House Republicans who want their party to engage on climate policy will likely continue to be led over the next two years by a lawmaker who has been largely silent on the issue.
Since winning the gavel in October 2023, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has done little to shed light on whether he believes human activity is contributing to the climate crisis — even as more of his members are joining caucuses designed to stop the planet from warming.
His failure so far to weigh in on the matter in a meaningful way raises questions about whether House Republican leaders will take climate members’ concerns seriously in the 119th Congress — especially with Johnson under pressure from both archconservatives as he also attends to moderates making up his narrow majority.
“I’d like to hear what he has to say about it,” said Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, regarding the speaker’s climate views.
Carter, a vice chair of the House Conservative Climate Caucus, was among the nearly two dozen House Republicans surveyed by POLITICO’s E&E News in recent months about whether Johnson believes in the scientific conclusions surrounding climate change.
None of them could say for sure where Johnson stood on the matter, making it hard to anticipate how the speaker will help settle internal divisions on climate and energy — especially when House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a fellow Louisianan, is vocally skeptical that humans are having a role in warming the planet.
Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.), the incoming chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, which typically supports expanded fossil fuel development, said he hadn’t spoken to Johnson about the issue but suspected the speaker is “not interested in doing a whole lot of climate games” and doubted that “it’s a big thing on his agenda.”
Johnson could run up against the Conservative Climate Caucus, which already has a history of whipping Republican members on some legislation.
Founding Chair John Curtis, who is replacing Mitt Romney in the Senate, used his bully pulpit during the last Congress to help sink amendments to the Energy-Water appropriations bill that would have gutted federal energy efficiency programs.
Heather Reams, president of the center-right Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions and co-chair of the board of directors of the Conservative Climate Foundation — a nonprofit that supports the caucus’s work — said new Chair Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) has discussed ways to make the caucus more muscular.
“Right now, the Conservative Climate Caucus is an educational caucus,” Reams explained. “But [Miller-Meeks] has talked about moving it to a stronger posture.”
Aides for Miller-Meeks, who is going into her third term after a tight reelection campaign, did not make her available for an interview.
Johnson is meanwhile facing opposition from his right flank for putting spending bills on the floor that didn’t sufficiently cut spending and address other conservative priorities.
Winning a full term as speaker Friday will not be easy, even with President-elect Donald Trump’s endorsement earlier this week and follow up calls to certain lawmakers. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has said he remains undecided was weighing alternatives. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) appears to be a hard no.
“I respect and support President Trump, but his endorsement of Mike Johnson is going to work out about as well as his endorsement of Speaker Paul Ryan,” Massie wrote on social media. “We’ve seen Johnson partner with the democrats to send money to Ukraine, authorize spying on Americans, and blow the budget.”
Assuming Johnson retains the gavel, a first test in the new Congress could be how he navigates an intraparty battle over the future of the clean energy tax credits codified in the Democrats’ 2022 climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act.
Johnson has previously said he supports taking a “scalpel,” not a “sledgehammer,” to the green tax incentives that have spurred manufacturing booms in red districts around the country.
But it’s not yet clear what pressure Johnson will be under to take a harder line in slashing components of the IRA, which Trump has called a “con job” and a “sham.”
Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), co-chair of the House Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, who led the August letter to Johnson about the tax credits, said he has not received a commitment from the speaker one way or the other.
“Our goal is to save as many of the tax credits that are working as we possibly can,” said Garbarino.
‘People don’t know’
Rather than hammer Johnson for an answer on climate change, many Republicans say they have chosen to give him some breathing room.
But Johnson strikes a notable contrast to his immediate successor, Kevin McCarthy of California, who urged his conference to talk more about environmental issues in a way that would resonate with younger voters even as the GOP-led House continued to push staunchly pro-fossil-fuel policy and reject mandates to reduce emissions.
Johnson’s public record on climate change is limited. During an exchange with constituents during a 2017 town hall, he said he doubted whether driving SUVs was really contributing to climate change.
That same year, Johnson wrote an op-ed in the Shreveport Times on the occasion of the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord under the first Trump administration. The comments raise more questions than answers.
“Few Americans deny that the earth’s climate is changing. … Evidence shows that cycles of climate change have always been a part of the earth’s history,” Johnson wrote.
