The Conservative Case For Climate Action: 22 Minutes With Bob Inglis

Earth Day has long been a moment of bipartisan agreement in America — a reminder that clean air, clean water, and the protection of the natural world are not partisan concerns. But in today’s political climate, that shared purpose can feel distant.

Few people have thought harder about how to rebuild it than Bob Inglis. A Republican who represented South Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District for twelve years, Inglis became one of the most visible conservative voices calling for serious climate action — a stance that ultimately cost him his seat in Congress. In 2015, he received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. He now leads RepublicEn.org, a nonprofit dedicated to engaging conservatives in the climate conversation through the language of free enterprise and accountability.

EARTHDAY.ORG Global Director of Advocacy and Partnerships James Banks sat down with Inglis to talk about bipartisanship, the economics of clean energy, and why he believes the country is closer to a turning point than most people think.

Bob Inglis is the founder and executive director of RepublicEn.org, a nonprofit that builds the conservative clean energy base. He represented South Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District from 1993 to 1999 and from 2005 to 2011, and received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2015.

Earth Day 2026 and its theme, Our Power, Our Planet, highlights how people everywhere — from classrooms and local neighborhoods to national institutions — can drive environmental progress through education, advocacy, and community engagement.

Q: The first Earth Day sparked an extraordinary moment of bipartisan agreement. Are Americans capable of rediscovering that kind of shared purpose?

I think we’re on the cusp of rediscovering it. Maybe I’m the eternal optimist — and that’s maybe true — but I think we’re getting to the point where we’ve just had enough of the basic trash talk. There’s going to come a time when we realize: all these folks are doing is telling us we’re going to “own the libs” or “defeat the conservatives” — bury the other side. And that just isn’t getting us anywhere.

This current moment really is pretty low rhetoric, pretty low expectations — about even the ability to formulate a sentence, let’s say. But I really think the next moment will be different. The whole style of politics could change, and it’s up to us as consumers of that style to demand it.

Bellbottoms, I think, are back in — aren’t they? When consumers demand more bellbottoms, Levi’s and everybody else makes more bellbottoms. When consumers of politics say, “we’re tired of the trash talk, and we really want somebody who can talk to us about solutions” — that’s what we’ll get. We’ve got to get ready for that and drive toward that end.

Q: Does the climate conversation need to start with everyday concerns — clean air, clean water — if it’s going to resonate with people?

People really do want to live in fresh air and clean water and would like to have a healthier environment. When it comes to climate, that’s a little harder, because the main culprit is CO2 — and you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it. You sort of wish there were a foul odor as a proxy. But you can taste and smell the things that come along with it; they burn your eyes and your throat.

In places like China, there’s a greater demand for action because people can feel it. It’s like when the Cuyahoga River caught fire — repeatedly caught fire — and we realized, “wait a minute, rivers aren’t supposed to catch on fire.” You might wish, in the case of climate, that there were more things we could feel about this odorless, tasteless gas. That’s a real challenge. But generally speaking, people want clean air and clean water, and that’s a place to start.

Q: Why is it so important that good-faith conservative voices are part of the climate conversation?

We learn from people who are like us, and especially from people who like us. We really need the affirmation of the tribe — to feel that it’s okay to engage on a topic. What we’ve got to do at RepublicEn.org is show conservatives that this is very much their topic. You’re really good at this thing of solving climate change. This is a problem of economics. It has an environmental consequence. Fix the economics. Bring accountability for the side effects of burning fossil fuels and dumping into the trash dump of the sky for free.

We know that if you let people dump for free, there’ll be a lot of dumping — at the city dump or in the atmosphere. Charge for the space you take, and you get less dumping. That’s rock-solid conservative economics, and it’s actually acceptable to a lot of people left of center too. We could bring America together and lead the world to solutions. It’s just a matter of making sure people hear it in their own language.

And when they hear it from someone within their own tribe, it makes them feel like, “okay, I’m not Benedict Arnold here. I’m not going to be cut off from my community.” As human beings, we really can’t live on our own — we need a whole community of support. People don’t want to be cut off. We want to show them: you’ve got a home here. This is what we talk about as conservatives.

Q: Do conservative leaders have a unique ability to reach people who might otherwise tune the issue out?

If you’re going to start a Latino outreach church, you probably want to speak Spanish from the pulpit. If you’re going to reach conservatives on climate, you probably want to use the language of conservatism.

My friend Dan Kahan at Yale — joint appointment in law and psychology — has research showing that left-of-center people tend to be communitarian and egalitarian. They focus on the whole community doing well and key in on fairness. Right-of-center people tend to be hierarchical and individualistic — they believe in working through a chain of command, in individual effort and reward. The language is completely different in those two communities. And most of the climate conversation has been conducted in communitarian, egalitarian language.

