The contest for loneliest person on the right in Donald Trump’s Washington would be hard fought among free traders, pro-immigration libertarians, neoconservative globalists, and fiscal hawks convinced of the necessity of entitlement reform. But none of these could possibly be as lonely as the conservative Republican who believes climate change is a serious threat that his party should make a priority. That person is Jay Faison.
But don’t tell Faison that. Despite seeming out of step with the climate skepticism of most conservatives and the Trump administration, this ebullient 49-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, brims with optimism and a can-do spirit deriving from his practical experience as a successful entrepreneur. He doesn’t feel lonely at all, because the Trump administration is not essential to his long-term strategy, while some of Trump’s early moves, such as halting the anti-coal bias of the Obama administration, actually meet with Faison’s approval. “Everyone focuses on the White House,” Faison says, “but there are a lot of other things happening that don’t depend on the White House. You need to look beyond the headlines.”
A conversation with Faison turns the entire matter on its head, revealing that the real sectarian skeptics are the polarizing environmental advocates, like Bill McKibben and Tom Steyer, who insist on imposing a rigid and unrealistic orthodoxy that brooks no deviation or dissent. While the New York Times reports that “some political observers have drawn comparisons between Mr. Faison and Tom Steyer,” and former South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis has called him “the Tom Steyer of the right on climate change,” it would be more accurate to understand Faison as the un-Steyer. Faison is no light greenie. He told me, “Working in the real estate business with my father I saw how crazy environmentalists can be.”
Faison does not fit the usual profile of a climate warrior. He is the son of a prosperous North Carolina developer, Henry Faison, and freely admits, “I was born on third base and stole home.” After taking an MBA from the University of Virginia and working in the family business, he set out on his own and founded SnapAV, a home electronics equipment wholesaler. He is a regular churchgoer who describes himself as a “nondenominational Christian,” adding, “I don’t know why anyone thinks belief in the New Testament conflicts with science.” Ideologically he describes himself as a “fiscal conservative”; he endorses school choice and tort reform, and dislikes Obamacare as much as the next conservative. He’s been a longstanding supporter of Republican candidates, favoring Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham in the last presidential cycle and directing substantial contributions to the reelection campaigns of senators Rob Portman and Kelly Ayotte, majority leader Mitch McConnell, and congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Asked who his favorite Republican is at the moment, his answer is instant and enthusiastic: “Rob Portman. He understands the details on complex policy issues.”
Faison aligns with the “consensus” that climate change presents a potentially serious risk to the future of the planet. He became convinced of this risk through a series of encounters with climate scientists and acquired a sense for the vulnerability of ecosystems from being a lifelong outdoorsman. Meanwhile, SnapAV prospered. In 2013, Faison sold his interest in the company and used $175 million of his proceeds to start a new foundation, ClearPath, dedicated to climate and energy issues.
But Faison took a circuitous route there, as befits someone with the entrepreneurial inclination to look at the political marketplace and “go where other people aren’t.” The biggest problem with climate change is that the environmental community has polarized the issue. Faison notes that it started out with the usual combination of consensus and policy disagreement during the administration of George H. W. Bush, who committed the United States to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, but for which he got no credit from the increasingly partisan environmental community. Today, the leading climate campaigners like McKibben and Steyer seem primarily concerned with demonizing anyone who doesn’t fully profess a narrow environmental confession, in virtually the same sense as a confession of faith, and branding anyone who questions the gaps and defects of the current state of climate prediction with the risible label “denier” or tool of fossil fuel companies. (This turns out to include Faison, as we shall see.) The animus toward dissent extends to hounding unorthodox believers in climate change like the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. When Pielke pointed out that the data and findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the gold standard for the supposed “consensus science” on climate—don’t support the popular claim that severe weather events are becoming more frequent and more extreme, Steyer encouraged the Center for American Progress to mount a smear campaign to get Pielke ousted as a contributor to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. For many environmental advocates, purity of belief is more important than results or incremental compromise, persuasion disdained in favor of denunciation. It is easy to conclude their fervency is less about science and policy than politics, yet environmentalists wonder why they face so much resistance.
Faison’s first effort to influence the hothouse of climate politics was a misfire. Perceiving correctly that any serious, long-term climate policy requires the involvement of Republicans, Faison launched a grassroots social media campaign designed to persuade them to moderate their climate skepticism. (Surveys consistently show Republicans worry much less about climate change risks than Democrats by a huge margin.) ClearPath’s campaign proved a bust, as Faison freely admits.
“We got it wrong,” Faison said; “we threw a lot of money away.” Ever the entrepreneur, Faison learned a market lesson. “The worst possible thing you can do in business is go against the market. Environmentalists preach to Republicans. No one likes to be preached at. It doesn’t work in business, and it doesn’t work in politics. Climate change has become very tribal, but it’s a long-term issue. The problem with environmentalists is they think people will support pain now for benefits later.” As Faison told Bloomberg News last summer, he got the feeling on Capitol Hill that Republicans thought he was a closet liberal, a Tom Steyer-lite. “When I say ‘climate change,’ they think Nancy Pelosi.”
So Faison switched course, believing that there is an opening in the GOP for what he calls “conservative ‘clean energy’ solutions.” This may sound like a tricky proposition, too, but Faison has a clear grasp of how the environmental community has also distorted the domain of “clean energy.” For all of his conventional opinions about climate science, Faison departs markedly from the usual prescriptions of environmentalists for a forced march to “renewable” energy such as wind and solar. “I am not aware of solar or wind energy projects that are not heavily subsidized,” he notes. “It’s a top-down approach that does little to drive down the cost of clean energy or drive innovation.” Above all, wind and solar can’t scale up very far to meet our energy needs, and the intermittency of wind and solar power will always be a problem. Modern economies must have “affordable power when you need it.”
