Can young Republicans wake their party up to climate change?

Katie Zakrzewski was a climate denier until the age of 18. The podcast host and communications professional grew up in a conservative Catholic household in North Little Rock, Arkansas, believing climate change was a “big government excuse to justify taxing people.” It wasn’t until she went to college and started learning about climate science that she had what she called her light-bulb moment. 

One of the first classes she took in her freshman year was about science and society. And the professor who taught the course encouraged students to do their own research and bring evidence to support opinions that might challenge their own. Zakrzewski accepted the challenge wholeheartedly but soon realized there wasn’t any concrete data to support the views of people in her community that climate change was a hoax.

“I kept doing research and was like, ‘Man, the data’s not adding up, and this is not looking good for me,’” she says. She grappled with the idea that maybe what she had been brought up to believe was wrong and turned to her parish priest for advice. He told her to set aside politics and do what she felt was right.

Her light-bulb moment was quickly followed by an “oh-no” moment – Zakrzewski felt she had to make up for the time she had spent denying climate science. She started actively lobbying members of Congress on climate policy and in 2020 began working for Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a national non-partisan environmental organization. 

For Zakrzewski, environmentalism and conservativism aren’t opposing forces. “It doesn’t make any sense to say you’re as vehemently pro-life as I am and then say, ‘But the environment doesn’t matter, clean air doesn’t matter, and clean water doesn’t matter,’” she says. “That didn’t add up.”

Feeling like she didn’t have a home in today’s Republican Party, Zakrzewski and a couple of like-minded young conservative environmentalists launched a podcast last year called Green Tea Party Radio in the hope of giving a voice to others with similar views. Zakrzewski, now 26, is part of a growing minority of young conservatives who are deeply concerned about the warming planet and want to see their concerns reflected in a GOP they feel has strayed from its conservationist roots. 

Researchers say there is a widening generational divide among Republicans when it comes to their concerns about climate change and some of their views on energy policy. Since early 2021, when the Biden administration came into power, this trend has only gotten worse for the party, as support among Republicans in general for renewable-energy development has shrunk, while the support among younger conservatives specifically has grown, according to polling by Pew Research. “So in effect, what we’re seeing here is a bigger gap between younger and older Republicans in their views about the direction we should go on energy than even four years ago,” says Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew Research. 

Republicans aged 18 to 29 are 30 percentage points more likely to support more wind power and 26 percentage points more likely to favour more solar power than those 65 and older. When it comes to their views on climate, 79% of younger Republicans acknowledge that human activity contributes to climate change, whereas only 47% of elder GOP voters say the same. 

For the longest [time], the GOP has kind of kicked the can down the road and said, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’  The time is now.

—Katie Zakrzewski, Green Tea Party Radio

Observers say the GOP would ignore these shifting dynamics at its own peril as millennials and Gen Zs become a voter block that can make or break an election. In November, when Americans will be asked to choose either former president Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, 40 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. In 2020, millennials surpassed baby boomers as the United States’ largest generation, with more than 70 million people. While Corporate Knights went to press before the election results were known, young voters could prove a decisive force.

Green at heart

As one of the founders of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), Danielle Butcher Franz, 27, has been working to mobilize young conservatives around climate change since 2017. Recently, the organization attended the Republican National Convention, with a booth on the “new youth movement,” encouraging passersby to “leave a legacy” of environmental conservation. 

Unlike Zakrzewski, who came from a conservative family, Butcher Franz grew up in what she described as a left-of-centre family that listened to National Public Radio and supported candidates from the left-leaning Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). Some of her earliest memories are of handing out stickers at parades for various DFL candidates in northern Minnesota. 

In her teenage angsty years, she found herself playing devil’s advocate in dinnertime discussions about current events. Eventually she realized that she believed some of the things she was saying to stir the pot and that she was actually more conservative-leaning than her family. But she was too afraid to tell her parents at the time and started an anonymous Twitter account with the handle @RepublicanSass to engage with other conservatives. “I started just tweeting out hot takes and opinions and trying to find a community, really, to test my own views and see if these were things that I really agreed with,” she says.

