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Though not, perhaps, the bad ideas you might expect.
Donald Trump will announce his running mate any day now, and according to multiple reports his choice has come down to Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. All erstwhile critics of Trump, they now share a fervent admiration for the former president they once scorned. But where do they stand on climate change?
Opinions on climate within the Republican Party are complex, and these three men reflect the divisions. According to Pew Research Center polls, 47% of Republicans over the age of 65 believe that human activity contributes a great deal or some to climate change, but a full 79% of Republicans under 30 think so. Yet only a tiny number of them feel any urgency around climate: In a Pew poll earlier this year, only 12% of Republicans said climate should be a top priority for the president and Congress, the lowest score of the 20 issues they asked about. (59% of Democrats said it should be a top priority.)
That leaves room for Republican politicians to take a variety of positions, as long as they agree that the ideas favored by climate hawks are bad. For many, the optimal position is a kind of malign neglect: They’ll admit that warming temperatures are bad, but somehow find their way to opposing all measures to address the problem. With one partial exception, that describes all of Trump’s likeliest running mates.
Burgum can be a little tough to pin down on climate, in large part because of how he shrewdly avoids talking about the issue in the culture-war terms so many in his party prefer. At the start of his second term he set a target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 — but without regulation or any reduction in fossil fuel production. Instead, Burgum wants the state to become a center for carbon capture, calling the room underground to store large amounts of carbon the state’s “geologic jackpot.”
As part of that project, Burgum has advocated the construction of a pipeline to carry CO2 into the state from other Midwest states, which he touts as simply a money-making proposition. “This has nothing to do with climate change,” he said in March. “This has to do with markets.” He has touted environmental, social, and governance-related investing, which focuses on companies with strong environmental records, as an opportunity for the state to lure capital — but has also joined with other Republican governors to condemn it.
Burgum has close ties with the oil industry, so much so that he has become Trump’s key liaison to the industry and its billionaire magnates; he has also been mentioned as a possible energy secretary if he is not Trump’s running mate, which would make him the administration’s chief fossil fuel advocate.
In other words, Burgum seems to be on multiple sides of the climate issue. He’s a fossil-fuel promoter and critic of electric vehicles who wants to make his state carbon neutral. And you will look in vain for any statement where Burgum says exactly what kind of threat he believes climate change poses, or even if he thinks it is happening at all; in technocratic style, he shifts any question on the issue to economic and practical concerns.
With its frequent hurricanes and dramatic sea level rise, Florida sees direct and repeated effects of climate change as much as any state in the country. Yet it took Marco Rubio many years to arrive at his current position: In the early part of his career he was a clear climate denier, but lately he has taken something more like the prevailing Republican view, which is that while climate change is happening and human activity may be contributing to it, we shouldn’t actually do much about it. At the very least, we shouldn’t do anything that comes with even the smallest cost in dollars or convenience.
During his first run for Senate in 2010, Rubio said, “The climate is always changing” — a common dodge among climate deniers, used to make them sound like they aren’t completely oblivious while they refuse to acknowledge the causes and consequences of post-industrialization warming. But “I don't think there's the scientific evidence to justify” the idea that humans have anything to do with it, he added.
He continued to hold that position for years. “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” he said in 2014. But over time, Rubio became less hesitant about admitting the reality of warming, even if he steered away from talking about the cause. He proposed modest measures to increase climate resilience, while always pairing them with attacks on more aggressive action as an attempt by leftist radicals to destroy the economy.
Today, Rubio is a member of the bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus, which has occasional meetings but steers away from taking any positions on particular legislation or regulations, making it mostly a way for senators to say “I care” without committing themselves to action.
When Vance talks about climate, it’s in the terms of a culture warrior, heaping contempt on liberals and their goals for a safer and cleaner environment. His 2022 Senate campaign against Democrat Tim Ryan featured substantial discussion of climate issues, with Vance regularly condemning efforts to reduce emissions and lamenting the decline of coal. “All of this ‘bring American manufacturing back’ from the Democrats is fake unless we stop the green energy fantasy,” he tweeted that July. “Solar panels can’t power a modern manufacturing economy. That’s why the Chinese are building coal power plants, something Tim Ryan’s donors won’t let America do.”
“If you want to make our environment more clean, the way to do it is to invest in Ohio natural gas,” he’s said. Or as he told Fox News, “The obsession Democrats have with eliminating fossil fuels is crazy.”
Like Trump, Vance has emphasized his loathing for electric vehicles. “Even if there was a climate crisis, I don’t know how the way to solve it is to buy more Chinese manufactured electric vehicles,” he said on a radio show in 2022 in response to the EV incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (which in fact requires that to qualify for subsidies vehicles must be mostly American-made with domestic materials; the requirements are complicated, but no Chinese vehicles qualify). “The whole EV thing is a scam, right?”
Always attuned to the value of a PR stunt, Vance introduced a bill he called the “Consequences for Climate Vandals Act,” meant to crack down on the scourge of climate activists throwing soup on paintings. Fox News was pleased, but the bill went nowhere, leaving America dangerously vulnerable to art-based climate protests.
