Meet the unlikely supporters of green and renewable energy: Members of the Conservative Energy Network.
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HOUSTON – Green lawns and trees shimmered in 100-degree heat at the Houstonian resort last week as an unexpected gathering got underway.
Inside, the smell of BBQ hung in the air and a ballroom resounded with praise for Donald Trump, admiration of America’s heartland and a love of conservative values.
Also solar power. And wind turbines. And nuclear energy.
“Clean is right,” said John Szoka, smiling at the play on words.
He’s the CEO of the Conservative Energy Network, sponsor of last week’s Conservative Energy Summit in Houston. Founded in 2016, this year for the first time it brought together more than 200 people from around the country to discuss how best to champion energy sources they believe will restore American energy leadership, save people money, create jobs and secure the power grid.
While conservative voices have never been absent from discussions around clean energy, CEN is part of a new “eco-right” that’s emerged to make a conservative case for climate work, or at least carbon-neutral energy.
And that doesn’t necessarily mean believing in climate change, speakers said. Anyone who supports free markets can see that cheap, renewable energy is the future — and there’s money to be made for those who embrace it, the group believes.
“The folks making money from renewable energy projects are conservative and Republican,” said Drew Christensen, senior director of public engagement at Apex Clean Energy in Virginia and a former Republican Representative from Minnesota.
Speaker after speaker argued that free market competition, consumer choice, private property rights and cutting government overregulation are fundamentally Republican values. If those principles prevail, clean energy will thrive in the U.S., they believe.
“We need to get the politics out of the energy business,” said Pat Wood of the Hunt Energy Network in Dallas.
For America to continue to produce this cheap, abundant power that just happens to be renewable, conservatives have to embrace it – because almost all clean energy projects are developed in Republican districts, said Mark Stover, executive director of the Texas Solar Power Association.
“In rural, red areas, we’ve got to repudiate the feeling that Democrats are trying to force clean energy projects down our throats,” said Marshall Conrad, vice president of government relations at Strata Clean Energy in North Carolina.
Does it matter who’s in the White House?
The elephant in the room was the upcoming presidential election. Most of the organizations present, including CEN, are non-profits that cannot take political positions. But they did address, obliquely, the fact that the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, publicly says he hates wind turbines and generally opposes renewable energy, which he claims is too costly and inefficient.
“No matter who wins, we’ll continue to do this work because where we’re focused isn’t national policy, it’s down at the state and local level,” said Szoka.
Looking to the future, conservatives need to get on board because if newer, cheaper forms of power are dismissed it’s going to affect elections, said John Berger, president and CEO of Sunnova Energy in Houston.
“People are starting to get angry. Power bills in some areas are greater than mortgage payments,” he said. “We need to address these issues – ratepayers are also called voters.”
Renewable energy isn’t only a liberal cause
Ten years ago renewable energy wasn’t a partisan issue, said Christensen. In fact, when George W. Bush was governor of Texas in 1999 and deregulated the state’s power market, he specifically included renewable power goals, which his successor Rick Perry doubled down on. Texas became a wind, and later solar, powerhouse.
“Today, every single thing is either red-coated or blue-coated, everything has a partisan angle,” he said.
The shift has been dramatic. Strong support for government efforts to develop clean energy has plummeted over the past five or so years among conservative Republicans, from 54% to 24% and from 70% to 49% among moderate Republicans, data from a Yale/George Mason University survey this spring showed.
“It’s not surprising the support for clean energy has fallen sharply among Republicans in recent years given that Trump and Fox News relentlessly trash talk it,” said Edward Maibach, an expert on climate communications at George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication who co-led the survey.
CEN came into existence to help provide an alternative view of renewable energy at the state and county level, say organizers.
“I want to make electricity boring again,” said Stover. “Let’s have adult conversations about electricity. It’s not, ‘You’re in wind and solar, you’re bad,’ or ‘You’re in coal and oil, you’re good.'”
CEN works in the towns and counties where zoning decisions are made and where renewables are being blocked. A USA TODAY analysis published in February found that at least 15% of counties in the U.S. have effectively halted new utility-scale wind, solar, or both.
To help reclaim energy independence as a conservative stance, CEN and offshoots, including the Land & Liberty Coalition, work at the micro level, spending time not just in state capitals but also churches, county fairs, zoning commissions and county council meetings to preach a rock-ribbed Republican message about something locals often see as liberal stupidity.
They have an “all of the above” attitude to energy. Topics at the summit included geothermal and nuclear power, hydrogen hubs and industrial carbon capture.
“You need a trusted, conservative voice to go in there and tell them the truth, get beyond all the misinformation they’re seeing,” said Szoka, who spent ten years as a Republican state legislator in South Carolina. “We’re that voice.”
Not every Republican sees renewables as a lefty plot. Surveys show that Republicans support not just more oil and gas drilling, but also more solar (70%) and wind (60%.)
Take the solar customer in Pahrump, Nevada, that Drew Bond of the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions recently visited.
“This guy is a Vietnam veteran, lives in the middle of the desert, has solar on his roof, drives a diesel truck and a Chevy Bolt and he had a Trump bandana on,” Bond said.
The take-home message? “We need to stop putting people in boxes.”
It was a message that pleased more liberal-leaning groups.
Colin Leyden of the Environmental Defense Fund spoke at the conference. While EDF gets categorized as liberal, he said they’ve actually had a long history of endorsing candidates on the right. But in recent years it’s been a struggle to find Republican candidates to endorse.
“I’m happy to hear that you’re seeing an evolution of the climate conversation on the right,” he said.
He also acknowledged that the left needs to be more honest about the trade-offs wind and solar demand. There are frequent complaints about the land they take up and the fact that it’s almost all in rural and agricultural areas.
“We talk about climate denial, but there’s also tradeoff denial,” he said.
Fighting against misinformation and for free markets
CEN works in the trenches across 25 states. That includes championing the property rights of farmers and ranchers to build solar or wind on their property, fighting over-regulation and getting power projects built that bring significant revenue to rural communities without raising taxes, said Bradley Pischea, national director of the Land & Liberty Coalition.
They also spend a lot of time fighting misinformation about new kinds of energy as online posts claim (wrongly) that wind turbines make people sick, solar panels drip poison into the soil, offshore wind kills whales and high voltage transmission lines cause cancer.
“If there was one thing I could do to support renewable energy it would be to wipe Facebook off the face of the Earth,” said Stover.
It takes a conservative voice to refute the lies, said Szoka. Send someone from Greenpeace to a county council meeting in Kansas and nothing they say is going to get listened to. Send out someone who’s spent a dozen years working on pro-life issues or gun rights or tax cuts and they’re harder to ignore.
Sometimes being part of the “eco-right” means taking left-of-center money, said Szoka. The organization receives funding from energy companies but also from philanthropic groups such as the MacArthur Foundation, Argosy, McKnight and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
“While CEN does not necessarily agree with the politics of all of its donors, we do agree on the need for a clean energy transition and CEN wants to ensure America’s global leadership and economic dominance in that transition,” he said.
In the end, consumers will always go with the cheapest power, which today means wind and solar, said John Berger, President and CEO of Sunnova Energy in Houston.
“Costs will fall, prices will fall and guess what? We’ll solve the climate crisis,” he said. “Government needs to get out of the way of the power sector and unleash the technologies that can bring this about.”
