In Appalachia, greens are banding together with the Tennessee Conservative Union. A green movement of all stripes

Can conservatives and environmentalists get along again?

Activists around the country are giving it a try.


In Appalachia, greens are banding together with the Tennessee Conservative Union to oppose mountaintop mining. In Georgia, the Sierra Club and Atlanta’s tea party have formed a Green Tea Coalition that is demanding a bigger role for solar power in the state’s energy market. Elsewhere, veterans of the George W. Bush administration are working with the Environmental Defense Fund on market-based ideas for protecting endangered species.

It’s not yet a broad national trend, and may not be enough to begin dampening Washington’s bitter left-right split over President Barack Obama’s environmental policies. But some activists — particularly outside the Beltway — see potential for the kinds of coalitions that used to get big things done, back in the days when Theodore Roosevelt was creating national parks and George H.W. Bush’s administration was taking on acid rain.

“I do think there’s a big schism there, but there are some things we can all agree on,” said Lloyd Daugherty, chairman of the Tennessee Conservative Union.

Daugherty’s group — and its roughly 15,000 members — joined an effort with environmentalists last spring against mountaintop mining. While Daugherty and his organization had long privately objected to the mining because of its effect on property rights, hunting and fishing, he decided to fight publicly after a Chinese company bought mineral rights in Tennessee.

“We’re proud that Tennessee is a red state. But just how red are we willing to go?” asked a 30-second ad that Daugherty’s group ran, which shows Tennessee’s state flag morphing into the Chinese flag.

The ad was put together by Shelby White, a senior campaigner at Catapult, an environmental strategy firm that looks to build unusual coalitions on issues like climate change and logging.

“We’re looking to find more of those issues that can bring conservatives, businesses and other unusual bedfellows together,” said Glenn Hurowitz, a senior member of Catapult and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Catapult has also recruited rock stars like Mick Jagger to combat guitars made from illegally logged wood and elite frequent fliers to lobby United Airlines to reduce pollution.

Catapult is an offshoot of Climate Advisers, a consulting shop founded by Nigel Purvis, a former senior climate adviser to President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and a Clinton administration climate diplomat.

Conservatives and eco-activists have mainly been at odds for the past decade or so. Daugherty and some environmentalists blame that on a newer generation of Republicans who have allowed a drive for limited government to overshadow everything else.

“Most of them now are influenced by talk shows,” said Daugherty, a radio talk show host himself and former Southern field director for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. “It’s become too easy for conservatives to label anybody who cares about conservation as tree huggers.”

But fault can lay in the other direction too, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Tony Kreindler acknowledged.

“For so long, conservatives and Republicans in particular when they do the right thing for the environment, they rarely get the credit they deserve and are often dismissed by the environmental community,” he said.

EDF’s political arm — the Environmental Defense Action Fund — is in the early stages of an effort to give possible direct donations, independent expenditures and other help for Republicans vying for safe red seats in 2014 who could be future partners.

“This is not about taking out the bad guys. This is about helping the good guys and creating a deeper bench of environmental champions in both parties,” Kreindler said. “We’re going to be actively engaged in this electoral cycle building allies with conservatives in the Republican Party.”

It’s a part of a larger effort by EDF to foster a new agenda with the help of conservatives. EDF and some George W. Bush administration environmental officials, led by former Interior Secretary Gale Norton, co-formed the Conservation Leadership Council “to find environmental solutions that are based on conservative principles of freedom, liberty and choice,” Kreindler said. The result so far has been several roundtable talks and a dozen policy papers advocating market-based ways to update the Endangered Species Act and address issues like clean energy financing.

Conservatives like Daugherty are more influenced by the likes of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan than upstart tea partiers like Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

In fact, Goldwater’s son, former Rep. Barry Goldwater Jr., is chairing an effort formed this year — dubbed Tell Utilities Solar won’t be Killed, or TUSK — that is fighting a fee on rooftop solar customers proposed by the state’s biggest utility, Arizona Public Service.

“Conservatives embrace solar energy because it represents ratepayers taking control of their energy choices,” Goldwater said. They also view the fee as a subsidy for Arizona Public Service.

A similar effort led to a united effort between Georgia’s Sierra Club chapter and Atlanta’s Tea Party, dubbed the Green Tea Coalition.

“This is going to be a national movement,” said Debbie Dooley, co-chairwoman of the Atlanta Tea Party.

The partnership began when Colleen Kiernan, director of the Sierra Club chapter, invited Dooley to lunch in early 2012 and the two shared disdain for a proposed transportation sales tax for metro Atlanta. The Sierra Club viewed it as a glorified road-building program that wouldn’t do enough to promote transit or address congestion, and Dooley saw it as business as usual.

The two later partnered to pressure Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Co., to purchase energy from 525 megawatts of solar panels, over the objections of groups like Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire tea party-backing Koch brothers. They also are fighting a Georgia law that bars third parties from owning residential rooftop solar projects.

Their argument is similar to that made by Goldwater and others in Arizona — making it easier for residents to choose increasingly inexpensive solar power and fighting electric power monopolies.

Dooley and Kiernan are also teaming up against a proposed new Atlanta Braves baseball stadium. The Sierra Club says the suburban site would worsen congestion, while Dooley contends it’s a sweetheart deal involving taxpayer dollars.

“While we certainly don’t agree on much, from time to time it makes sense to work together when we find an issue we both recognize protects the wallets of Georgia families and the future of our planet,” the Sierra Club’s Kiernan said in a statement to POLITICO.

A lot of conservatives have been “afraid to speak up and say, ‘Hey, I support alternative energy,’” Dooley said. She gives a PowerPoint presentation to fellow conservatives that touts the virtues of “energy freedom” and reminds them that Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol treaty to protect the ozone layer.

Dooley said she has fielded offers from conservatives and liberal activists in Colorado, Virginia and California, as well as college students, who want to set up Green Tea chapters. She also spoke about the alliance at a town hall event in Atlanta hosted by the German Consulate. “And they seemed to think this is something that could go international,” Dooley said. “I’m not sure about that. But we do have plans to expand out of Georgia because this is something that needs to be done.”

Still, some on the right and the left are skeptical that any real burgeoning movement exists.

“We’ve not seen it as a sort of major trend,” said Debbie Sease, the Sierra Club’s national legislative director.

“I’m not seeing it,” GOP energy adviser Mike McKenna said, despite some unity between conservatives and greens in opposing the federal corn ethanol mandate. “Some unfortunate large chunk of the environmental movement have become lobbyists for renewable energy subsidies, and that’s going to limit what they can manage on the right side of the political spectrum.”

Sease said that if any growing trend occurs, it will start at the local level, where the personal impact of an issue can more easily trump political ideology.

Dooley agrees. She plans to help activists in other states set up chapters and push their own agendas.

“It would be hard to have national groups to sign on to this,” she said. “You’d be tied up in red tape.”