“We don’t need the U.N. dictating to us how to be responsible stewards of what God has given us,” Johnson continued.
He has since said little else, with Johnson’s office having declined multiple requests from POLITICO’s E&E News to elaborate on the speaker’s position.
And while his silence is notable given he hails from a state vulnerable to coastal erosion and flooding, it’s not surprising to people familiar with his work in the state Legislature.
“There’s a reason people don’t know” his position, said Jackson Voss, a climate policy coordinator with the Louisiana-based Alliance for Affordable Energy.
“Obviously, climate and the environment have not been issues that Speaker Johnson, throughout his political career, has focused on very much. He was briefly in the state Legislature, and he focused almost entirely on trying to restrict LGBTQ and abortion rights.”
They also point to the fact that he hails from a region that’s more inland, shielding him from the worst effects of extreme weather events while reaping the economic benefits of the Louisiana oil economy.
“His district hasn’t until recently started to really see the effects of climate,” said Davante Lewis, a Louisiana public service commissioner who has held various roles in local governing coinciding with Johnson’s political career. “Hurricanes never make it that far up north in Louisiana until recently. There weren’t ice storms that were happening so frequently.”
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), a Conservative Climate Caucus vice chair, said it was “very important” the group prioritize discussing climate issues with the speaker, both to understand Johnson’s views and share the group’s perspective.
“It’s just like Donald Trump, who has finally got the American worker, especially the union worker, to believe that our team is for them,” Walberg said.
“I think on the climate front it will be a little more difficult, but Republicans are good stewards: Just because we want to use our resources doesn’t mean we want to abuse it,” he added. “What we can bring to Speaker Johnson is alternative means by which to message something that we truly believe in.”
‘A winning argument’
In previewing a legislative agenda for the next Congress, Johnson has spoken at length about his interest in pursuing policies to “restore America’s energy dominance.”
In a set of speeches delivered in the weeks leading up to the November elections, he gave some more clues about the policies he would endorse.
Giving remarks at the New York Stock Exchange in October, Johnson said a Republican governing trifecta would “cut wasteful Green New Deal spending,” specifically “the Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act that is costing twice as much as it advertised and is sending our taxpayer dollars to China.”
He attacked the outgoing Biden administration’s energy actions and environmental regulatory standards on everything from electric vehicles and natural gas export approvals to refining.
“These mandates, which have ignored the untapped resources on our own soil and ignored the science of supporting natural gas products, have made fueling up at the gas station and cooling or heating homes astronomically more expensive,” Johnson said.
They were similar to the comments Johnson made during an appearance hosted by the conservative American First Institute a month earlier, where he also promised to “hold the handle” of the “blow torch” Trump wants to take to the “regulatory state.”
In none of these statements, however, did Johnson connect expanding domestic energy production to lowering greenhouse gas emissions — a talking point employed by many Republicans who want to underscore that the U.S. should be recognized for producing oil and natural gas more cleanly than other countries, while also innovating around other alternative fuel sources like nuclear and hydropower.
Reams, of CRES, said anyone who is judging Johnson’s statements by whether he mentions the words “climate change” is missing the point.
“Republicans engage on climate differently than Democrats do,” she said. “Democrats talk about their climate agenda; Republicans talk about an energy agenda, and climate is a co-benefit of it.
“So if you’re replacing coal with natural gas, you’re lowering emissions. That’s a climate policy,” she continued. “Sitting at the [Republican National Convention], I know a lot of reporters were like, ‘I didn’t hear anything on climate.’ And I was like, ‘I heard climate left and right: clean air, clean water, we do things more cleanly than anywhere else in the world.’”
Similarly, Nick Loris, public policy vice president at the center-right C3 Solutions, said, “It may not be in the members’ interest” to apply the “climate” label to energy legislation, given that characterization is so politically polarizing to much of the Republican base.
Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), who left Congress to be the next governor of his home state, said he was hopeful Johnson would set an example for Republicans to improve their rhetoric in this policy arena at the very least.
“I think everybody should talk about it,” Armstrong said. “This is a winning argument for Republicans.”
Reporter Kelsey Brugger contributed.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