Danielle Butcher Franz. Photo by Mallory Thomas.

The account took off. Soon it had more than 20,000 followers, leading to opportunities to attend conservative conferences, do internships and write op-eds. She eventually changed her handle to her own name. Shortly after, the 17-year-old got the opportunity to go to the Conservative Political Action Conference, where she met ACC co-founder Benji Backer, then 16, in person for the first time. The two became fast friends and quickly realized there was a gap in the right-of-centre when it came to environmentalism, and the issue of the climate crisis specifically.

Their conversations eventually led them to create the ACC, to give conservatives a voice on these issues and “to show them that they can be at the table and propose their own solutions,” says Butcher Franz, now the organization’s CEO. “These were issues that we cared a lot about personally and we knew our peers cared a lot about, but there really weren’t any Republican leaders talking about these issues in a way that was productive and that resonated with young people.”

She says that this will have to change if the GOP wants to be electable in the future: “If Republicans don’t come up with an answer to the climate question, they will become politically irrelevant.”

A green tradition 

The Republican Party was not always seen as inhospitable to environmentalists. 

Often referred to as the “conservation president,” Theodore Roosevelt created 23 new sites in the U.S. national park system. During his presidency, Roosevelt also established 230 million acres of public lands for conservation efforts. Richard Nixon, for his part, created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). And in 1987, Ronald Reagan signed on to the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that helped shrink a gaping ozone hole over Antarctica.

But in recent decades, Republicans have ratcheted up their opposition to environmental policies and international agreements that hope to lessen humans’ impacts on the world. Not a single Republican member of Congress voted for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which environmentalists heralded as the largest climate investment the country had ever made but conservatives criticized as big government spending that would fuel inflation. Critics say the undercurrent of climate denialism that exists within the party has been politically driven – an act of opposition to eight years of former president Barack Obama and four years of Biden-administration policies. But the seeds of that opposition to green policies were planted much earlier than that. 

Despite supporting the Montreal Protocol, Reagan’s administration also worked to roll back environmental regulations and cut the EPA’s budget in the 1980s. In 2001, then-president George W. Bush announced to the world that his government would not implement the Kyoto Protocol, a predecessor to the Paris Agreement that Donald Trump would eventually pull the country out of, too. While in power, Trump called climate change a “hoax” and dismantled almost 100 environmental rules and regulations, according to a New York Times analysis. 

If Republicans don’t come up with an answer to the climate question, they will become politically irrelevant.

—Danielle Butcher Franz, CEO, American Conservation Coalition

Some green Republicans are still encouraged by positive movement they’ve seen in the last few years. In 2021, Utah Representative John Curtis, who is running for Mitt Romney’s Senate seat, founded the Conservative Climate Caucus, a group of more than 80 Republican members of Congress. The group has acknowledged that emissions need to be cut to tackle climate change. Caucuses don’t have any power to propose legislation, but they serve to educate lawmakers on particular issues.

These lawmakers tend to support technologies such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen fuel rather than phasing out fossil fuels in favour of more wind and solar energy. They also oppose regulations and taxes as emissions-cutting tools. “[We focus on] policy around scaling up innovations of advancements in technologies so that we can reduce emissions using innovation and policies that support innovation more than a heavy-handed government approach,” says Luke Bolar, the chief external affairs officer at ClearPath, a conservative clean-energy think tank.

The party, however, still faces an uphill battle in convincing young voters that it’s getting serious on climate change. Project 2025, a 900-page document that the Heritage Foundation – a conservative think tank – produced as a road map for a second Trump administration, doesn’t help much. A recent study by Energy Innovation found that if Trump wins the election and implements the plan’s recommendations, it could result in billions of tonnes of additional carbon emissions.

