Republicans are solving the climate change 'hoax' better than Democrats

Innovation beats imposition

Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash

Red states have taken the lead spot in generating clean energy in the United States. They first started competing with California towards the end of the Obama Admin, and have not shown any signs of decline.

But what’s strange is as these Republican-led states’ clean energy production soared, GOP leaders and voters actively downplayed and deflected the idea that climate change was a big deal; national right-wing figures were calling it a hoax just a few years ago.

So, what changed?

How did the Republican coalition, unconvinced of the catastrophe stemming from climate change, produce more clean energy than Democrats who warned about it all along?

How did Republicans overlook the emergency and at the same time invest and deploy more clean energy projects than those who were focused on it?

Democrats love representing unpopular priorities

Climate change ranked high on most Democrats’ list of priorities in January 2024, but only about a third of Independents thought it deserved the same attention. For Republicans, climate change was the least prioritized issue.

From a policy perspective, it makes sense why the GOP would criticize Democrats’ apocalyptical mentality about climate change: most voters don’t care about it that much. Republicans were prioritizing the things average voters prioritized!

Ironically, Democrats and Independents ranked ‘strengthening the military’ and ‘global trade’ as their least concerned priorities, respectively. A year later, two of the Trump Admin’s most unpopular actions are the egregious tariffs and its foreign policy decisions.

Think about that for a second: as Trump campaigned on isolationist foreign policy posturing while promising a 10% minimum tax on American consumers, his opponents were worried about climate change. And yet they failed on all counts.

But just because Republicans didn’t take the claims surrounding climate change seriously doesn’t mean they weren’t taking related problems seriously.

Republicans focused on the right solutions

In a 2016 Pew poll, only about a quarter of Republicans said the Earth was ‘warming due to human activity’. Yet over half of them—including 68% of moderate/liberal Republicans— agreed that ‘Americans will make major changes to their way of life to address climate change’. A majority also said ‘new technology will solve most problems’ from climate change.

Though often underrating what climate scientists argued and the exact causes of the evolving weather patterns, Republicans nonetheless took the case for expanding and developing more energy sources seriously.

Sarah Palin represented the Republican mentality around climate action perfectly during her 2008 run for vice president by arguing climate change is “real” and that “we need to do something about it” and that “it kinda doesn't matter at this point what caused it.”

It may be unintuitive, but these two positions are not contradictory!

Whether humans caused it or climate scientists were right in their prophetic analyses of the doomsday clock, Republicans knew it was mostly irrelevant to the solution: investing and developing cleaner sources of energy using free-market incentives. Their solutions to combat climate change had nothing to do with believing climate change exists or is a cause for crisis, enabling them to focus entirely on developing new and better energy sources—and they succeeded!

Republicans love DEI: Diversity of Energy Infrastructure

Though it often seems like a full-on Trump cult, the Republican Party isn’t a monolith. Concern about the warming climate and the extent to which it’ll have major effects on their local communities depends heavily on age and location.

Younger Republicans have more progressive views on climate change, including the causality of human activity and their unwillingness to expand fossil fuel production. Those living on the coasts are much more likely to say climate change is happening and blame it for their local weather disasters. These coastal areas are also where more moderate Republicans live compared to the middle of the country.

This is also where things get a bit paradoxical: despite young coastal Republicans desiring more effort in diverting climate change, much of the actual clean energy generation has come from older, heartland Republican states.

Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas had the most total renewable power generation last year, excluding the two giants Texas and California. South Dakota and Iowa lead the nation in the percentage of their electricity that comes from clean energy, with both states exceeding 60%. Republican states make up four of the top five in wind, four of the top five in solar, and eight of the top ten in nuclear--excluding purple Pennsylvania.

Democrat-led states hold four of the top five states only in hydro; the share of hydro-energy generation has declined for over two decades as demand for other renewables exponentially rises.

I think part of the quick expansion of clean energy generation comes from Republican-led states taking the lead in not just heavily investing in specific types of clean energy, but also in its materialization. As young Republicans battle it out with their progressive neighbors on the coasts, their older counterparts in middle America—who enjoy greater control over their state and local governments—reform regulatory policy, increase energy investments, and adjust political priorities.

Democrats get in their own way

Progressive groups, especially environmental ones, are a sticking point in the left’s recent ‘abundance’ discourse. Abundance bros attribute some of Democrats’ failures to deliver clean energy production to environmental review laws and activist groups. Bottlenecks arise in local and state communities in the form of well-intended regulations to protect the environment as a result.

But these mandates are exploited by organized interest groups to slow things down. The existing regulations then empower these groups to obstruct infrastructure projects through further lawsuits and agitation.

President Biden—after multiple attempts—got a bipartisan coalition in Congress to suspend environmental review for new factories that would produce computer chips under the CHIPS Act. There were major objections from environmental activists and progressive Democrats including early proponent of the Green New Deal: Bernie Sanders.

Abundance liberals want to make it easier to build green infrastructure, even at the cost of making it harder to obstruct fossil fuel extraction. Many progressive environmental organizations have the opposite priority.

Republican states, by comparison, often reform regulations when they’re in the way or avoid adding state-level requirements on top of federal ones, streamlining renewable energy projects. And GOP candidates largely avoid proposing caps on energy usage, making such limits politically untenable within the party and maintaining the innovative and consensual aspect to clean energy production.

Progress is the only solution

Democrats undermine their own goals with climate change by focusing on the urgency and moral imperative of saving the planet, without fully considering how expanding clean energy—even alongside fossil fuels—can ease that feeling of urgency and zealotry. The more we create, invest, develop, deploy, and error-correct, the less of a problem climate change will be.

In May 2025, the U.S. power grid generated more electricity from clean energy sources than from fossil fuels for the third consecutive month, the longest stretch in the country’s history. And for the first time, electricity from solar and wind outpaced coal.

Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and electric vehicles are driving demand for more energy. Efforts by some progressive groups to limit or pause energy production forces manufacturers to rely on fossil fuels simply because they face exhaustive demands from numerous stakeholders to prove that their projects are environmentally sound.

This creates a persistent cycle where we express a strong desire to address climate change, yet we frequently stall or block the very projects that could make a difference due to concerns about their environmental impacts.

Creating and expanding energy supply of all kinds is the solution to climate change. Not mandates. Not restrictions. Not waiting for perfect solutions. Not destroying the economy. Just building more, faster—which will then make it more affordable to do again and again.

Republicans figured this out and are now being rewarded for their efforts. Now it’s Democrats’ turn!