Young conservatives want to push Trump on climate change — the ‘America-First’ way

For most environmentalists, the day that Donald Trump got elected president in November was “a dark day.” But there was one small, overlooked corner of the movement that celebrated. In a statement congratulating Trump on his victory, the leaders of the American Conservation Coalition saw a chance to bring “an America-First climate strategy” to fruition. “Now, we will build a new era of American industry and win the clean energy arms race,” they wrote.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit was founded in 2017 by college students who wanted to prove that there was a conservative case for climate action. Since then, it’s evolved from a group on the right’s fringes into a political force. The American Conservation Coalition has wide grassroots support, with some 60,000 members in branches around the country and connections all over Congress. Trump’s second term, which starts on Monday, will be a test of how strong its influence has become.

“I think there’s a golden opportunity right now for Republicans to shift the environment from a left-wing issue that Republicans lose on to a conservative issue that they can win on,” said Chris Barnard, the organization’s president. “And by the end of this administration, that is what we hope to achieve, and hope to have real, tangible progress and solutions that point back to that show that.”

The group has extensive ties to Trump’s cabinet nominees, according to Barnard. Liberty Energy’s CEO Chris Wright, nominated for secretary of energy, is a “personal friend” to the American Conservation Coalition, or ACC, and recently hosted a fundraiser for the coalition. Former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee to lead the Interior Department, led a town hall in New Hampshire with Barnard during his six-month presidential run in 2023; Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, has worked on various issues with the ACC.

“If that’s the yardstick — helping Republicans get engaged on climate — they’ve been a resounding success,” said Matthew Burgess, an environmental economist at the University of Wyoming who studies how to depolarize climate change. In his estimation, the Republican Party has perceptibly shifted its stance on climate change, moving away from outright denial in recent years. “Whatever movement there’s been on the Republican side, the ACC is probably easily the single most important advocacy group on that.”

You wouldn’t mistake the American Conservation Coalition’s platform for one found on a progressive climate group’s website. The top three priorities are unleashing nuclear energy, reforming the permitting process to make it easier to build new energy projects, and beating China by “leading the world in all-of-the-above energy production.” That includes more oil and gas development, in line with Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. In his first week, Trump is expected to push to undo President Joe Biden’s limits on offshore drilling and federal lands, roll back emissions standards for vehicles, and end a freeze on new projects to export liquefied natural gas.

“Our approach will always be distinct from the approach of a progressive group, because it’s guided by conservative principles like innovation and deregulation and empowering individuals and local communities,” said Danielle Butcher Franz, the CEO of the ACC. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re not on the same page about the severity of these issues.”

Butcher Franz says that tackling climate change effectively means that both conservatives and progressives need to change their approach. Conservatives could be a lot bolder in the solutions they propose, she said: “They oftentimes have a reputation for being the party of ‘no’ and just striking down the things that they don’t like.” Progressives, on the other hand, could work harder to find common ground. “There are a lot of self-imposed litmus tests where if you don’t agree on everything, you’re not [seen as] worth working with,” Butcher Franz said. She said she’s seen potential partnerships with other climate groups collapse over a single area of difference, like support for fossil fuel production. 

For some progressives, the ACC’s Republican ties are the problem. “I think people often try to hold us accountable for the views of high-profile Republicans that people don’t like,” Butcher Franz said. She gets asked questions like, “Well, President Trump has said that climate change is a hoax, so how can Republicans possibly make progress on this?” But that’s the wrong starting place, she said. “I think the better question is, does somebody need to be bought into a progressive climate agenda to reduce emissions? And I would argue that, no, they don’t.”

The group’s approach creates a pairing of ideas that are rarely seen side by side. “Enough alarmism. Enough inaction,” a slogan on the ACC’s site reads. 

Those feelings may be reflected by much of the country, regardless of political affiliation: 80 percent of Americans say that climate news makes them feel frustrated that there’s so much political disagreement over the problem, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.

“The interesting thing about the ACC is, I think a lot of what they say, if you look at polls, is pretty close to what the median voter is saying about climate change,” Burgess said. “You know, ‘It’s real, doing something is much better than doing nothing, and renewables and nuclear are good and we should be prioritizing them, but we don’t want to get off fossil fuels, and particularly natural gas, in the short term, especially insofar as it hurts our economy.’”

When the ACC began in 2017, talking about climate change with Republican politicians who had long shied away from the subject — or simply denied it existed — wasn’t easy. “In the early days, we were all volunteers who were just trying to chase each opportunity that presented itself,” said Stephen Perkins, now the coalition’s COO. “It was tough back then to even say ‘climate’ or ‘environment’ in conservative spaces. We found it difficult to get those meetings and to have those conversations with elected officials or with other leaders within the conservative movement.”

But as early as 2019, partway through Trump’s first term, some of this resistance started to fade. Trump’s EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, signed a memorandum of understanding with the ACC to find ways to get young environmental leaders involved in the agency’s programs. In 2020, Barnard and Benji Backer, the ACC’s founder, went on a hike with Senator John Curtis, who was in the House of Representatives at the time, in his home state of Utah. The conversation sparked the idea for the Conservative Climate Caucus, started by Curtis as a safe place for House Republicans to talk to each other about climate change. It now has more than 80 members, who have been more willing to support green technology than other Republicans, if still generally opposed to measures to curtail greenhouse gas emissions directly. 

As these changes unfolded, the American Conservation Coalition’s base grew. In 2021, Perkins was hired to build grassroots support for the group, which had about 5,000 members at the time. Across the country, through outreach and advertising, they now have 60,000 members, mostly college students and young professionals who are right-of-center, Perkins said. The goal is to reach 100,000 members by the end of 2025. 

“A lot of our members are in government offices,” Perkins said. “In fact, it’s really hard for us now to walk into a member of Congress’ office without someone in the front room knowing about ACC because they were involved in college.” According to Eli Lehrer, president of the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, the ACC’s grassroots support is crucial to its success. “They have an impact in D.C. because they have an impact around the country,” he said. “So they both can mobilize people locally, and that gives them a way to talk about the same issues in D.C.”

Over the last two years, the American Conservation Coalition reached the national stage. In August 2023, the Republican primary debate included a question from a college student, one of the group’s members, about how the presidential candidates would calm fears that their party didn’t care about climate change. Even as the candidates deflected, some young conservatives saw it as progress that the topic even came up. The ACC also sponsored the Republican National Convention last July and had a booth there for the first time, with Trump’s former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, speaking at their reception. 

“These are just signs that the narrative is changing, and that conservatives or Republicans are seeing that there’s an opportunity for them to engage that is authentically conservative,” Barnard said. “They don’t feel like they have to leave their values at the door when talking about this stuff.”

However, Barnard says he’s more concerned with achieving practical results than getting Republican politicians to say the right thing. If they pass a bill to boost nuclear power and clean energy, but it’s for economic reasons or national security reasons rather than climate reasons, it’s still a win, he said: “We need to focus a lot more on what actually works than what sounds good, and on tangible progress than on litmus tests that just further polarize both sides.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Young conservatives want to push Trump on climate change — the ‘America-First’ way on Jan 17, 2025.