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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 toldThe 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 toldThe 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 toldThe Washington Post.
Read more about the politics of climate change:
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On the budget debate, MethaneSAT’s untimely demise, and Nvidia
Current conditions: The northwestern U.S. faces “above average significant wildfire potential” for July • A month’s worth of rain fell over just 12 hours in China’s Hubei province, forcing evacuations • The top floor of the Eiffel Tower is closed today due to extreme heat.
The Senate finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday. The excise tax on renewables that had been stuffed into the bill over the weekend was removed after Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote. In her piece examining exactly what’s in the bill, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo explains that even without the excise tax, the bill would “gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules.” Debate on the legislation begins on the House floor today. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he doesn’t like the legislation, and a handful of other Republicans have already signaled they won’t vote for it.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week sent the White House a proposal that is expected to severely weaken the federal government’s ability to rein in planet-warming pollution. Details of the proposal, titled “Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and Motor Vehicle Reconsideration,” aren’t clear yet, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has reportedly been urging the Trump administration to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which explicitly identified greenhouse gases as a public health threat and gave the EPA the authority to regulate them. Striking down that finding would “free EPA from the legal obligation to regulate climate pollution from most sources, including power plants, cars and trucks, and virtually any other source,” wrote Alex Guillén at Politico. The title of the proposal suggests it aims to roll back EPA tailpipe emissions standards, as well.
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So long, MethaneSAT, we hardly knew ye. The Environmental Defense Fund said Tuesday that it had lost contact with its $88 million methane-detecting satellite, and that the spacecraft was “likely not recoverable.” The team is still trying to figure out exactly what happened. MethaneSAT launched into orbit last March and was collecting data about methane pollution from global fossil fuel infrastructure. “Thanks to MethaneSAT, we have gained critical insight about the distribution and volume of methane being released from oil and gas production areas,” EDF said. “We have also developed an unprecedented capability to interpret the measurements from space and translate them into volumes of methane released. This capacity will be valuable to other missions.“ The good news is that MethaneSAT was far from the only methane-tracking satellite in orbit.
Nvidia is backing a D.C.-based startup called Emerald AI that “enables AI data centers to flexibly adjust their power consumption from the electricity grid on demand.” Its goal is to make the grid more reliable while still meeting the growing energy demands of AI computing. The startup emerged from stealth this week with a $24.5 million seed round led by Radical Ventures and including funding from Nvidia. Emerald AI’s platform “acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data center,” Nvidia explains. A field test of the software during a grid stress event in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated a 25% reduction in the energy consumption of AI workloads over three hours. “Renewable energy, which is intermittent and variable, is easier to add to a grid if that grid has lots of shock absorbers that can shift with changes in power supply,” said Ayse Coskun, Emerald AI’s chief scientist and a professor at Boston University. “Data centers can become some of those shock absorbers.”
In case you missed it: California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday rolled back the state’s landmark Environmental Quality Act. The law, which had been in place since 1970, required environmental reviews for construction projects and had become a target for those looking to alleviate the state’s housing crisis. The change “means most urban developers will no longer have to study, predict, and mitigate the ways that new housing might affect local traffic, air pollution, flora and fauna, noise levels, groundwater quality, and objects of historic or archeological significance,” explainedCal Matters. On the other hand, it could also mean that much-needed housing projects get approved more quickly.
Tesla is expected to report its Q2 deliveries today, and analysts are projecting a year-over-year drop somewhere from 11% to 13%.
Jesse teaches Rob the basics of energy, power, and what it all has to do with the grid.
What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?
On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This is the start of a new series: Shift Key Summer School. It’s a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, we try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: Let’s start with the joule. The joule is the SI unit for both work and energy. And the basic definition of energy is the ability to do work — not work in a job, but like work in the physics sense, meaning we are moving or displacing an object around. So a joule is defined as 1 newton-meter, among other things. It has an electrical equivalent, too. A newton is a unit of force, and force is accelerating a mass, from basic physics, over some distance in this case. So 1 meter of distance.
So we can break that down further, right? And we can describe the newton as 1 kilogram accelerated at 1 meter per second, squared. And then the work part is over a distance of one meter. So that kind of gives us a sense of something you feel. A kilogram, right, that’s 2.2 pounds. I don’t know, it’s like … I’m trying to think of something in my life that weighs a kilogram. Rob, can you think of something? A couple pounds of food, I guess. A liter of water weighs a kilogram by definition, as well. So if you’ve got like a liter bottle of soda, there’s your kilogram.
