A new conservative group has joined the growing ranks of Republicans embracing responsibility for addressing climate change.
Drew Bond and John Hart, longtime fixtures and friends in the conservative movement, recently announced the launch of C3 Solutions, a 501(c)3 think tank designed to provide clean energy solutions and to counter liberal ideas. Former conservative senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum will also advise the new group.
The trio said they are forming the group partially as a response to polling showing young people are increasingly concerned about climate change.
“It’s just a recognition of where the American public is,” Santorum told the Washington Examiner.
“I still don’t think Republicans think this is the No. 1 issue out there, but this is an issue people care about,” added Santorum, who said he’s motivated by his seven children. “To ignore it is politically stupid and not in conjunction with your stated purpose, which is to make sure the environment is strong and healthy.”
But it remains to be seen whether the group and the broader conservative movement is willing to support policies that can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions without violating their small-government political ideology.
The group’s founders argue they can manage that dilemma.
“You can be a conservative on climate change without becoming a moderate or compromising your principles,” said Hart, 47, a former communications aide for Tom Coburn, the late conservative senator from Oklahoma, an oil and gas state.
Hart and Bond formed C3 Solutions after realizing they shared environmentalist instincts.
Bond, 50, is a former chief of staff at the Heritage Foundation under President Ed Feulner who co-founded a solar power company called PowerField Energy.
Hart, who grew up in Kansas, calls himself an “aspiring sustainable farmer,” owning and managing a 62-acre farm in the Pleasant Valley region of Maryland.
“The personal responsibility aspect is very important,” Hart said.
Hart, paradoxically, said Coburn also inspired him.
Coburn, before he retired in 2015 because of prostate cancer, was known as the “Dr. No” of Congress for blocking legislation.
Coburn called climate change science “crap” and described himself as a “global warming denier.”
Hart, however, said Coburn used to suggest to him that Republicans should propose alternative solutions to climate change. Hart said the prodding was similar to how Coburn, a physician, used to push his party to counter Democratic ideas on healthcare.
“Republicans paid a price on healthcare for not having a clear agenda and message,” Hart said. “We have an opportunity on climate change to look ahead and not be in a position of being on defense.”
Santorum also has derided climate change science as “junk” and once called the problem a “beautifully concocted scheme” by liberals.
As recently as 2018, in his role as a commentator for CNN, Santorum questioned the motives of climate change scientists.
“The reality is that a lot of these scientists are driven by the money that they receive,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Santorum, along with Hart and Bond, said debating climate science is not useful anymore and that he aims to propose alternative solutions to regulations and mandates favored by Democrats.
Democrats are advancing proposals for curbing climate change as a means for responding to the coronavirus, promoting the need for a significant government intervention to transition the economy off fossil fuels and build a modern infrastructure.
“You either have the government solve your problems or the private sector solve your problems,” Bond said. “We have to have a balance of those. The Left is saying the virus is why we need to be more alarmist about climate. We don’t need to be more alarmist. We need to be thoughtful and prepared and find ways of unleashing innovation.”
C3 Solutions has provided little detail on what kind of policies it favors to enable innovation, a catchall term supporting private sector development of clean energy technologies that have also been embraced by congressional Republicans.
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his allies have introduced a policy set focused on expanding tax subsidies for technology that can capture carbon from fossil fuel plants to prevent it from being emitted.
Santorum indicated C3 Solutions supports the concept of tax incentives in addition to increasing government spending on research and development to encourage innovation. Its website also lists other priorities, such as “understanding the economic impacts” of climate change, developing a “more resilient” infrastructure to protect against extreme weather, and promoting “sustainable” agriculture and forestry practices.
Hart and Bond said they consider natural gas to have a “big” role in a clean energy future, envisioning a position for fossil fuels at odds with United Nations climate scientists who said the world must reach net-zero emissions by 2050, meaning canceling out emissions with measures to take carbon out of the atmosphere.
“We favor an all-of-the-above approach,” Bond said, including nuclear energy and renewables. “We reject us vs. them, natural gas vs. renewables.”
The duo also said they don’t have a specific goal in mind for reducing emissions, either for 2030 or midcentury.
“It’s hard to say whose goal is the right goal,” Bond said. “Our goal would be to have the maximum measurable impact in the least amount of time with the least amount of heavy-handed government.”
Fellow Republicans who consider themselves part of the “eco-Right” movement interested in addressing climate change said they welcome C3 Solutions into the fold.
Bob Inglis, a former GOP House member from South Carolina who was friendly with Santorum in Congress, said he’d like to see C3 Solutions propose more specific ideas to achieve innovation.
Inglis is the founder of republicEn, an environmental group that supports a carbon tax, which he argues would incentivize innovation faster by raising the price of carbon-intensive products based on the damage they cause society.
“This is great that we have a group of conservatives coming forward to enter the competition of ideas about how to deal with climate change,” Inglis said. “Innovation is a great turn of the conversation, but how do we get the innovation?”
Hart, Bond, and Santorum said they oppose a carbon tax but that they don’t intend to fight with other Republican groups promoting the idea.
“My first inclination is never a tax,” Bond said. “But this is not at all a critique on conservatives vs. Republicans. We need a full team on the field.”
Joseph Majkut, a climate scientist with the free market Niskanen Center who favors a carbon tax, said the emergence of a new conservative climate group is a “positive development” but challenged his colleagues to propose serious ideas.
“As more thoughtful, experienced people enter the fray, we need to be asking how we can help Republican politicians craft policies that will meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions that do not either violate their ideological red lines or overly disturb their existing political coalitions,” Majkut said. “That is a hard problem to solve.”
