In our ongoing commitment to remain nonpartisan when it comes to climate change, we showcase different voices and perspectives to provide a fuller picture about the issue. Many conservatives embrace the clean-energy transition because of its potential for economic growth and greater energy security. To give us some insight on how some Republican leaders view energy policy and the transition, we asked Bob Inglis to write this blog. Bob is the Executive Director of republicEn.org, a prominent leader of the burgeoning EcoRight, which is a growing movement among conservatives who “believe in the power of American free enterprise and innovation to solve climate change.”
Clean Energy Policies Benefit Everyone: Just Ask Red States
By Bob Inglis
Conservatives across the U.S. understand that clean energy holds great economic promise and is already delivering benefits. Just look at the top three wind states in 2023 – Texas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. These “red states” saw an opportunity and they took it. Realizing they have a plentiful supply of wind, they took advantage of the prevailing winds in the form of federal policies meant to incentivize tapping into this God-given resource. The wind industry in the U.S. has delivered nearly $330 billion of investment in the last 20 years ($10 billion in new projects in 2023) and employs 131,000 Americans (plus 300,000 adjacent jobs).
Solar has its own happy story. As of 2023, nearly 280,000 Americans were working in the solar industry at more than 10,000 companies in every state, generating over $60 billion of private investment in the American economy. Again, two Republican-led states, Texas and Florida, are among the top three solar-generating states in the United States.
It is this recognition that there is money to be made, jobs to be generated, and communities to flourish thanks to clean energy projects and investment that led 18 GOP lawmakers in November 2024 to write a letter to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. In the letter, they asked him not to take a sledgehammer to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA), the Biden-era omnibus climate bill. While the IRA passed in partisan fashion, it actually included many policies that were championed by Republican lawmakers as standalone bills.
“Energy tax credits have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country – including many districts represented by members of our conference,” they wrote. “We must reverse the policies which harm American families while protecting and refining those that are making our country more energy independent and Americans more energy secure. As Republicans, we support an all-of-the-above approach to energy development and tax credits that incentivize domestic production, innovation, and delivery from all sources.”
These signers of the letter get it: nearly 60% of IRA projects – representing 85% of the investment and 60% of the created jobs – are in red districts. Iowa Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks, the chair of the House Conservative Climate Caucus, gets it. Georgia Congressman Buddy Carter, whose district is home to a $5.5 billion Hyundai EV manufacturing plant, gets it. And they get it because where you sit determines where you stand. Their districts – like so many others – benefit from clean-energy projects and investments, which create good-paying jobs, contribute to the tax base, and in many cases, revitalize communities.
Clean-energy policies and projects are good for the economy, good for communities, and good for the climate.
Bob Inglis is the Executive Director of republicEn.org and a former, two-term U.S. congressman representing Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C. Bob created the Energy and Enterprise Initiative (now republicEn.org) at George Mason University in 2012. For his work on climate change, Bob was given the 2015 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. He appears in the film Merchants of Doubt and in the Showtime series YEARS of Living Dangerously (episodes 3 and 4), and he’s spoken at TEDxBeaconStreet and TEDxJacksonville.
