1. Introduction

1Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump kept lambasting Joe Biden’s climate and energy record, calling the package of measures passed by the Democrats a ‘Green New Scam,’ which he vowed to dismantle once in power. And yet, in the summer of 2024, eighteen Republican House members sent House Speaker Mike Johnson a letter urging him to preserve the green tax credits contained in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Joe Biden’s signature piece of legislation.1 In response, Mike Johnson signaled that Republicans might use a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer to repeal the IRA, prompting vigorous pushback from other Republican lawmakers, who were calling for a full repeal of the law. This suggests that there may be a modicum of ideological diversity on matters of climate and energy policy on the right of the political spectrum in the US, and that energy policy might be in the process of becoming a bone of contention within the conservative movement.

2One potentially fruitful way of studying the scope of ideological diversity on climate and energy in US conservative circles is to investigate and compare the views promoted by conservative advocacy groups dedicated to energy policy as they set out to influence Republican officials. Historically, a large number of powerful conservative advocacy groups have gone to great lengths to preclude climate action. For example, in November 2022, a coalition of conservative organizations sent House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy a letter urging him to disband the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis set up by the Democrats.2 Conservative interest groups have also been instrumental in fueling Republican opposition to clean energy laws at the state level.3 Since the late 2010s, however, some conservative clean energy groups have been calling on Republican officials to look more favorably on low-carbon technologies and on an innovation-driven approach to climate action.4 This more competitive environment offers opportunities for advocacy groups intent on questioning majority positions on matters of energy within the Republican Party.

3In this article, I assess the differences and commonalities between two subgroups of conservative advocacy organizations on matters of climate and energy policy. The first subgroup comprises Heritage Action (HA) and the American Energy Alliance (AEA), two conservative organizations aligned with Donald Trump’s resolute opposition to any federal effort to bring about the decarbonization of the US economy. The second subgroup is composed of ClearPath (CP) and Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), two organizations whose mission statement consists in promoting climate policies consistent with conservative policy preferences. This study seeks to determine whether there is a significant gap between conservative advocacy groups claiming to take climate change seriously and other groups, which adopt an openly hostile approach. What are the main bones of contention pitting those subgroups against each other? On what do they agree? Ultimately, the goal of this comparative study is to understand whether ideological diversity on climate action is actually on the rise on the right of the US political spectrum, or whether these disagreements over energy policy are merely superficial and, therefore, hardly consequential. I focus on the public statements produced by those four organizations from January 2024, when the Republican presidential primaries began, to election day, on November 5, 2024. This time period seems especially appropriate to compare the two subgroups’ visions of climate and energy policy, as all four organizations were trying to influence Republican candidates in a highly consequential election cycle. The year 2024 began with the decision by the Biden administration to impose a moratorium on the authorization of new LNG terminals, which sparked vocal condemnations from Republicans. More broadly, the 2024 election was largely shaped by public discontent over soaring inflation, which the conservative critics of the incumbent administration were quick to attribute to Joe Biden’s quest for decarbonization. Later during the campaign, after Kamala Harris had become the Democratic candidate for president, she went out of her way to convince US voters that she had no intention of banning hydraulic fracturing ‒ notwithstanding her previous statements to the contrary. Meanwhile, her Republican opponent constantly reiterated his willingness to amend the nation’s environmental regulations in order to empower the fossil fuel sector to usher in a new era of US energy dominance. This emphasis on the importance of energy policy meant that the stakes were particularly high for conservative advocacy groups hoping to effect public policy change in this area.

2. Methods

4This comparative study is predicated on a qualitative research design. Following Creswell and Poth’s recommendations, I went through each step of the process of qualitative analysis. First, I identified an intention for the case study. Second, I investigated multiple cases bounded by time so that I could compare and contrast the advocacy groups’ perspectives regarding energy and climate policy. In order to do so, I collected data from different sources of information. Third, analysis of the data enabled me to describe the cases extensively and explore the main themes.5 The theoretical lessons to be drawn emerge inductively at the end of the analytical process.6

5In order to determine whether viewpoint diversity regarding energy policy is on the rise among US conservative advocacy groups, I emulated the way Marquardt et al. conducted their analysis of the climate rhetoric mobilized by three right-wing populist leaders, using an inductive qualitative approach to compare and contrast the views expressed by the four conservative advocacy groups under study.7 This allowed me to analyze their response to a wide range of issues and policies, from the role of industrial policy in fostering innovation to the root causes of inflation.

