Republicans are in retreat on climate change.
Party leaders in Congress once boasted about finding conservative solutions to global warning, and rank-and-file lawmakers discussed pressure from constituents and activists to act. Now, President Donald Trump’s pro-fossil-fuel ethos is firmly in control.
A handful of Republicans lawmakers still talk about the need to promote renewable energy, but they are increasingly isolated in a party focused on fighting what conservatives call the Democrats’ “Green New Scam.”
“We seem to be in a political retrograde, and yet emissions continue to rise,” said Republican Alex Flint, executive director of the group Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative group focused on reducing planet-warming carbon emissions.
A lot has changed in a fairly short time. In 2016, House Republicans started joining a bipartisan caucus focused on climate solutions. And in 2019, GOP star pollster Frank Luntz urged the federal government to act on climate, publicly disavowing comments he made 20 years prior.
After Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020 and Democrats regained control of Congress, then-House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) created a task force to deal with climate and conservation issues.
Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, now the Republican whip, five years ago talked up “climate resilience” and at one point said of GOP lawmakers, “We all believe climate change is real. We believe mankind is certainly contributing to that.”
Asked last week about action on climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Barrasso said, “Finally, the Republicans are doing the right thing to become energy dominant for this nation in spite of the fact Joe Biden put our head in the noose in the fight against China by shutting down American energy and prioritizing climate over energy that’s available, affordable and reliable.”
Trump himself has repeatedly called human-made climate change a hoax. And Energy Secretary Chris Wright called the international Paris climate agreement “silly.”
The conservative and bipartisan climate caucuses do still exist on Capitol Hill, and so do a small number of Hill Republicans who talk openly about climate change — including Sens. John Curtis of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, as well as Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York.
But while dozens of House Republicans signaled their support for protecting renewable energy tax incentives, the party was largely unified in voting to phase them out.
Murkowski and Curtis did help strike a last-minute deal to make that phase-out more lenient. But they have not pushed back, at least not publicly, on the administration’s plans to roll back an EPA decision that underpins federal regulations against greenhouse gas emissions. Murkowski said the move was “not unexpected.”
Tom Pyle, head of the conservative Institute for Energy Research, said, “The climate wing of the GOP has been clipped by reality. Heck, even the Democrats aren’t talking about climate anymore.”
Interviews with lawmakers, advocates and administration officials show how the landscape for climate action feels much different under Trump 2.0 — with many Republicans moving away from well worn arguments against picking winners and losers in energy.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) say the shift in his party is a reaction to Biden-era green energy policies, which he said were too harsh on fossil fuels.
“We had everybody saying you just got to go all renewable, forget the reasonable transition. Now, you got people going the opposite direction,” said Tillis, a moderate who is retiring from Congress next year.
“I think most members are still in the same place,” said Tillis. “Intuitively, they know it’s an all-of-the-above strategy.”
Others attribute the GOP’s increased hostility to wind and solar on the administration’s rhetoric and the decreasing prominence of climate change as an electoral issue.
“The sobering lesson we may be learning is that Trump has correctly judged that politics is about the short term — the consequences be damned,” Flint said.
Clean energy Republicans are not gone, said Anne Kelly, vice president of government relations at the sustainability group Ceres. They are just “shell-shocked” by administration actions.
Heather Reams, president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a group that works with Republicans on climate and renewable energy issues, said: “No one has successfully gotten in Trump’s bull’s-eye and withstood it.”
She said, “House members being singled out by the president, in any administration — that’s tough. In this administration, that could be the end of a congressional career: ‘Why should I stick my head out on something that’s not a top voter issue?'”
The election results are a big reason why Democrats are joining climate-minded Republicans in highlighting the economic benefits of renewable energy development rather than its benefits for the planet.
“Those of us in the climate community who are used to making a more broad argument about where we are in the sweep of history have to get comfortable making a more immediate argument that says the reason prices are going up is a deliberate policy choice of the Republican Party,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
Reams said of climate-minded Republicans, “I think we are in an evolving time. It’s not like we’ve gone from A to B. … I think we are amidst the journey, and we haven’t landed on anything else. It’s kind of hard to put your finger on it.”
Chris Barnard, president of the right-wing American Conservation Coalition, said, “I think the way that we framed it is like — ‘the climate hawk is dead, what comes next?’ And it should be something that aligns energy dominance needs with reindustrialization, with climate co-benefits as a result,” Barnard said. “It’s just a new way of approaching and thinking about these issues.”
Advocates on the left say the Republican Party has had plenty of time to show its true colors on climate action.
“I think assuming congressional Republicans are going to stick up for renewable energy is a mistake,” said Emily Becker, a deputy director at the center-left think tank Third Way. “How many times do we need to touch a hot stove?”