What we have to do at RepublicEn — what we call the “eco-right,” a balance to the environmental left — is make that same case in hierarchical, individualistic terms. A great deal of money is spent on the environmental left every year; a very small amount is spent right of center. We’re trying to change that. Left of center, you might get away with saying “let’s repent of the capitalistic system.” On the right, you don’t want to say that. You want to say: “accountable free enterprise.” That may sound like an oxymoron to some people, but what I mean is a free enterprise system with all the costs in, all the subsidies removed, and a level playing field.

The language that works right of center is: “what we’re after here is more energy, more mobility, more freedom — we just want it cleaner, better, faster, and cheaper.” And there’s a real way to do that — to create wealth in America, create jobs, create opportunities, by selling products around the world that meet people’s needs.

The problem with the “shine your halo” approach is what it actually does: it makes the other person a sinner and you the saint. That’s a bad setup if you’re trying to convince people. But if you say “we can all win at this, and by the way, we can make money at it” — that’s a different conversation. As Steve Forbes said when he ran for president: in a capitalistic system, you make money by serving customers, and if you serve them well, you make lots of money. We can serve the world very well by creating better batteries, better solar cells, hopefully small modular reactors that are more affordable than the gargantuan ones — and sell those around the world, cleaning up the air the whole time.

Q: When you look at today’s energy economy — solar, batteries, new grid technologies — do you feel the market is already moving forward, regardless of the politics?

Yes, definitely. There was a time when human beings used whale oil to light their homes. Then coal oil. Then petroleum. The next is pretty clearly electricity — for data centers, for cars, for drones, for just about everything. And we’ll either enter that competition — with Ford Motor Company trying to meet the mark of BYD, the Chinese company that can make a car go 300 miles on a five-minute charge for around $20,000 — or we’ll double down on burning rocks and fouling the air. The world is going to move on, whether we’re part of it or not.

I was walking down a particularly choked street in New York City during Climate Week — closed in, full of fumes from trucks and buses and cars — and it occurred to me that my seven grandchildren are going to someday say, “Can you believe Mimi and Papa used to breathe that stuff?” The same way I might say to my grandmother, who grew up in South Georgia: “What was it like at the south end of a northbound horse?” We are headed to that day.

And here’s the thing: economic realities eventually overtake shaky ideologies. You can talk about saving the horse-drawn cart and protecting the buggy whip manufacturers. You can point out that Henry Ford’s cars were catching fire, that the tires were blowing out, that horses were rearing up and people were getting hurt. All true. But people figured out it was a pretty great deal to ride at 25 or 30 miles an hour rather than deal with that horse. That’s what’s going to happen with the electrification of everything.

You can have a religion of climate change — that’s not me. You can have acceptance of the data — that’s me; I apply my faith to that data. Or you can reject both. It doesn’t matter. You’re going to end up in the same place, because BYD is threatening to take over the entire world car market, and Ford is betting the farm on an EV platform it can sell for $30,000. That’s the economic reality, and it’s driving us there regardless of anyone’s view on climate science.

When I get discouraged in this business, I go watch JFK at Rice University in September 1962 — the Moonshot Speech. He admits in that speech that some of the materials needed for the spacecraft hadn’t been invented yet. “No matter. We’re going to the moon before the decade is out.” That’s really where we are. We need to admit we’re behind — behind BYD, behind China. And then, as Kennedy said: “We intend to catch up.” If we can get that kind of focused policy commitment, it would accelerate everything dramatically.

Q: What role should policy play? Is a carbon tax really the answer?

I think we do need policy, and the policy that would help most — this isn’t just conservative intuition, this is based on serious modeling by En-ROADS, from MIT Sloan School of Business — is a carbon tax. A simple price on dumping into the trash dump of the sky.

When I explain this to fellow conservatives, I use an example from my hometown of Bluffton, South Carolina. In the 1960s, the dump was a little dirt road loop off Highway 46 where you drove in and threw your trash on the ground. We eventually figured out that stuff was leaching into the saltwater estuary where we planned on eating the crabs and the shrimp and the fish and the oysters. And nationwide, we started lining dumps so they wouldn’t leach into the waterways. Most everybody agrees with that now.

But go back to the 1960s. If I’d been Inglis Trash Hauling back then, I could have gone to the County Council and railed against it: “Communism! They want to make me pay a tipping fee? I’m a taxpayer!” Fast forward to today — I’m certain there is nobody on the Beaufort County Council who would hear that argument. They’d say: “Inglis, you’re taking up space in the dump. Pay for the space you take. Back that cost up to your customers, because it’s their trash filling up the dump.”