6The two subgroups under study were chosen because they are emblematic of the two perspectives that I intended to compare and contrast. The climate-conscious conservative subgroup comprises CRES and CP. The ClearPath foundation is a 501(c)3 organization whose mission is “to accelerate American innovation to reduce global energy emissions.”8 A conservative entrepreneur from North Carolina created CP in 2014 with a view to convincing conservative voters and policymakers that climate action and conservative principles need not be antithetical. CRES is a 501(c)4 organization dedicated to the promotion of a conservative approach to climate action. It features among the conservative climate advocacy groups that have received grants from such foundations as Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, which are used to financing mainstream environmental organizations. Those foundations have justified this move by emphasizing the need for bipartisanship to secure robust and enduring climate policies.9

7The second subgroup includes two organizations reflecting a deep-seated conservative hostility toward climate action. AEA is a 501(c)4 organization acting as the advocacy arm of the Institute for Energy Research, which has received funding from Koch Industries.10 Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, AEA was cited among the organizations helping Donald Trump to prepare his future energy policies.11 So was HA, a 501(c)4 organization acting as the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, a highly influential conservative think tank that attracted considerable attention thanks to the publication of Project 2025. According to David Shafie, the Heritage Foundation had also been instrumental in shaping the first Trump administration’s energy policies.12

8Many US advocacy groups are 501(c)4 organizations, which spread political messages and engage in lobbying while granting their donors anonymity, as long as they can prove that their political initiatives do not exceed 50% of their overall activities.13 501(c)4 organizations became an even more attractive vehicle for various interests willing to engage in political advocacy while retaining anonymity after the US Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that most legal limits on their political activities were unconstitutional. 501(c)3 organizations, by contrast, are much more limited in their ability to engage in politics, as they cannot participate in political campaigns directly or endorse candidates.14 Yet, Andrew Rich has argued that 501(c)3 organizations, like think tanks, often aggressively seek to shape the policy-making process.15 This has led Jason Stahl to call free-market think tanks “one of the central institutions of conservative political organizing.”16 Echoing this perspective, Baumgartner et al. have included think tanks and foundations in their list of interest groups involved in US politics.17 In order to account for the blurring of the demarcation between research-based activities and political advocacy, Adam Wellstead and Michael Howlett have recommended that 501(c)3 organizations interested in shaping public policy outcomes be called “knowledge-based policy influence organizations.”18 Of the four organizations under study, CP is the only 501(c)3 organization, but its explicit mission to promote clean energy and influence US conservatives makes it a very good example of Wellstead and Howlett’s assessment.

9The two subgroups qualify as what John Creswell and Cheryl Poth call instrumental cases, in that they were selected to shed light on different perspectives regarding the same set of issues.19 The goal is to “employ maximum variation as a sampling strategy to represent diverse cases and to fully describe multiple perspectives about the cases.”20 The comparative study focuses on two different units of analysis: public statements compiled by the four organizations on their official websites and tweets they posted on their official X accounts from January 1, 2024 to November 5, 2024. Using advanced searches on X, I collected tweets (excluding replies and re-tweets) mentioning at least one of the following terms: climate, coal, energy, energies, gas, geothermal, global warming, hydro, Inflation Reduction Act, IRA, I.R.A., nuclear, solar, wind. On the organizations’ websites, I reviewed all statements and publications posted during the period under study, except for HA, which does not just concern itself with energy-related matters. On HA’s website, I searched for statements and publications including the following terms: climate, global warming, energy. The data collected included official statements, podcasts, opinion pieces, and reports. Appendix 2 of the supplementary materials provides an outline of the material analyzed in this qualitative study.

