In Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback has always enjoyed the support of Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries. They have been the single greatest contributor to his campaigns. The Koch network of funded groups—which includes Americans for Prosperity and Kansas’s Chamber of Commerce—boosted Brownback’s successful effort in the August 2012 Republican primaries for the State Senate to oust Republican moderates who had opposed his legislation.

Have the Kochs’ contributions ensured Brownback’s loyalty? Brownback, along with other conservatives, might argue that his relationship to Charles and David Koch merely represents a convergence of interest and principle. But in Kansas, there is one issue for which the Kochs’ money has not reinforced Brownback’s views, but actually changed them. Under pressure from the Kochs and Koch Industries, who oppose measures to shift American energy use away from fossil fuels, Brownback has reversed his support for encouraging Kansas’s wind industry.

In Kansas, wind power is the main form of renewable energy. Twenty wind farms, accounting for $7 billion in investment, dot western Kansas and provide 11.4 percent of Kansas’s energy. According to the American Council on Renewable Energy, “Kansas has one of the most promising wind resource potentials in the country.” The wind industry is popular in the state, including among farmers, who receive about $8 million annually in lease payments.

The growth of Kansas’s wind industry was sparked by legislation in 2009 that required the state’s utilities to devote 20 percent of their energy production to renewables by 2020. Democratic Governor Mark Parkinson, who had replaced Kathleen Sebelius when she left for Washington, signed this Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) into law, and Brownback, who was elected in November 2010, enthusiastically backed it. In the Senate, Brownback had co-sponsored with New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman a federal RPS. After his election as governor, his spokeswoman, Sherrene Jones-Sontag, said that Brownback backed the RPS and that “on numerous occasions has praised Governor Parkinson for his support of the wind industry.”

Brownback remained supportive of the Kansas RPS through the first three years of his term, but then the political winds began to shift. In 2013, the Koch brothers and their network of groups launched a national campaign against the federal production tax credit (PTC) for financing new projects in renewable energy. (Koch Industries began as and still is, among other thngs, a fossil-fuel producer.) In Kansas, the Koch network launched a similar campaign, led by Americans for Prosperity, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, against the state’s RPS. The Koch network called for freezing the RPS requirement at 15 percent in 2016. From January through April, Americans for Prosperity spent $383,000 on media ads calling for repeal of the RPS.