This is the common thread running through Vance’s comments on climate: Unlike Rubio, who may have no choice but to discuss the effects of warming given the state he represents, Vance almost never mentions these effects. He turns any discussion of climate into an attack on liberals, environmentalists, and Democrats for their supposedly ruinous ideas to address the problem. If Burgum’s response to climate is Can we make money off this? and Rubio’s is It’s serious, but let’s not be hasty, Vance’s could be summed up as Go to hell, libs.
No matter who Trump picks, his vice president is unlikely to be anything but the most tentative voice of reason in the administration’s climate policy, even in the best of circumstances. None of these three has given us much reason to think he would risk his own position by standing in the way of what will no doubt be a determined effort to remove regulations on the fossil fuel industry, undo the carrot-based approach of the Biden administration to encouraging a green transition, and generally let the emissions rip. Or even that they’d want to.
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Packed hearings. Facebook organizing. Complaints about prime farmland and a disappearing way of life. Sound familiar?
Solar and wind companies cite the rise of artificial intelligence to make their business cases after the United States government slashed massive tax incentives for their projects.
But the data centers supposed to power the AI boom are now facing the sort of swift wave of rejections from local governments across the country eerily similar to what renewables developers have been dealing with on the ground over the last decade. The only difference is, this land use techlash feels even more sudden, intense, and culturally diffuse.
What’s happening is simple: Data centers are now routinely being denied by local governments in zoning and permitting decisions after local residents turn against them. These aggrieved denizens organize grassroots campaigns, many with associated Facebook groups, and then flood city council and county commission hearings.
Just take this past week. Last Thursday, Prince George’s County, Maryland, paused all data center permitting after a campaign against converting an abandoned mall into a data center gained traction online, with a petition garnering more than 20,000 signatures. On Monday, faced with a ferocious public outcry, Google rescinded a proposal to build what would’ve been its second data center in Indiana in Franklin Township, a community in southeastern Indianapolis – a withdrawal requested mere minutes before the township council was reportedly going to reject it.
That same day, the rural Illinois town of DeKalb denied a solar company’s request to build a “boutique data center” on the same site as a previously-permitted solar farm. And on Tuesday, the small city of Howell – located smack between Lansing and Detroit, Michigan – denied a data center proposed by an anonymous Fortune 100 company. Apparently, so many people showed up to voice their opposition to the project that the hearing was held in a high school gymnasium.
Opponents cite many things in their arguments against development, some unique to the sector like energy and water use, and others familiar to the solar and wind industry, like preserving prime farmland or maintaining a way of life.
These arguments are incredibly salient, as polling conducted by Heatmap News has revealed: less than half of Americans would ever support a data center coming near them, and this technology infrastructure is less popular than any form of renewable energy. Digging into the cross-tabs of that poll, data centers are unpopular with essentially all age demographics, and arguments against the facilities – like “they use too much water” or “they consume too much electricity” – get relatively similar agreement from registered Democrats and Republicans alike.
Ben Inskeep, a clean energy advocate in Indianapolis, told me he started fighting data centers last year after he became aware of the total power needed to fuel the rising number of projects in the state. His advocacy organization, Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, previously weighed in on rate hikes and electricity generation decisions. Now, they’re tracking more than 40 data center projects they say are proposed in the state and getting involved in the fight on the ground against them.
Inskeep told me that, from his point of view, the primary support for data centers comes from local governments and municipally-funded works like schools and health facilities that are facing slashed budgets. In some cases the projects are being rejected despite representing millions – even billions – in capital investments and potential tax revenues so large that municipal governments are put between a rock and a hard place as they’re pressured by a weakening economy and state funding cuts.
That’s what happened in Indianapolis. Earlier this month the school district that would’ve been funded by the now-rejected Google data center came out in support of the project, declaring it would welcome new tax revenue, and said it would also lead to new educational partnerships with the tech giant. But none of that mattered. Some local officials even lambasted their colleagues' support as unwarranted, a lashing out that reminds me of what happens to pro-solar officials in Ohio.
Heatmap News has been tracking contested data center projects since the spring of this year and has found almost 100 projects under development across the country that are being actively fought by local organizers, citizens advocacy groups, and environmental organizations. The data is preliminary and likely an undercount.
Still, there’s lots to glean from it. Crucially, as we’ve seen with renewable energy development, data center opposition crops up most often in tandem with the number of projects proposed and constructed. This is only logical: the more of something that is built in a place, the more likely people are to say, “We’ve built enough of that.” This is why Virginia is the top state when it comes to data centers being opposed – it’s a hub that’s seen development spike for far longer than elsewhere in the United States.
I believe that as data center project proposals continue to rise across the country, we’ll see in parallel rising hostility to their development – potentially much larger than anything renewable energy has ever faced. It will undoubtedly also be a problem for anyone in solar or wind who is riding on an AI boom to add demand for their projects.