10After collecting the material from the four advocacy groups, I set out to code the data manually. Analysis of the material enabled me to uncover the recurring themes explored by the members of the four advocacy groups. Building on these themes, I was able to identify the five analytical dimensions that are discussed in Section 3. In a general inductive approach, a large amount of text data is synthesized into a shorter format, so that the researcher can gradually move from the data to the main aims of the study. In the end, the goal is to forge a theory about the ideological perspectives that inform the data.21 I selected statements that reflected recurrent positions aired by the four advocacy groups regarding the role of federal regulations in the energy sector, the legitimacy of climate action, the legitimacy of federal investments in the energy sector, the ‘proper’ energy mix for the United States, and the geopolitics of energy. I went on to code the material manually along those five analytical dimensions. I then proceeded to compare and contrast the positions of the two subgroups of organizations, in order to identify the issues they agreed and disagreed on. Specifically, my aim was to gauge the actual scope and depth of ideological diversity among those groups, to find out whether the rhetorical differences between them were truly substantial or merely superficial. Appendices 1 and 2 in the supplementary materials contain a detailed description of the coding process and feature a wide range of examples for each analytical dimension.

3. Theory

11Since the 1990s, the Republican Party and its free-market conservative allies have emerged as a formidable obstacle to consequential climate action, whether at the state level or at the federal level.22 Judith Layzer has argued that conservative hostility toward decarbonization policies has been a continuation of the neoliberal assault against government regulations.23 According to Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright, many conservatives interpreted calls for decarbonization in the wake of the 1992 Rio summit as an attempt to restore the legitimacy of the regulatory state, which they strenuously resisted in the name of laissez-faire economic ideology/commitments.24 This position is often accounted for by the oversized influence of the fossil fuel industry on the Republican Party.25 Further, conservative opposition to climate action has been interpreted as an anti-reflexive effort to affirm the supremacy of industrial capitalism, insulate Western modernity from its environmentalist detractors, and call into question the legitimacy of impact science.26 More recently, the rising appeal of Donald Trump’s populist style has prompted Daniel Fiorino to highlight the growing influence of a kind of right-wing energy populism, characterized by a determined opposition to scientific expertise and to US commitments to climate multilateralism.27

12And yet, there is some evidence to suggest that Republicans and conservatives have not always been uniformly and monolithically opposed to climate action. In the 2000s, for example, Republican Senator John McCain partnered with his Democratic colleague Joe Lieberman on three occasions to try to secure the passage of a cap-and-trade bill.28 At the beginning of Donald Trump’s first presidential term, a group called the Climate Leadership Council, led by such Republican figures as James Baker and Henry Paulson, drafted a policy paper urging the incoming Republican administration to adopt a version of the carbon tax that would dovetail with free-market principles.29 In 2021, Republican Congressman John Curtis set up a Conservative Climate Caucus to welcome Republican officials willing to engage on climate action. The members of this caucus remain vocal in their support for fossil fuels and do not usually diverge from mainstream Republican hostility toward regulations and taxes, but they tend to be significantly more in favor than other Republicans of federal support for low-carbon technologies.30

13According to Matto Mildenberger, just because climate policy support is significantly stronger on the left, one ought not to overlook the existence of active minorities on both the left and the right, and the importance of within-coalition cleavages.31 Because of slim majorities in the US Congress and institutional barriers to smooth legislating, dissent may have notable policy consequences. In such a context, particular attention ought to be given to self-described climate-conscious conservative advocacy groups, if only because, as Leah Stokes puts it, “organized combat between interest groups is at the heart of US politics.”32 Baumgartner et al. point out that interest groups almost always try to either maintain or upset an established status quo in the policy process.33 Hence, the raison d’être of conservative climate-skeptic groups has been to maintain opposition to climate action as the ideological norm in Republican and conservative circles.34