Though Faison is too generous to say so directly, he acknowledges that environmentalists are more of an obstacle than help in developing low- and non-carbon energy sources on a large enough scale to meet the world’s growing energy needs. “Environmentalists want this to be easy. They don’t want to think about the complexities of energy.” Warming up to the subject, Faison rolls on: “Most environmentalists are not energy experts. They don’t go to coal mines. They don’t talk to energy executives. They show no intellectual humility on the issue.” He thinks the current environmental mania for blocking pipelines and declaring of fossil fuel “leave it in the ground” is counterproductive.
Faison’s new climate policy strategy can be stated succinctly: innovation instead of regulation. Obama’s Clean Power Plan is “not operationally doable,” Faison thinks; the state-level mandates of the Clean Air Act on which the CPP is based—designed for very different kinds of conventional air pollution problems—actually prevent much interstate flexibility in meeting low-carbon energy needs. Opposing CPP is only the beginning of Faison’s clean energy heresies. He supports fracking for natural gas, noting that the decline in carbon emissions in the United States owes more to market-driven substitution of cheap natural gas for coal that fracking made possible than to regulatory efforts. He supports vastly expanded nuclear power. He supports increased hydropower, which environmentalists hate more than nuclear power. “Hydropower has been held hostage by the environmental movement.” Last year, Faison teamed up with Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Stop Wasting America’s Hydropower Potential,” pointing out that expanding hydropower would not necessarily involve building many new dams: “For instance, only 3 percent of the nation’s 80,000 dams now produce electricity. Electrifying just the 100 top impoundments—primarily locks and dams on the Ohio, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas Rivers that are operated by the Army Corps of Engineers—would generate enough electricity for nearly three million more homes.”
Most heterodox of all, Faison says “coal is not a four-letter expletive.” Here Faison understands what environmentalists refuse to acknowledge: “The clean energy game is not in the U.S.; it’s in southeast Asia, where 80 percent of new energy assets are going to be built over the next generation.” And those nations are going to use a lot of coal. Carbon capture from coal has been a tough slog, but Faison is convinced the costs will come down if we stay on it. It will require some government research help and investment, as will a new generation of nuclear power, still struggling to be born in a regulatory framework that hasn’t been updated in 40 years. Faison describes the problem of constructing nuclear this way on his website, ClearPath.org: “Build in America. It would take 10 years and cost around $500 million, including roughly $100 million in fees to get it approved by the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Build in Asia. Get it approved to build in 4 years. Save millions.” No wonder China is leading the world in new nuclear power development.
Energy policy wonks will divide about the capacity and defects of government-led basic research, rightly worrying about rent-seekers capturing government favors, the potential of path dependence, and the hazards of allowing the government to be in a position to “pick winners.” Faison is aware of the problems of government-led innovation—”government could mismanage a two-car parade,” he notes—and embraces some libertarian-leaning ideas such as cash prizes for performance-based energy technology breakthroughs.
But to bog down in these difficulties is to miss a broader point, perhaps best brought to light by asking Faison who his allies are. His first answer: “The coal industry.” Here Faison’s geniality yields to frustration with the environmentalists who cling bitterly to their anti-coal absolutism and their “keep it in the ground” mentality. Faison adds that he’s had productive relations with the Heritage Foundation and even the chief climate skeptic among Capitol Hill Republicans, Sen. James Inhofe. Faison has taken a lot of heat from some on the right for his stance on climate change, but he’s keeping faith with conventional energy producers and conservatives. Nor is he entirely an outlier. Operating more quietly than Faison’s ClearPath Foundation is Samuel Thernstrom’s Energy Innovation Reform Project, which is taking deep dives into energy technology questions. (See “The Next Shale Revolution?,” The Weekly Standard, December 29, 2014.)
Some critical news articles about Faison say he was naïve, if not foolish, for thinking he could change the minds of a significant number of conservatives on climate change. As already mentioned, Faison acknowledges that such a mission proved to be an uphill fight. Tom Steyer has spent much more in the political realm than Faison with abysmal results, while seeming to have learned nothing from his failures. Yet the media still treat him with complete credulity. Steyer, meantime, isn’t even willing to meet Faison halfway. “From what we can tell by the people he is supporting, he is grading Republicans on the curve,” Steyer complained of Faison to the New York Times. “We have fairly objective standards for grading people, and none of the [sic] them come close to meeting our standards.” “Objective standards” means complete conformity to Steyer’s inflexible views. But how does Steyer expect to make any political progress if his “objective standards” essentially require Republicans to become Democrats? Who is the real naïf here?
While climate activists like Steyer and McKibben recite the (inaccurate) slogan about how “97 percent of scientists ‘believe’ in climate change,” they shift the subject when it is pointed out that 100 percent of public and private long-term energy forecasts, such as those from the International Energy Agency and our own Department of Energy, find that fossil fuels will be the dominant source of energy for the planet for decades to come, and no amount of solar and wind power worship is going to change that. Who are the real “deniers,” then? With environmentalists becoming increasingly shrill and extreme, as do all coercive utopians detached from reality, Faison’s approach—encouraging innovation around current energy sources like nuclear, coal, and hydropower while seeking new breakthrough energy technologies—may well turn out to be the most farsighted if serious climate disruption comes to pass.
Steven F. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
