Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter (R-GA) was born and raised in the House district he now represents, which spans roughly 100 miles of the Georgia coastline and houses both the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and the bustling Savannah port.
It’s this mix of industry interests and environmental concerns that have shaped Carter’s life and congressional career that began with his first House election in 2014. And now, as the head of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee with jurisdiction over key environmental issues, Carter is in a position to help protect these areas and many others like them around the nation.
Carter is the new chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials, appointed to the position in January by the full committee chairwoman, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The panel’s previous chairman, former Ohio GOP Rep. Bill Johnson, quit Congress on Jan. 21 to become president of Youngstown State University in Ohio.
Carter represents a deep red district, which former President Donald Trump carried by a 14-point margin in the 2020 presidential election despite losing the state of Georgia itself.
Despite the district’s strong support for the former president, who has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a “hoax,” Carter says he’s determined to use his new leadership post to encourage Republican leadership on issues of climate change — the kind, he readily says, that’s caused by humans.
In many ways, Carter’s position exemplifies just how much today’s Republican Party has evolved on issues of climate, an issue that many in the party were once loath to discuss.
“If conservatives are scared to talk about climate, then we’re not going to have a seat at the table when decisions are made,” the congressman told the Washington Examiner in an interview, recounting his recent trip to COP28 in Dubai.
It was this trip to the U.N.-hosted climate conference in December, the first bipartisan House delegation in which Republican attendees outnumbered Democrats, that Carter says reaffirmed his belief that the GOP has an important role to lead in this space.
He noted the similarities between Republicans and the COP host countries, which have embraced an “all of the above” energy approach that includes fossil fuels and renewable resources.
The selection of two oil- and gas-producing nations, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, to host the COP28 and COP29 summits is “significant,” he said. “They have said that we need to be focusing more on emissions than on [the] source,” Carter said of the host countries. “And I think that’s important.”
For Carter, attending COP28 helped crystallize his goals as the new head of another Energy and Commerce subcommittee he chairs, House Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Minerals. Those goals include embracing nuclear power, reforming the permitting process, and weakening China’s ironclad grip on critical minerals manufacturing.
But to lead on these issues, he said, Republicans need to join climate chain discussions in the first place. “We need conservatives to be there,” Carter said of climate talks. “For us to just ignore [them] and boycott, I think, is the wrong approach.”
All about balance
Carter speaks fondly of his childhood spent along the coasts outside Savannah, Georgia, a onetime home to paper mills and chemical plants that is now a prime tourist destination. Savannah is also the third-busiest port in the nation (behind Los Angeles-Long Beach and New York-New Jersey), so many different interests are at play regarding policies on environmental and economic development.
For Carter, balance is key. As vice chairman of the Conservative Climate Caucus, he’s passionate about protecting the environment and protecting against harm caused by climate change while also railing against what Republicans view as President Joe Biden’s heavy-handed regulations on energy producers.
Most recently, Carter joined other Republicans in criticizing the Biden administration’s pause on approving new liquefied natural gas export terminals, which critics argue could carry significant economic harm and create even more uncertainty for fossil fuel developers in the United States.
“I think it’s a very short-sighted decision by the administration,” Carter said of the LNG pause, which he described as “bad policy.”
He shares in the Republican view that U.S. fossil fuels are, on balance, good for the environment — and offset much higher pollution from other major energy exporter nations, such as Russia and China.
“The U.S. has decreased carbon emissions in the last decade by more than the next 12 countries combined while still growing our economy,” Carter said.
Ultimately, “there’s a balance between permitting and between protecting our environment,” Carter said. “And right now, under the Biden administration, I think that it’s off balance and favored more toward regulations.”
Climate concerns
But Carter does share in the belief that human actions are causing climate change and that Republicans should be a part of the solution. He’s witnessed changes in his district, which covers the entire sprawling 100-mile stretch of Georgia’s coast.
While Carter quipped that south Georgia has two seasons, ”hot and hotter,” the temperatures in his home state have gotten even more extreme due to climate change, he said.
“Obviously, we’re seeing cycles of hotter weather,” said Carter, 66, a pharmacist by trade who was a state legislator for a decade before being elected to the House in 2014.
“We’ve also seen sea level rise that’s impacted us, and we need to address that,” Carter added.
Since 1935, sea levels in parts of coastal Georgia have risen by more than 9 inches, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Scientists estimate an additional 6 inches of sea level rise within the next 50 years due to the warming climate.
“We all want to protect the environment. I don’t think that’s a Republican thing or a Democrat thing,” he said.
Room to grow
While Carter and fellow members of the growing Conservative Climate Caucus still diverge sharply with Democrats on many key issues, Carter said he sees potential for bipartisan progress on certain things, including permitting reform, transmission buildout, and even LNG, which has united some centrist Democrats, perhaps most notably Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).
Most notably, Carter says he’s witnessed an evolution in their view on nuclear power, the reliable, carbon-free source of energy now considered crucial for countries hoping to deliver on their pledge of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
At the COP28 summit in Dubai, nuclear power acceleration was included in the text of the Global Stocktake for the first time in conference history. Separately, more than 20 countries also signed a declaration pledging to work toward tripling their nuclear power capacity by 2050.
Carter, who attended the conference with a bipartisan delegation, witnessed what he described as the “embrace” of nuclear power firsthand.
“I actually had a Democratic member who told me, ‘You just don’t know how far we, as Democrats, had to come to get to this point with nuclear,’” he recounted.
“Democrats are on board with that now,” Carter said of nuclear energy, “and that was something it took them a while to get on board with.”
Meanwhile, Republicans are learning and changing too. Since the founding of the Conservative Climate Caucus in 2021, its membership has more than doubled, rising from 40 members in its first year to more than 80 in 2024.
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And though the party is far from united on the issue, Carter says he has seen a shift within the caucus.
“I think Republicans have evolved on this,” Carter said. “And I think that we’ve had a positive impact.”