14In light of the data analysis conducted for this study, viewpoint diversity regarding climate and energy policy among conservative advocacy groups can be scrutinized along five analytical categories:

151) The role of federal regulations in the energy sector. The conservative indictment of the regulatory state dates back to at least the 1970s, with Kenneth Andrew and Bob Edwards singling out the increasing number of federal regulations in the 1960s as one of the leading causes behind the spike in the number of conservative advocacy groups.35 Put simply, the conservative case against environmental and climate regulations is predicated on the notion that such regulations will inevitably turn out to be counter-productive interferences with market forces, driving up prices and causing major misallocations of resources.36

162) The legitimacy of climate action. The key issue here is whether or not Republicans and conservatives should regard climate change as a serious threat worth addressing through targeted public policies. Willem Van Rensburg has identified three distinct forms of climate skepticism: evidence skepticism, denying the physical reality of climate change; process skepticism, raising doubts about the process by which scientific institutions produce knowledge about climate change; and response skepticism, targeting public policies aimed at fostering decarbonization.37 Interestingly, many Congressional Republicans had foregone evidence skepticism by the early 2010s, focusing mostly on thwarting Democratic attempts to pass climate legislation, whilst Donald Trump appeared to remain committed to all three forms of climate skepticism.38 It is worth determining, therefore, the degree to which self-described conservative climate groups diverge from more traditional groups with regards to the seriousness of climate change and the prospects of a transition away from fossil fuels.

173) The legitimacy of federal investments in the energy sector. Another crucial bone of contention centers on whether it behooves the federal government to funnel federal dollars into targeted support for some specific energy sources and emerging technologies deemed essential to the decarbonization of the US economy. Since the Reagan administration, such a perspective, often referred to as industrial policy, has been frequently derided by free-market advocates as an outdated and cumbersome approach to technological innovation. Because of the deleterious effects of the 2008 recession and mounting concerns about deindustrialization and the economic ascendancy of China, industrial policy, defined by Nathaniel Lane as “intentional political action meant to shift the industrial structure of an economy,”39 has recently garnered more attention from US policymakers, especially on the left and center-left of the political spectrum.40 Dani Roderick views decarbonization as an especially appropriate area in which to resort to industrial policy, because private players may refrain from innovating for fear of helping their competitors, and because emerging green technologies badly need federal support in the absence of a nationwide carbon tax in the US.41 Whether conservative climate groups break ranks with their more traditional counterparts on the legitimacy of the entrepreneurial state in the energy sector will be highly indicative of the extent of ideological diversity in conservative circles.

184) The proper energy mix for the United States. It bears repeating that achieving net zero means making deep cuts in fossil fuel use at a fast pace. One may wonder whether any conservative group is prepared to advocate policies that seek to disincentivize fossil fuel use, at least in the medium-to-long term. This question is all the more pressing, as Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has warned that adding low-carbon sources to fossil fuels might only be a way to give the illusion of a transition away from fossil fuels while merely enlarging the size of the energy pie.42

195) The geopolitics of energy. The fight against climate change is also a global collective effort requiring heroic amounts of international cooperation.43 To make matters even more complicated, other foreign policy concerns, such as the energy fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, great power competition between the US and China and the war between the US, Israel and Iran, compete for the limited geopolitical attention of US leaders. This begs several crucial questions: what are the geopolitical implications of climate-related policies? Is the development of low-carbon technologies an asset or a liability for US foreign policy? Because the fracking revolution of the 2000s has empowered US oil and gas companies to wield substantial influence on the world stage, cutting back on US fossil fuel production would have tremendous repercussions on the geopolitical leverage of the United States.44

4. Results

4.1 The role of federal regulations in the energy sector

20None of the organizations under study came out in support of regulations—quite the opposite. AEA, HA, and CRES took a clear stand against regulations, while CP remained largely silent on the matter. Regulations were criticized for causing inefficiencies and undermining economic competitiveness. AEA experts, for example, equated opposing federal regulations favoring electric vehicle (EV) adoption with “limiting the ability of government to do damage.”45

