A politically active Republican businessman is starting a bid to promote clean energy.
Jay Faison is putting up $1 million to start a digital ad campaign to grab the attention of Republicans with a pro-green energy message, ahead of opening a permanent office for his ClearPath Foundation to promote the clean energy industry among Republican groups and lawmakers, he said Tuesday.
“Our mission is to make conservative clean energy a priority for the GOP,” Faison said at a National Press Club event. “I think we can do it. It might take some time, but I think we can do it.” His push would include natural gas, hydropower and clean coal.
“For a long time it’s been a very divided debate,” he said. “On the one side we’ve had windmills and sunshine from the Left and drill, baby, drill on the Right, and I thought there was a vacuum in the middle around a conservative clean energy agenda.”
A possible driver of Faison’s campaign is Congress’ passage of a spending bill that included a five-year extension of wind and solar tax credits, which is expected to keep renewable energy growing by several-fold.
“A lot of Senate Republicans see [last year’s tax credit deal] as a win-win,” Chrissy Harbin, Americans for Prosperity federal affairs director, told the publication Morning Consult on Tuesday. “They get the green energy programs they wanted to extend, and they get to benefit from economic benefits of ending the ban on crude oil exports.” The spending bill also lifted the 40-year-old restriction on oil exports.
The article points out that although California is a leader in cleaner forms of energy, solar energy development, for example, is no longer a monopoly of the Golden State or even states that have a monopoly on sunshine.
New Jersey, for example, is nipping at California’s heels, and North Carolina just became the number two solar developer in the country, according to Morning Consult.
Texas and Iowa are competing to be the state that opened the most wind turbines between 2008 and 2015. The wind industry says Texas and Oklahoma led the nation on wind energy last year, along with California and Iowa.
