Republican lawmakers’ election of Mike Johnson as speaker of the US House of Representatives this month marks another shift by the party away from Democrats on the issue of climate change, political analysts say, deepening a division that is expected to be a feature of the 2024 election.
Johnson, a Louisiana congressman who has accepted more funding from oil and gas companies than any other sector, has a history of questioning the scientific evidence on climate change — and almost overnight has gone from relative obscurity to become one of the Republican party’s most visible leaders.
He has voted against scores of climate-related bills in the House and recently passed legislation aimed at rolling back some of the subsidies passed as part of President Joe Biden’s flagship climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act.
Speaking in 2017 to a packed meeting in Shreveport, a town in his congressional district, Johnson asked if “natural cycles” were behind global warming — or “is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”
Johnson’s doubts about anthropogenic global warming run counter to established science, but reflect the elements of the Republican party that are making the defence of fossil fuels and suspicion about clean energy part of its coming election pitch, say political analysts.
“There is no other political party that is getting away with such denialism in any other major country,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former White House adviser to then-president Bill Clinton and now strategic adviser at Washington’s Progressive Policy Institute. “The portrayal of clean energy technologies as elitist is something that Republicans are going to lean into next year.”
Republicans have assailed Biden’s climate policies since he won election to the White House in 2020, trying to pin the blame for high petrol prices on the administration’s efforts to accelerate an energy transition.
Some GOP leaders and would-be presidential candidates are now taking aim at the science itself.
“The climate change agenda is a hoax,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur running in the Republican primary, during a candidates debate in August. It was an echo of Donald Trump, the former president and clear frontrunner in the party’s 2024 primary race.
When moderators in the same debate asked the candidates if they believed that human behaviour caused climate change, only one — Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, who is no longer in the race — raised his hand. Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the UN, Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, former vice-president Mike Pence, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, were among the seven others who demurred.
DeSantis has pledged to withdraw the US from the Paris climate pact — as Trump did, before also rolling back scores of regulations against pollution.
He and Haley have also courted wealthy oil megadonors in Texas and Oklahoma, pledging their support for the country’s fossil fuel industry.
The positioning sets up a sharp contrast with Democrats in the 2024 election. While Trump and other Republicans talk up the US’s fossil fuel prowess, Biden is focusing on a cleantech race with China and touting the green jobs to be created by the billions of dollars in subsidies embedded in the IRA.
“The divisive 2020 election fractured energy politics,” said Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington consultancy. “Democrats became the party of transition and Republicans the defenders of fossil fuels.”
Many Republican leaders — including some primary runners and Johnson — have railed against the IRA, even though the red areas of the country are disproportionately benefiting from the green project surge.
A Financial Times analysis found 80 per cent of investment in large-scale clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing pledged since Congress passed the IRA and the Chips and Science Act last year is planned in Republican congressional districts.
But the widening rift between the Democrats and Republicans on global warming is reflected in polling, which shows climate change has become deeply polarised along party lines, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
“When we look at climate as a voting priority, [over the last 10 years] we have seen an enormous surge among Democrats, and the issue has taken off very strongly among independents — while among Republicans it is low and has flatlined,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, the programme’s director.
Democratic promises to take action on climate change were considered a reason why many younger voters supported Biden in 2020. And climate change is still among the top three issues for self-described liberal Democrats. But for moderate Republicans the issue is now closer to the bottom, said Leiserowitz, and for conservative Republicans it is “always the last”.
The jockeying of the Republican presidential candidates and the rise of climate-sceptic Johnson to the head of the party in the House also mark a shift within the Republican party itself.
In 2008, the late Republican presidential candidate John McCain stood at a wind power plant in Oregon and called for a limit on US greenhouse gas emissions, promising voters that he would deal with the “central facts of rising temperatures”.
“We stand warned by serious and credible scientists across the world that time is short and the dangers are great,” said McCain, then a senator for Arizona.
The party’s shift on the issue in the 15 years since may be a hindrance at the next election, especially among swing voters, analysts said.
Yale found Republican voters who described themselves as “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming were more likely to be younger, women, or people of colour.
“The polling is pretty clear that younger Republicans care more about climate change,” said Philip Rossetti, a senior fellow at the free-market R Street Institute think-tank. “We also know that voters in swing districts care more about climate change, and these are districts Republicans need to win and hold to maintain a majority.”
In an effort to change voter perceptions, more than 80 House Republicans have formed a Conservative Climate Caucus, which states that “decades of a global industrial era” have contributed to warming.
It also believes that “with innovative technologies, fossil fuels can and should be a major part of the global solution”, and that “reducing emissions is the goal, not reducing energy choices”.
A spokesperson for the chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus, Utah congressman John Curtis, said he has “had conversations” with Johnson, the new speaker.
“We look forward to working with him on our priorities. Conservatives are at the climate table,” he said.
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