21This stance prompted the organization to oppose a wide range of regulatory efforts launched by the Biden administration to foster decarbonization. There were multiple publications condemning the Biden administration’s tailpipe rule, dismissed as a threat to consumer choice and a “de facto ban on new gasoline cars,”46 and the power plant rule, which CRES called “Clean Power Plan 2.0”47 and AEA caricatured as the “Creating Poverty Plan.”48

22The issue of permitting reform received considerable attention from CRES and CP. Especially after Congress had passed the IRA, many officials, experts, and activists called for revisiting regulations thought to be hindering a wide range of development projects, many of which involving mining and energy, such as the construction of transmission lines or lithium extraction projects. In the second half of 2024, a legislative effort to secure a version of permitting reform, in the form of the Manchin-Barrasso Bill, was launched in the Senate, but failed to gain enough support to be enacted. The Bill sought to facilitate both fossil fuel projects and green tech projects in order to garner bipartisan support. Both CRES and CP repeatedly called for permitting reform and backed the bill. They predicated their case for laxer regulations on the premise that such a shift would benefit all sources of energy, including nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal, not to mention domestic manufacturing. The fact that the Biden administration often oscillated between its dedication to existing environmental standards and its willingness to accelerate the deployment of mining projects on US soil49 was not lost on the organizations. For instance, CP’s Matthew Mailloux warned that the Biden administration’s strict interpretation of NEPA “ultimately increased emissions through permitting delays” and that “the Administration is actively self-sabotaging its climate goals.”50

23Table 1. How conservative advocacy groups view specific energy policies

4.2 The legitimacy of climate action

4.2.1 Supporting climate action and climate-conscious conservatives

24Only CRES and CP came out in support of climate action, stating in unequivocal terms that lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and taking climate change seriously ought to be a priority. These two organizations’ authors did not shy away from using expressions such as “climate benefits,” “emissions reduction,” “deep decarbonization,” and “decarbonizing.” Such a willingness to signal support for climate action per se is all the more notable, as Hess and Brown have noted that clean energy conservatives have a tendency not to mention climate change explicitly for fear of alienating their conservative audience.51

25CRES was also steadfast in its support for self-identified climate-conscious Republicans. During the 2024 election cycle, it endorsed many Conservative Climate Caucus (CCC) members and commended the eighteen House Republicans who sent Mike Johnson a letter demanding that the IRA’s clean energy tax credits be preserved. CRES’s President Heather Reams also co-wrote a column on the RealClearEnergy website with Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who went on to take over from John Curtis as head of the CCC.52

26CRES was particularly active in its support for the PROVE IT Act, a bill sponsored by Curtis, the goal of which was to mandate disclosure of information on the carbon content of products imported to the US, in order to prevent carbon leakage and insulate US carbon-intensive industries from unfair competition from companies located in countries imposing no climate-related regulations.53

4.2.2 Opposing self-styled climate-conscious conservatives

27AEA members went to great lengths to target self-styled climate-conscious Republicans and oppose the PROVE IT Act, which was critiqued as a hypocritical ploy to lay the groundwork for a federal tax on carbon.54 AEA also took aim at John Curtis on X and on their podcast when Curtis was running in Utah’s Republican Senate primary.

4.2.3 Disagreements about the prospects of the energy transition

28In CRES’s scheme of things, the energy transition was to be driven exclusively by technological innovation, which would both alleviate climate change and benefit the US economy. In a similar vein, CP claimed that public and private investments in low-carbon technologies would enhance US economic leadership, citing Direct Air Capture and advanced nuclear reactors as causes for optimism.55 Such optimistic predictions stood in marked contrast to AEA’s perspective on the energy transition. Taking the Biden administration’s quest for an EV revolution as a case in point, AEA members repeatedly dismissed the energy transition as a fool’s errand.

