Executive Summary

Climate policy in the United States is in a time of great uncertainty. The Trump administration has moved to roll back much of the policy momentum the sector had experienced in previous administrations. After a number of years of climate policy being a relatively low priority for voters, its salience is rising on the left as progressives move toward a strategy of yoking climate to a larger set of progressive priorities in the form of the Green New Deal. However, as this report explains, such a broad and multi-issue message is less effective with conservatives and may also polarize opinion on some aspects of climate response where bipartisan support had existed. The narrower messages focused on innovation and energy reforms which reach many conservatives, on the other hand, may become less acceptable on the left if they are seen as an alternative to or negation of some of the economic and social policy ideas in the Green New Deal.

Against this intensely polarized landscape, this report analyzes the under-studied conservative side of the aisle to provide insight into the future prospects for cross-partisan efforts at climate policymaking.

The right-leaning environmental movement is largely still playing defense against the Trump administration, both at the level of federal policy and in the struggle for the future of conservative thinking on energy policy. Conservative reform organizations are relatively limited in infrastructure and resources. Efforts to reach conservative voters and influencers are disparate and have proceeded according to a number of different theories of change and understandings of how conservative policy evolves.

Eventual progress will require cross-partisan cooperation, but there currently exists a significant amount of distrust between advocates on the left and the right, who report having relatively few connections beyond a few high-profile efforts. Addressing these realities will be the first steps toward charging up what is currently a tough sled for those looking for fundable opportunities and change by building conservative or bipartisan efforts.

Section 1: Introduction

Section 2: Data and Polling on the Current Support for Climate Change

The available data and polling in the conservative climate sector provide more questions than answers at times. Our key findings include:

• More conservatives support climate change solutions—more than 50 percent in some subcategories—than are willing to say that climate change is real and man-made, indicating that a solutions-based approach, rather than a belief-based approach (who caused it), is more effective for this target audience.
• Advocates for climate change solutions must communicate differently with conservatives than with liberals in order to identify and organize them around cross-partisan solutions. Current data indicate that the most effective communication for identifying and organizing conservative support relies on values-based conservative frameworks such as purity, messages that hearken to the past, and solutions such as renewable energy.
• While the two are not interchangeable, there is less support for a carbon tax than for renewable energy, though some conservative groups and elites are focused on a carbon tax as a policy solution.
• Effective targeting of efforts to identify and organize conservative support for climate change solutions requires a more nuanced categorization of voters than party affiliation or voting history. Pew’s 2017 Political Typology¹ is a useful place to start. Identifying characteristics of conservative climate supporters and developing modeling based on those characteristics could provide a useful refinement of our understanding of conservative subgroups.

Section 3: Corporate Climate Leaders

Efforts to engage conservatives on climate change policy reform typically assume a leading role for business and corporate leaders. A cross-partisan model of environmental-business engagement held sway for decades on other issues. However, companies have been less willing to provide leadership on climate policy. Changing consumer attitudes are a major driving force behind corporation action on climate change, and will continue to be in the future. This trend is additionally supported by the historical, and increasingly large, role corporations see themselves playing in making an impact in the communities in which their employees live and work.

Section 4: State and Local Progress on Climate Change

With the federal government abdicating the central role in moving the space forward, states have begun to pick up the slack.

• States are increasingly taking active leadership on the issue of climate change. Importantly, this progress has not slowed since the 2016 elections, with states experimenting with policies designed to curb emissions and provide incentives for new technologies to flourish.
• Nevertheless, state and local level organizations are having trouble replicating their success, as the strategies necessary for policy change vary by state. To date, efforts for cross-partisan organizing have not been built for scale.
• Three key areas that will need investment to successfully power a replicable model for the climate policy movement, including a power analysis of state-level dynamics, medium-term trust and relationship building, and improving the quality and depth of state-level data.

Section 5: U.S. Landscape of Center-Right Organizations and Funders

The final section examines the universe of center-right organizations and funders to determine, within the landscape of the environmental policy sector, whether there are opportunities for success.

A useful way to understand conservative reform efforts in the space is to analyze them in three categories:

• The Associations approach attempts to mobilize around a previously existing identity (e.g., veterans).
• The Libertarian approach focuses on appealing to the limited government leanings of individuals on the right to advocate for reform.
• Arguably the strongest of the three approaches, the Innovation approach focuses on investing in new science and technologies to address our climate challenges.
• The key structural barriers in the sector include the intensely partisan atmosphere, a lack of strong organizations, and a dearth of strategic funders.

Despite incremental gains and some conservative activism in this policy area, the current partisan environment has created a deep lack of trust that hampers coalition-building. Actors in the conservative environmental movement face challenges in making serious inroads at the national level. There is a lack of funding in the space, and accordingly, a relative lack of strong organizations providing strategic investment opportunities. Nevertheless, the leadership from leaders at the state level and in the business community indicates that there is momentum in the sector that will sustain beyond the current administration.

Any question of policy must start with understanding how the increasingly partisan atmosphere affects efforts for policy reform. On the issue of the environment, we are specifically engaged in the question of whether conservatives can be a healthy part of the marketplace. With a national leadership that has thrown the environmental policy landscape into chaos, there are significant challenges to strategically moving the conservative base to action on these issues.

The analysis below comprises firsthand interviews with those directly engaged in the climate reform space—on the left and the right—as well as secondary research from available polling, studies, and news coverage on the various components of this paper.

A Note on Methodology

We undertook this research not to present a comprehensive picture of climate advocacy, but to specifically focus on right-of-center organizations, attitudes, and strategies. We began with a core assumption that the sector is not a mirror image of the nonpartisan or progressive climate communities, which would require a different analytical lens. We employed two analytical tools. To consider the health of the conservative energy/climate ecosystem, we used the data-driven assessment tools for public policy and impact investing developed by Byrd and Invest America,² specialists in building and sustaining large cross-partisan endeavors. To understand the prospects and challenges posed in attempting to build a cross-partisan climate movement, we relied on the theory of transpartisanship set out by Hurlburt and others³ at New America’s New Models of Policy Change project.⁴

Those analytic frameworks led us to first target right-of-center groups, and second target funders who support groups that they perceive as right-of-center or as influential with right-of-center audiences. Our background research included exploration of public opinion and attitudes among voters identifying as right-of-center, as well as a range of strategies employed in targeting those voters on climate and other issues. We sought to understand how those strategies are perceived by conservative audiences, and to document their inroads in areas like state and local governments, businesses, and security and faith communities. We observed—and we note as a recommendation—that the datasets available to analyze both policy substance and political alliances operating at the state level are inadequate to the task.

Because our lens is that of effectiveness with right-of-center audiences, some of our conclusions may be unexpected when viewed through a climate-advocacy lens. Our intent is to spur further analysis and creativity in a field whose basic theory of change was, in many cases, set in place under political circumstances quite different from what we currently face.