Republicans Are Warming Up to Renewable Energy

For decades alternative energy was the province of activists.  It was far more expensive than fossil fuels, and many remained unconvinced of humanity’s role in the globe’s rising temperature.

When world leaders gather[ed] in New York on Friday to sign the Paris climate accord, they did so against a changing backdrop.  As the cost of wind and solar power has plummeted, the solid consensus against alternative energy in the U.S. Republican Party has begun to crack.

The leading Republican candidates for president, Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, reject any role of humans in global warming, as do most party leaders.  But a small and growing number of once-skeptical Republicans is embracing wind and solar.  They see the clean energy sources delivering cheap electricity, bolstering America’s energy independence and fueling economic development in impoverished rural areas. 

In turn, renewables are adding jobs in North Carolina, Georgia and Texas and other conservative states, creating a formidable clean-energy constituency in a party whose energy mantra was “drill, baby drill.”

“This is going to change the discussion,” said Bob Inglis, a former six-term Republican congressman from South Carolina who now runs an organization promoting free-market solutions to climate change.  “What I sense among Republicans is there is some belief that, yes, this does sound like a song we could sing.”

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