4.3 The legitimacy of federal investments in the energy sector

4.3.1 Support for the logic of federally-sponsored industrial policy

29CRES singled out fiscal incentives as a way of fostering innovation in the energy sector, coming out in support of geothermal, clean hydrogen, wind, and solar tax credits, but also federal support for research and development in low-emissions cement, concrete, and asphalt. CRES and CP were unified in their support for various forms of carbon capture technologies, for example through the Department of Energy (DOE)’s funding of carbon capture demonstration projects.56 CRES also endorsed the IRA’s manufacturing production credit to domestic manufacturers of applicable energy components.57

30CRES and CP, therefore, seemed to stray away from conservative opposition to industrial policy. Without using the phrase itself, both organizations appeared to adhere to the notion that the federal government had a responsibility to foster the development of emerging technologies and pave the way for private sector success. For example, in an article on the missions of DOE, CP’s Jeremy Harrell argued that the fracking ‘revolution’ did not just come about thanks to the risk-taking spirit of entrepreneurs like George P. Mitchell, but also thanks to “government-funded research and development,” emphasizing “the broad role played by DOE in helping Mitchell commercialize technology and the vital role of government at various stages in the development process.”58 His praise of public-private partnerships was reminiscent of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s endorsement of the mixed economy in their scathing critique of the neoliberal policies of the past few decades.59

31Such a stance led CRES’s and CP’s members to praise the IRA and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), two major pieces of legislation informed by the logic of industrial policy and a preference for public-private partnerships. In a podcast interview, Heather Reams declared: “There are tremendous opportunities because of IRA, and then before that, because of the bipartisan Infrastructure Act, that are helping to expand clean energy and the infrastructure around it to expand it.”60

4.3.2 Rejecting the logic of industrial policy

32Consistent with the libertarian critique of the entrepreneurial state,61 AEA and HF systematically chastised the Democrats’ industrial policy strategy as counter-productive meddling in market forces, purportedly bound to lead to chronic inefficiencies and bad economic choices. Conjuring up the memory of ill-fated federally-supported energy companies during the Obama era, like Solyndra, AEA equated industrial policy with corporate cronyism. Those misgivings were echoed by HA’s scathing indictment of the IRA as an allegedly egregious example of reckless government spending “squarely to blame for the cost-of-living crisis.”62

4.4 Defining the right energy mix for the US

4.4.1 The fate of fossil fuel use in the US

33Criticism of the fossil fuel industry was conspicuously absent. By contrast, the Biden administration received severe criticism from the four groups for any step aimed at limiting US fossil fuel production. Particularly problematic in the minds of the members of the four organizations was Joe Biden’s decision to pause authorization of new LNG export terminals in January 2024. On numerous occasions, CRES and CP made the case that, because the US fossil fuel sector is cleaner than its foreign competitors, it would be counter-productive to target it. More broadly, there was no opposition to expansion of fossil fuel use and production from any of the four organizations, which all advocated for the expansion of pipeline infrastructure in the US.

34Unsurprisingly, there was no inclination to tax carbon on the part of the four organizations, which were either very critical of any such scheme (CRES, HA, and AEA) or silent on the matter (CP). CRES supported Congressional Resolution 86 opposing a domestic carbon tax,63 while AEA bemoaned the Biden administration’s emphasis on the social cost of carbon. This hostility toward or lack of interest in carbon taxes is all the more notable, as a small group of free-market think tanks had set forth their own version of a carbon tax in the past.64

4.4.2 Calling for an all-of-the-above energy strategy

35CRES and CP repeatedly emphasized the need to maximize energy production, irrespective of the sources involved. This was presented as a means to both boost economic growth and competitiveness and make the US economy less vulnerable to outside pressures. Thus, in a podcast interview, Heather Reams made the case for a diverse energy mix: “American homegrown energy means solar in the southeast, it means wind in the Plains, it means hydroelectric in the northwest, it means offshore wind in the northeast, it means nuclear across the country, it means oil and gas, it means everything.”65 Such a proposition, to be sure, makes deep decarbonization very difficult to reach.

