But green conservatives have their work cut out for them. As in previous elections, the forces seeking to protect the status quo are already readying their resources. The Koch brothers political network, for example, plans to mobilize around $889 million in 2016—more than double what it spent on the 2012 election.

Industry players can also pack a punch. During the 2012 election cycle, the oil, gas and mining industries spent millions in support of candidates, most of whom were Republican. And that represents only the money that these companies and their employees contributed through traditional political giving; additional millions in “dark money” were passed through various non-profit groups that shield donors.

Environmentalists on both the left and right realize they can’t hope to muster that kind of money, but they see Faison as a signal that, for conservatives, the tide might be turning on climate change. “I think Jay Faison is a game-changer. I describe him as the cavalry coming over the hill,” said Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina Republican congressman who lost the state's primary election, in part, for accepting climate change, and who now heads the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University. “It’s just really exciting to us... to see a champion of free enterprise—someone who is an exemplar of how free enterprise works—engaging, and he can’t be dismissed.”

Of Faison’s $175 million, $165 million will go to polling, outreach, and advocacy efforts lead by the ClearPath Foundation, a group he founded with the aim of promoting conservative solutions to climate change. He’s also putting $10 million into a political action group to support some candidates, and hoping to raise more money from like-minded conservatives. He hasn’t decided, however, if he’ll spread these political funds far and wide, or pick a few GOP environmental champions.

And while Faison admitted his spending isn’t going be able to compete with anti-climate-action interest groups, he sees an opportunity in the changing electorate. “If it were just a money thing, we would lose. But we have the truth on our side, and we have a fact pattern that's unfolding in front of us,” Faison told me.

Recent polling shows that there is an appetite among the conservative electorate—not just among the policy wonks—for the party to develop an environmental policy. According to a poll by the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, roughly three quarters of Republican primary voters in both New Hampshire and South Carolina said they would support a carbon tax, and around 40 percent said they supported Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Conservatives and environmentalists who track the issue attributed this growing support for GOP climate action to three main drivers: Faith, the availability of new solutions, and an evolving electorate.