The Environmental Defense Action Fund wants both parties to have ideas for climate change. Greens launch pro-Republican push

The political arm of one of the nation’s biggest environmental groups is looking for allies in the unlikeliest of places: the Republican Party.

The Environmental Defense Action Fund is rolling out a seven-figure ad campaign to aid green-minded Republicans in the midterm elections, part of a longer-term effort to find GOP partners on priorities like climate change. If it works, it would offer a break from the growing partisan split that green issues have encountered in recent years — not to mention the aggressively pro-Democratic efforts of groups like the League of Conservation Voters and billionaire Tom Steyer’s super PAC.


The group faces stiff competition for a seat at the Republican table, especially given the increasingly dominant role of conservative tea party groups and the Koch brothers. Still, supporters of the effort say they see stirrings of conservationist Republican activism around the country, including among young conservatives and a pro-solar-power “green tea” alliance between Georgia tea party activists and the Sierra Club.

And the Action Fund served notice Thursday that it’s willing to champion Republican allies even at the expense of Democrats. It rolled out a $250,000 television, print and digital ad buy promoting Rep. Chris Gibson (R-N.Y.), whose Democratic challenger, Sean Eldridge, has support from other progressive groups.

The group hasn’t publicly identified other Republicans it plans to support in its 2014 effort, which it says is worth around $1 million so far.

“We want to create competition between the parties to be better on environmental issues, and that’s how we’re going to get to more ambitious action,” said Tony Kreindler, the Environmental Defense Action Fund’s senior director for strategic communications, who is overseeing the effort. He said the group wants to create a dynamic in which “both parties are coming to the table with their own ideas.”

Coddy Johnson, a former White House political strategist and national field director for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, stressed that the campaign is meant to be a lengthy one. He calls climate change the “next logical issue” to pursue after the work that he and other Republicans did in recent years to support gay marriage.

“There’s a broader trend taking place in the electorate and among Republicans to think about the environment and conservatism and climate change as a key issue,” he said in an interview. “That doesn’t just get settled in 2014, but one we’ll be working on perhaps throughout our lifetimes.”

The group is the politically active offshoot of the Environmental Defense Fund, long regarded as one of the top moderate voices in the green movement. The pro-Republican campaign has the backing of a roster of prominent GOP donors, the group said, though Johnson was the only one it would name.

The ads supporting Gibson include a TV spot thanking him for voting for “smart policies” and “responsible solutions,” including “fighting to stop climate change by preserving common-sense limits on air pollution and supporting high-tech investments that lower energy costs and protect the environment.” It’s being paired with print and online banner ads in his district.

“He’s vocally supportive of action on climate and believes it’s a real problem, which is not something you see a lot on Capitol Hill these days,” Kreindler said. “So it’s the kind of guy we definitely want to thank as much as we can.”

The ads don’t mention Eldridge or the upcoming election.

The group had already made smaller investments during the primary season, spending $25,000 for a mail and phone effort thanking two Michigan state lawmakers from conservative districts for supporting conservation programs. It also spent $15,000 to thank four Republican state legislators in Kansas for opposing GOP efforts to abolish the state’s renewable electricity production mandate. All four Kansas Republicans and one of the Michigan lawmakers subsequently won their primaries.

The group paid for those ads and the pro-Gibson efforts out of its 501(c)(4) advocacy program. That funding is walled off from the group’s more conventional direct political independent expenditures, which so far have gone to help Democrats this cycle.

Kreindler acknowledges that the notion of bipartisanship at the center of the GOP outreach will meet a lot of skepticism, saying, “We need to prove our good intentions.”

“We want to help Republicans because most Republicans run away from environmental groups,” he said. “Once we can prove our good intentions and prove that we can win, [in] 2016 the opportunities become much greater.”

If Gibson’s voting record is any indication, Congress’ deep polarization on environmental issues isn’t going away soon.

Gibson was the only House Republican in July to oppose appropriations amendments aimed at halting spending on just about every major climate change study and prohibiting federal agencies from considering the costs of carbon pollution in their regulations. He was one of only three Republicans to oppose an amendment meant to throttle an Energy Department climate program.

But Johnson said he sees strong similarities between the climate issue now and gay marriage in 2008, when younger Republicans were anchoring efforts to shift the debate.

“The popular will was there,” said Johnson, who sits on the Action Fund’s board of directors and is a member of the Conservation Leadership Council, a partnership between the Environmental Defense Fund and former officials from the George W. Bush administration. “It was about how you bring along leaders … to allow Republicans and Democrats to get behind the issue,” he said.

Other Republicans not connected to the Environmental Defense Action Fund’s campaign say they envision a near future in which liberals and conservatives try to outpace each other on environmental causes.

“We’re talking about making this our issue,” said Michele Combs, founder and chairwoman of Young Conservatives for Energy Reform. Combs, a student of the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater and daughter of Christian Coalition of America CEO Roberta Combs, said 35 state chapters in her organization are creating a groundswell of young conservatives who will be more receptive to green energy and energy efficiency efforts.

“I think you’ll see a different policy come out when these people get organized,” she said. “The messenger has always been the Al Gores, and so our age group didn’t even look at this issue. But I think the tide is turning.”

Seth Levey, the 27-year-old co-founder of a PAC run by young Republicans called Concord 51, said that “our generation is interested in getting things done. And there aren’t many of us in office right now but that’s part of the reason we exist, is we want to start now before we take over the conversation.”

Georgia even saw an alliance form last year between the Sierra Club and Atlanta’s Tea Party, a “Green Tea Coalition” that promoted solar power against the opposition of Georgia Power and the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity.

Similar activism in Kansas helped defeat an effort supported by another Koch-aligned group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, to repeal the state’s renewable electricity mandate. And with the Environmental Defense Action Fund’s help, Republican state lawmakers who voted with the greens on that issue survived their primaries this year.

Green issues “can win,” Kreindler said, even in conservative states where environmentalists face deep-pocketed opponents. “We may not be able to outspend them, but we’ve got the better issue on our side. And Kansas proves that.”