36Although HA and AEA did not second CRES’s and CP’s calls for an all-of the-above strategy, they did echo their enthusiastic support for nuclear energy. This source of energy was regularly praised for its ability to provide US businesses and consumers with vast amounts of reliable power. Only CRES and CP highlighted nuclear energy’s major contribution to the decarbonization of the US electric grid, however.

37In addition, CRES’s members celebrated the achievements and benefits of the solar and wind industries time and time again. Heather Reams and Abigail Ross Hopper, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, did their utmost to associate wind and solar energy with economic growth and decarbonization, claiming that Republicans and conservatives would be wrong to dismiss them as the preserve of the left: “Supporting clean energy and efforts to reduce emissions are inherently consistent with policies Republicans support. It’s about promoting innovation, economic growth and American leadership. It’s about securing our energy future by using all the resources available to us, not just a select few.”66

4.4.3 Lampooning wind and solar

38The main reason why HA and AEA did no adhere to the other two organization’s all-of-the-above rhetoric stemmed from their determined hostility toward wind and solar. Central to AEA’s critique of wind and solar were their cost and the alleged threat they posed to grid stability as a result of their intermittent nature. AEA members often rejoiced in the travails of the nascent US offshore wind industry, which was scourged during the Biden administration by rising costs and supply chain issues. Another recurrent argument invoked by AEA against renewables revolved around human rights issues plaguing some low-carbon technology supply chains. Investing in solar panels and batteries, AEA authors tirelessly proclaimed, was tantamount to supporting slave labor in China and child labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In AEA’s podcast, EVs, for instance, were dubbed “Chinese slave mobiles.”67

4.5 The geopolitics of energy

4.5.1 Targeting US adversaries

39All four organizations sought to spotlight the threats posed by the US’s geopolitical adversaries in the energy sector, with China and Russia as the most concerning players. Like the three other organizations, CP often vindicated its arguments in favor of investments in the energy sector by stressing the need to avoid relying on China and Russia, citing US dependence on Russia for uranium enrichment as a case in point.68

40Heather Reams made the most of this geopolitical conversation to promote green investments, which, she claimed, would strengthen the US’s geopolitical position.69 This enabled her to cast permitting reform as a geopolitical imperative. Even though she did not mention it explicitly, this line of reasoning dovetailed with the protectionist rationale behind the IRA. CP’s publications also largely aligned with this vision.

4.5.2 Climate policies hurting US interests

41AEA members repeatedly protested that US support for green investments redounded to the advantage of China, citing Chinese dominance in the EV sector as evidence: “China is in the EV game to win it, even though it is U.S. and European climate policies that are creating the demand by adhering to the Paris Climate Accord ignored by China, India and other countries around the world.”70 According to AEA’s narrative, the Americans and the Europeans were primarily serving Chinese interests through their green investments, risking “an ‘extinction-level event’ for US automakers.”71 Such concerns also extended to China’s manufacturing superiority in other green technology sectors. The upshot of this situation, an AEA document claimed, was that the US ought to develop its massive fossil fuel resources on which China depends, instead of foolishly trying to catch up with the Chinese manufacturing sector.72 They also dismissed the IRA’s protectionist clauses as insufficient to truly preserve the US green tech sector in the face of fierce competition from Chinese manufacturers.

5. Discussion

42This study offers a better sense of what those conservatives stand for and, even more importantly, what they do not advocate. Although they clearly diverged from the Democrats on the highly consequential issue of climate regulations, CRES and CP did partially endorse the Biden administration’s approach to the energy transition. For instance, they celebrated key provisions of the IJJA, which few Republicans voted for, and the IRA, which received no Republican support whatsoever. It is also worth noting that, while stopping short of using the phrase itself, they seemed to adhere to the logic of industrial policy consubstantial to the Biden administration’s strategy and anathema to many conservatives. They also appeared to share the Democratic president’s optimistic embrace of the possibility of green growth. This being said, their rejection of or lack of interest in regulations and carbon taxation seemed to corroborate David Hess and Kate Brown’s interpretation of clean-energy conservatism as “a counter-trend within the countermovement,” to be understood as “a movement within conservatism rather than an embrace of progressive environmentalism.”73

