and in that there were comprehensive reforms to the process for clean energy infrastructure. This has improved siting. But again that doesn’t always ensure a project will be permitted and you can easily find ways to hold them up.
What gives you hope for the future? Where’s the light at the end of the tunnel for you?
I think that by facilitating permitting reform and also participation – local participation – as early as possible in the stages of projects… I think this is where the key lies. You can pass regulations but a lot of it has to do with doing the work ahead of time on your project and satisfying the local community so you don’t have a bigger fight on your hands.
Here come Chip Roy and Lee Zeldin.
National Republican political leaders are beginning to intervene in local battles over battery storage, taking the side of activists against developers. It’s a worrisome trend for an industry that, until recently, was escaping the culture clashes once reserved only for solar and wind energy.
In late July, Texas Congressman Chip Roy sent a letter to energy storage developer Peregrine Energy voicing concerns about a 145 megawatt battery project proposed in rural Gillespie County, an area one hour north of San Antonio that sits in his district. Roy, an influential conservative firebrand running to be state attorney general, asked the company more than a dozen questions about the project, from its fire preparation plans to whether it may have ties to Chinese material suppliers, and stated that his office heard “frustrations and concerns” about the project from “hundreds of constituents – including state and local elected officials.”
“Gillespie County is subject to extreme drought, wildfires, and flash flooding events,” Roy wrote. “Naturally, residents are concerned about the environmental risks a battery storage facility poses to one of [the] most vulnerable areas in Texas, among other things.”
Peregrine told me in an email that the company then sought to assuage the congressman’s concerns, speaking with his staff over the phone. But Roy remained unmoved, now fully backing the local opposition to the project. “My office has met with representatives from Peregrine Energy, and while we appreciate the dialogue, we believe that this project warrants scrutiny,” Roy said in a statement provided by his staff when reached for comment. “We look forward to remaining engaged with Peregrine Energy and continuing to represent the people of Harper who feel strongly that this battery facility poses more harm than good.”
Republican interventions like these may feel out of the ordinary to many in the energy sector. Historically, conservative politicians like Roy often vote against writing new regulations governing the environment and public safety, and Texas has often been a bastion for that kind of policymaking. Not to mention Texas is a major hub for battery storage development, second only to California in total capacity installed onto the grid. The Lone Star state’s strained grid means there is no shortage of demand for excess back-up power.
Unfortunately for battery storage developers, national Republicans are now increasingly open to attacking individual battery storage projects in the same way they’ve sometimes fought solar and wind farms, especially when activists on the ground feel they’ve lost the fight with municipal and state regulators.
Last year, we launched The Fight with a story about the unincorporated town of Acton, California, where a battery project was approved by county officials in an area with high risk of experiencing wildfire. Local opponents of the facility, feeling that county and state courts would not fairly adjudicate their concerns, lobbied their elected representative in Congress – then-Rep. Mike Garcia – to do something, anything in response to the situation. And while Garcia was stymied from halting that individual battery project, he then tried to block the Energy Department from streamlining federal permits for the entire battery storage system sector. (The rulemaking was completed before the start of the Trump 2.0 administration. Garcia lost re-election last year.)
At the time, this was the first full-fledged example I could find of a Republican in Congress really picking up the mantle of the “BESS bomb” panic around large-scale battery facilities potentially posing an unacceptable risk to surrounding host communities. Sure, there’d been scares around lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes, for example. But battery storage in general? The sector has enjoyed bipartisan support at the national level, and definitely still does to some extent given that GOP lawmakers declined to pare back the industry’s Inflation Reduction Act credits in their recently-passed tax megabill.
But now there’s a very clear battery fire “butterfly effect” occurring in which local rage fails to get the attention of government officials focused on energy capacity so activists will just go to whatever ears are most sympathetic to them. This is resulting in percolating Republican ire against battery storage, point blank.
Indeed, Heatmap Pro’s August poll of 3,741 registered voters found that there are now three times as many strong opponents of battery storage facilities among Republicans than strong supporters.
Less than a month after Roy’s letter to Peregrine, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin personally visited his native Long Island, New York, to voice his support for those campaigning against a Key Capture Energy battery project in Hauppauge, a hamlet within the town of Islip. The EPA has no role in whether the project is built or not. But the endorsement – coupled with a New York Post op-ed declaring “battery sites are too risky for New York” – came right before a 12-month battery moratorium Islip had enacted was set to expire.
This week Islip extended the moratorium, indefinitely stopping the battery project. Next week, the New York City Council’s committee on fire and emergency management will be holding a public hearing to specifically address the local fears about storage projects.
As for Roy and Peregrine Energy, it’s unclear how the Texas Republican could stop the facility on his own. It has the permits necessary to build and Texas doesn’t have the kind of stringent environmental regulation that creates opportunities to stall construction.
But the lawmaker’s existing political clout in Washington and motivation to win the Republican primary nomination in a heated statewide contest make him a dangerous enemy for any company to have, especially energy developers linked in some way to the transition. As Garcia showed a year ago and Zeldin demonstrated over the summer, someone with a national platform and a megaphone could do a lot of damage to a single project, or worse. We’ve yet to truly see what will come from the flapping of this butterfly’s wings.