‘All folded like origami’
Republicans’ posture toward clean energy and climate change was on full display during this year’s monthslong fight to pass their One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
GOP moderates, particularly in the House, ceded ground on renewable energy, allowing the near-immediate phase-outs of wind and solar tax credits. The Senate eased but didn’t prevent the incentives’ demise.
Even though the megalaw preserved credits for geothermal, hydrogen and nuclear, House moderates caved when it came to extending tax credits for wind and solar — even after 21 GOP members signed letters urging leniency.
The night before the House voted on its version, Garbarino stormed out of the speaker’s office saying he was “not happy.” Garbarino, co-chair of the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, ended up missing that early morning roll call but said he would have supported the legislation.
“They all folded like origami,” Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) said of the 21 Republicans. “Even to the detriment of their own districts, where these investments have been made. It just hasn’t grown into a policy-making effort. It seems it’s maybe political cover for them.”
But reflecting later on the chain of events, Garbarino rejected accusations that his pro-renewable-energy positions were political cover.
“If it wasn’t for the work prior to the Big Beautiful Bill, everything would have been repealed right away. It was the work we did, both publicly and behind the scenes, both here in the House and Senate, I think that got us to the final language,” the New Yorker said.
“Was the final language perfect? No, the language wasn’t perfect on a lot of things, but it was not a full repeal which a lot of people demanded. I am happy. I am satisfied with what we got in the bill. … It gives people time.”
Sarah Chieffo, vice president of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, which mostly supports Democrats, said pro-renewables advocacy from some Republicans has been positive. The group has launched a $4 million campaign to denounce what it calls the “Big Ugly Bill.”
“I don’t want to greenwash it, but I think how some Republicans in Congress are now talking about clean energy as something we need to get on the grid for energy security and to lower cost impacts is an important shift from even five years ago,” she said.
What about Miller-Meeks?
One key player appeared to be working mostly behind the scenes: Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), who chairs the House’s Conservative Climate Caucus.
Last year, the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) named Miller-Meeks renewable energy champion of the year, and she defended the clean energy credits to top tax Republican Rep. Jason Smith in April. But the swing state congresswoman was relatively quiet during the late-stage public fights over the credits.
Miller-Meeks’ approach was a departure from that of Curtis, who founded the Conservative Climate Caucus in 2021 when he was a House member. As caucus leader, Curtis was one of the most vocal GOP representatives when it came to climate issues and has continued that work in the Senate.
With Tillis and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Curtis helped delay fast confirmation of some administration nominees over renewable energy concerns and how the administration would implement the phase-out of incentives.
Curtis has also reached out to conservatives like fellow Utah, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Sen. Mike Lee. “We’ve talked more about what I’m doing, and I’ll just say: He’s not very critical of what I’m doing,” said Curtis.
In an email through her office, Miller-Meeks defended her work, saying the tax credits ended up “in a far better position than I could have hoped this time last year.”
“When we sent the first letter, to Speaker Johnson, asserting Republican support for a more comprehensive conversation on energy tax credits we were fighting against full repeal,” she wrote.
“As more projects were built and came online, the urgency of meeting demand for AI and meetings the energy needs of AI increased, and politization died down, and a reasonable conversation about the benefits of the tax credits emerged.”
Miller-Meeks, who is facing a tough reelection fight, said she helped educate House Republican colleagues about the benefits of renewable energy tax credits and ended up with a compromise.
“But after many conversations with a variety of stakeholders everyone understands the timeline and good projects will continue to be built,” she said.
The group Climate Power, which has Democratic ties, says the GOP agenda is threatening more than 100 clean energy projects and thousands of jobs.
“The credits were never going to last forever and the is a reasonable runway for businesses to meet US energy needs and continue to build out and strengthen our energy system,” said Miller-Meeks.
‘Things appear to be worse’
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), who founded the Climate Solutions Caucus in 2016, said that while Trump may be shifting rightward on climate, the megabill fight actually signaled that not all Hill Republicans are following.
“On the surface, things appear to be worse,” said Curbelo. “Trump 2.0 is definitely looking at climate and energy issues through the lens of the culture wars. Certainly that’s a lot more prevalent in the administration than it was the first time around.”
But beneath the surface, Republican support has not diminished, Curbelo argued — in fact, on the Hill, the opposite is true. He pointed to a failed amendment from Lee that would have scrapped the production and investment tax credits for wind and solar energy. It went down 21-79.
Curbelo says it’s notable that at least some of the Democrats’ 2022 climate law survived this year when Republicans in 2023 expressed support for full repeal under pressure from the far right during debt ceiling negotiations.
“It depends on your perspective and where you want to start measuring from,” Curbelo said. “But certainly anyone should have expected this to be a major target for the Republican trifecta and the truth is we landed somewhere between the scalpel and the sledgehammer approach and I think significant investments were protected.”
Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell unseated Curbelo in 2018 elections. She was then ousted by GOP Rep. Carlos Gimenez, who went from stressing climate issues as mayor of Miami-Dade County to downplaying them in Congress.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