The party’s official 16-page platform for the presidential campaign doesn’t even mention climate change and reaffirms Trump’s promise to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”   

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Another recent report from the Center for American Progress said that 23% of federal elected officials in Congress were climate deniers, and all the members identified as climate deniers were Republicans. But Bolar disputes the report’s conclusions, saying that some of the statements used to paint lawmakers as climate deniers are from as far back as 2010. He adds that many of them have since joined the Conservative Climate Caucus. 

Bolar says that most Republican lawmakers are aware that younger conservatives have a “higher sense of urgency” when it comes to the climate crisis and that they need to “build a bridge” to them by talking about solutions. “The gulf there is communicating what they’re for and the policies that they support,” he says. “That’s a challenge, and I think it’s improving but not fully solved yet.”

What about the Democrats?

For Democrats, age isn’t as much a factor as it is for Republicans when it comes to attitudes toward climate change and energy issues, according to Pew Research. Alec Tyson says that a large majority of Democrats think climate change is a big problem that needs to be addressed and that renewables need to be prioritized over fossil fuels. That level of support doesn’t change much across age groups within that voting block. 

Some commentators say there isn’t much fear in Democratic circles that they’ll lose young climate-conscious voters to the Republicans, even if Harris stood up for fracking on the campaign trail and kept climate talk to a minimum. The larger concern is that they simply might not show up to vote at all if they feel candidates aren’t strong enough on environmental issues. In the presidential election, Trump had closed the gap with President Joe Biden when it came to young voters, but Harris’s candidacy reversed this trend. Since its early days, the Harris campaign has caused a “youthquake,” as polls in early August showed her more than 20 points ahead of Trump with young voters in four swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Pennsylvania. By September, 52% of registered voters and 61% of likely voters under 30 backed Harris; only 29% to 30% planned to vote for Trump, according to national polling by Harvard’s Institute of Politics.

Katie Zakrzewski. Photo courtesy of Katie Zakrzewski.

In the long-term view, young conservatives think these dynamics could evolve if Republican leadership can change its tune by acknowledging man-made climate change and proposing solutions. “So much of the GOP says, ‘We hate the Green New Deal, we hate what they’re proposing,’ and then they don’t propose anything,” Zakrzewski says. “It’s not good enough to shoot something down. If we’re going to say something is bad, then what’s your alternative?”

As November approaches, young conservatives who care about environmental policy are grappling with how to approach voting this year. For Zakrzewski, she’s likely going to vote in the down-ballot races and leave the top of the ticket blank, given Trump’s anti-climate rhetoric. “It seems like every four years, I might as well write in Mickey Mouse,” she says. 

Historically, Republicans have been far better than their Democratic opponents at uniting around common causes – namely low taxes and limited government – and leaving behind what they disagree on. But if the GOP fails to evolve in significant ways on climate and energy policy (or at the very least in how it is perceived on these issues), researchers question whether those ties will hold the party’s supporters together or lead to a realignment of American politics.

A study from University of Colorado Boulder found that voters’ opinions on climate change are already making a significant difference in close presidential elections. Researchers found that views on climate cost Republicans the 2020 presidential election and that, for voters, climate “was one of the strongest predictors of whom they voted for in 2020, especially among independents.” The study estimated that there would have been a 3% swing in favour of Republicans that election year had voters’ level of concern about climate remained the same as it was in 2016. This electoral reality could get more challenging for Republicans, as young conservatives and voters generally are increasingly anxious about global warming. 

It remains to be seen how youth on both sides of the aisle will shape not just the November election, but the future of American climate policy and the global energy transition. 

Environmental conservatives are hopeful that there could be a strong shakeup in the GOP’s policies on climate as younger generations of voters start to run for public office and rise through the party’s ranks. But for Zakrzewski, there’s no time like the present to start making change within the party. “For the longest [time] the GOP has kind of kicked the can down the road and said, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ The time is now, and I think this election is going to be a decisive one. You’re either at the table or you’re on the menu,” she says.

Alex Robinson is a journalist based in Ottawa.