43Nevertheless, this study also demonstrates that climate-conscious conservatives are still up against formidable opposition. HA’s and AEA’s intransigence is an unmistakable sign that the powerful ideological and institutional infrastructure intent on defeating climate action that came into being in the 1990s is still firmly in place. When it comes to its strategy, the climate change countermovement, in which HA and AEA actively participate, still bears close resemblance to what it was like in its early phase in the late 1980s and in the 1990s.74 In the final analysis, CRES’s and CP’s aim is to partially reorient the conservative consensus against climate action. This, of course, will be no easy task, as interest groups are significantly more likely to succeed when they are defending the status quo.75

44Since energy transitions do not just involve economic and technological considerations and tend to take on broader cultural meaning for all parties involved, climate-conscious conservative groups like CRES and CP have a vested interest in defusing the currently strident partisan polarization over US climate and energy policy. (For instance, there is some evidence that Republican-leaning voters are less inclined to turn to EVs than their Democratic-leaning counterparts.76) Such identity-driven skepticism toward low-carbon technologies is now in full display under Donald Trump’s second presidency, as shown by his militant hostility toward wind energy. To Jens Marquardt, M. Cecilia Oliveira and Markus Lederer, technocratic approaches to energy policy have been superseded by partisan polarization, turning the debate over climate change into a “battleground for the promotion of and resistance to broader political reforms and societal change.”77 For all the talk about conservative environmentalism, CRES and CP are actually trying to depoliticize energy sources and to restore a more technocratic, non-partisan rationale to US energy policy. By contrast, HA’s and AEA’s systematic opposition to climate action makes it strategically expedient for them to tout wind turbines and solar panels as technologies favored by the left and progressive environmentalists, which a ‘truly principled’ conservative has a duty to reject.

6. Conclusion

45In the end, this qualitative analysis suggests that expectations with respect to viewpoint diversity among US conservatives should remain modest. As is true of the Conservative Climate Caucus, there seems to be no appetite for demand-side approaches to climate action, like a carbon tax, on the part of the two climate change-aware advocacy groups under study. This means that the choice is one between inaction or attempts to expand the supply of low-carbon options. This finding is in line with Hall et al.’s analysis on energy lobbying at the state level, where oil and gas companies may be targeted via legislation, but almost never by Republican-dominated legislatures.78 Support for fossil fuel production, especially oil and gas, remains a deeply held consensus view among conservative advocacy groups, irrespective of whether they profess to care about climate change. This raises questions about the bona fides of CP and CRES as climate advocates. Are their policy recommendations genuinely designed to foster decarbonization? Or, are those groups just trying to grow the size of the energy pie, regardless of the impact on US emissions?

7. Appendix (methodology)

46The comparative study is predicated on a qualitative research design. Even though there are limits regarding the generalizability of the study, it makes it possible to illuminate the views expressed by four conservative advocacy groups trying to shape the climate and energy conversation on the right of the US political spectrum. I provide this supplementary material because I want to make the material used for this study transparent and because I want to explain the coding process I resorted to.

Appendix 1. Material

47Aim: Identify the views and policy positions of the four organizations on climate and energy policy so as to be able to identify what they agree and disagree on.

48Process: Investigate the arguments made by Heritage Action, the American Energy Alliance, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, and ClearPath through a qualitative analysis of tweets and public statements made by those organizations.

49Selected material:

• Tweets posted by the four organizations on climate- and energy-related issues

• Statements on climate- and energy-related issues on the official websites of the four organizations

• Conditions: explicit mentioning of climate change, global warming, energy, or any major source of energy

Appendix 2. Coding process

50The material presented below was coded systematically, guided by the five categories of the analytical framework.

51The role of federal regulations in the energy sector

52The legitimacy of climate action

53The legitimacy of federal investments in the energy sector

54Defining the right energy mix for the US

55The geopolitics of energy