Then I want to move it over a meter. So I have a distance I’m displacing it. And then the question is, how fast do I want to do that? How quickly do I want to accelerate that movement? And that’s the acceleration part. And so from there, you kind of get a physical sense of this. If something requires more energy, if I’m moving more mass around, or if I’m moving that mass over a longer distance — 1 meter versus 100 meters versus a kilometer, right? — or if I want to accelerate that mass faster over that distance, so zero to 60 in three seconds versus zero to 60 in 10 seconds in your car, that’s going to take more energy.
Robinson Meyer: I am looking up what weighs … Oh, here we go: A 13-inch MacBook Air weighs about, a little more than a kilogram.
Jenkins: So your laptop. If you want to throw your laptop over a meter, accelerating at a pace of 1 meter per second, squared …
Meyer: That’s about a joule.
Jenkins: … that’s about a joule.
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The Yale Center for Business and the Environment’s online clean energy programs equip you with tangible skills and powerful networks—and you can continue working while learning. In just five hours a week, propel your career and make a difference.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
If the Senate reconciliation bill gets enacted as written, you’ve got about 92 days left to seal the deal.
If you were thinking about buying or leasing an electric vehicle at some point, you should probably get on it like, right now. Because while it is not guaranteed that the House will approve the budget reconciliation bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday, it is highly likely. Assuming the bill as it’s currently written becomes law, EV tax credits will be gone as of October 1.
The Senate bill guts the subsidies for consumer purchases of electric vehicles, a longstanding goal of the Trump administration. Specifically, it would scrap the 30D tax credit by September 30 of this year, a harsher cut-off than the version of the bill that passed the House, which would have axed the credit by the end of 2025 except for automakers that had sold fewer than 200,000 electric vehicles. The credit as it exists now is worth up to $7,500 for cars with an MSRP below $55,000 (and trucks and sports utility vehicles under $80,000), and, under the Inflation Reduction Act, would have lasted through the end of 2032. The Senate bill also axes the $4,000 used EV tax credit at the end of September.
“Long story short, the credits under the current legislation are only going to be on the books through the end of September,” Corey Cantor, the research director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. “Now is definitely a good time, if you’re interested in an EV, to look at the market.”
The Senate applied the same strict timeline to credits for clean commercial vehicles, both new and used. For home EV chargers, the tax credit will now expire at the end of June next year.
While EVs were on the road well before the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, what the new tax credit did was help build out a truly domestic electric vehicle market, Cantor said. “You have a bunch of refreshed EV models from major automakers,” Cantor told me, including “more affordable models in different segments, and many of them qualify for the credit.”
These include cars produceddomestically by Kia,Hyundai, and Chevrolet. But of course, the biggest winner from the credit is Tesla, whose Model Y was the best-selling car in the world in 2023.
Tesla shares were down over 5.5% in Tuesday afternoon trading, though not just because of Congress. JPMorgan also released an analyst report Monday arguing that the decline in sales seen in the first quarter would accelerate in the second quarter. President Trump, with whom Tesla CEO Elon Musk had an extremely public falling out last month, suggested on social media Monday night that the government efficiency department Musk himself formerly led should “take a good, hard, look” at the subsidies Musk receives across his many businesses. Trump also said that he would “take a look” at Musk’s United States citizenship in response to reporters’ questions about it.
Cantor told me that he expects a surge of consumer attention to the EV market if the bill passes in its current form. “You’ve seen more customers pull their purchase ahead” when subsidies cut-offs are imminent, he said.
But overall, the end of the subsidy is likely to reduce EV sales from their previously expected levels.
Harvard researchers have estimated that the termination of the EV tax credit “would cut the EV share of new vehicle sales in 2030 by 6.0 percentage points,” from 48% of new sales by 2030 to 42%. Combined with other Trump initiatives such as terminating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program for publicly funded chargers (currently being litigated) and eliminating California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act that allowed it to set tighter vehicle emissions standards, the share of new car sales that are electric could fall to 32% in 2030.
But not all government support for electric vehicles will end by October 1, even if the bill gets the president’s signature in its current form.
“It’s important for consumers to know there are many states that offer subsidies, such as New York, and Colorado,” Cantor told me. That also goes for California, New Jersey, Nevada, and New Mexico. You can find the full list here.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited to include a higher cost limit for trucks and SUVs.