And more of the week’s most important news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Pulaski County, Arkansas – The attorney general of Arkansas is reassuring residents that yes, they can still ban wind farms if they want to.
2. Des Moines County, Iowa – This county facing intense pressure to lock out renewables is trying to find a sweet spot that doesn’t involve capitulation. Whether that’s possible remains to be seen.
3. Fayette County, Tennessee – This county just extended its solar energy moratorium for at least the next 18 months after pressure from residents.
4. McCracken County, Kentucky – It’s not all bad news this week, as a large solar project in Kentucky appears to be moving forward without fomenting difficulties on the ground.
A conversation with Wil Gehl at the Solar Energy Industries Association
This week I chatted with Wil Gehl, the InterMountain West senior manager at the Solar Energy Industries Association. I reached out in the hopes we could chat candidly about the impacts of the current national policy regime on solar development in the American West, where a pause on federal permits risks jeopardizing immense development in Nevada. To my delight, Wil was (pun intended) willing to get into the hot seat with me and get into the mix.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So for starters, walk me through how solar development out west has changed since the start of this year.
Certainly been a lot of changes. I think there’s sort of a confluence of lots of uncertainty and change in the industry. The impending tax credit deadlines and safe harbor and commence construction deadlines, all of that combined with the sort of things that have been ongoing in the West for a while — public lands, siting issues — I think those have made a relatively difficult development environment for folks.
But that said, we’re also seeing unprecedented load growth across the West, and Nevada’s a really good example of that. So the demand for solar and storage remains super high. But I think now we’re navigating even more difficulty in getting projects both sited and also over the finish line.
How has the pause on federal permitting impacted projects in this area of the country?
Nevada is 80% public land, give or take, so those changes at the federal level, particularly, the Department of Interior … it’s pretty difficult if you’re looking at utility-scale solar in the state to avoid a sort of federal lands nexus. Those policy changes are really being felt on the ground in Nevada.
We don’t do a ton of engagement at the county level but I’ve been tracking those developments across the state, in Nevada, and others around the West. Whether they’re moratoriums or consideration on moratoriums, or new siting restrictions… in most states in the West, the land use decisions rest at the local level, either the county or the municipal jurisdiction. The patchwork of changing ordinances, that [has a] pace that has intensified a little bit this year as well.
How is SEIA trying to get those projects unstuck? I think about Esmeralda 7 for example, which hasn’t seen its permitting timeline updated online in half a year. What’s the process for trying to get these projects to move forward at this juncture?
I guess I don’t have project by project specific information but in general, I think the example with Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo’s letter is how we’ve been approaching this issue. Trying to make the case for states like Nevada with really high load growth that projects like this are critical to meeting energy demand and serving customers reliably. Trying to tie the really near-term challenge of serving load together with these issues of federal land so that people on the ground at the state level are aware of it and can use the influence they have with federal officials and other folks to make this situation known, that this has real practical effects with states and their economic development.
When it comes to transmission for these solar projects, what’s the status? Is the scope of the pause just limited to the scope of solar generation or also transmission lines connected to them?
I think the kind of more recent challenges have been more focused on the generation side. The pace of the transmission and associated queue bottlenecks, I feel like that situation has not improved by any means but I don’t get the sense there’s any near-term changes that have impacted that. I’d be curious if other folks who work more closely on the transmission side have a different perspective, but that’s kind of what I’m seeing.
Is there from your vantage point a clip or an end here? If these projects are unable to be unstuck, do you expect developers to try and wait out this limbo with public lands? Or do you expect developers to rethink how they site their projects?
I think in general for projects already under the development process, folks have already invested a lot of time, energy, and capital to get those projects to this point. Particularly those in the West really necessary to serve as growing load, I would expect folks to really be pursuing every angle they can to get those projects over the finish line.
That said, I’m sure there is some point. I just don’t have a good sense of when this becomes totally unpalatable or you’re not able to move forward.
NV Energy recently had a filing at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that allowed projects previously in their queue an escape route out if they were not able to maintain their queue position. I do think that’s a sign of the siting difficulties, the people re-evaluating their project portfolio. I’m not a developer but if you’re looking on private land or federal land, signs are pointing to a smoother path forward on private land but in states like Nevada where 80% plus is public land, even for a project fully sited on private land, it’s really difficult to avoid interconnection or transmission. There are pretty much always going to be federal impacts. That’s just going to be a challenge that industry’s facing at this point.
What’s your message to developers who are anxious in this moment?
That’s a good question. I share the anxiety.
I also think there’s a lot of effort being undertaken by developers to explain the situation on the ground to their elected officials and I really think that’s the kind of message that needs to get out there. These real tangible impacts of projects that were already invested in, in some cases already under construction, that are being hindered by these policy decisions that I don’t think are serving the public interests and are going to limit economic development if they don’t come online in time. Ultimately energy is needed to meet the growing demand. There’s not a great alternative to these projects not getting done.