Same thing applies to the trash dump of the sky. Right now we have free dumping. Charge for it, and there’ll be less of it, because people will substitute away from the sources. That’s what Milton Friedman would tell us to do — Reagan’s own economics advisor.

And because we’re conservatives, that carbon tax needs to be paired with a reduction in other taxes — specifically the payroll tax, which by itself hurts poor people. A carbon tax by itself would also hurt poor people. But if you shift the tax from payroll to carbon, the Congressional Budget Office says the bottom 70% of Americans end up better off.

Then you apply it to imports. Goods coming from a country without the same carbon tax get charged at our border. That makes it in their interest to do the same — why would China want to fork over money to the United States that they could have collected themselves? So the world follows the American lead. No international agreement. No bowing and scraping at the UN. No protracted negotiations. Just a bold move by the United States.

And lest this sound like purely right-wing stuff — if someone out there is thinking, “why does this sound familiar? I’m left of center” — it might be because it’s essentially what Al Gore has been for for the last 30 years. I asked him several years ago if I could keep saying that. He said, “Hold up, Bob — if you’re talking about a low carbon tax…” I said, “No sir, I’m talking about a substantial carbon tax, steadily rising, paired with a reduction in payroll taxes, applied at our borders.” He said: “Yeah, fine. What you’re for at RepublicEn.org is the same thing I’ve been for for about 30 years.”

That’s what we hope for: after conservatives have heard it in their own language, they can see they’re actually pretty good at this — and we can come together and bring America together and lead the world to solutions.

Q: Several prominent figures in the MAGA movement have recently started talking about solar as a way to strengthen American energy independence. What do you make of that shift?

I think what it shows is they’ve looked at the numbers. The rap against solar and wind has always been that they’re “intermittent” and “unreliable.” But when you’re paired with battery backup, they’re very reliable. The price of batteries has come down dramatically. The price of solar cells has come down. People have started to get the memo, and they see the numbers pencil out.

That’s what I mean by economic realities driving us to a point of convergence. The rhetoric on various outlets says solar is intermittent and you can’t count on it — meanwhile, the people actually doing it are saying, “Hush the rhetoric. We know how to do this. We get the batteries, we back them up, and it works.” It’s just facts coming into play.

Q: The Trump administration has rolled back climate policies and slowed approvals for renewable projects, yet solar and battery storage keep growing. What does that tension tell us about where America’s energy system is actually headed?

Economic realities overcome shaky ideologies — that’s the point of convergence I keep coming back to. You can rail against climate religion, call it a “false religion.” You can try to introduce doubt about the data. But meanwhile, the economic realities are headed toward this energy revolution, this real transition in the way we power our lives. That’s what’s going to win. Policy could speed it up — get us to that point of convergence sooner — but the direction is set.

It’s like smoking. Every physician will tell you: stop smoking. Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at it — you could be 80 years old and have smoked all your life. Stop. There may be some damage already baked in, but you can avoid the worst of it if you stop now. We’ve been smoking a lot. We can either keep going, or we can accelerate the point at which we say: there’s a new way to power our lives.

And from a guy who was five times in Iraq and four times in Afghanistan — I’m reminded right now, in the midst of this Iranian conflict, that it would sure be nice to say to the Middle East: “See if you can drink that stuff. We just don’t need you like we used to. Here’s a copy of our Constitution in your language — you might want to study it. But you will not see us panicking over the Straits of Hormuz.” Even though we’re the world’s biggest oil producer, it’s a worldwide market. If you constrain 20% of the supply through the Straits of Hormuz, you’re going to affect prices and risk a worldwide recession. Would I like to defund petro-dictators like Vladimir Putin? You bet. I’d like to say to him: “Your economy looks like it’s pretty much crumbling. You can’t prop it up anymore with oil, because we just don’t need it like we used to.” That’s when we get to real freedom — not just cleaner air, but national security.

Q: When people talk about energy, they rarely talk about policy. They talk about their power bill and whether the lights stay on. Does the climate conversation need to start with those everyday concerns?

It definitely helps to make it applicable to daily life. Affordability is a key concept right now. Data centers are sucking up a lot of power, and the question of whether the grid is going to supply that — or whether very wealthy companies are going to do it themselves — is a potent issue that brings all of this into the present.

But I also think that once people actually experience the technology, it changes things. I watched this unfold at a Chevrolet dealership once. A 70-something hunter walks in — orange vest, obviously just been out hunting — and goes over to look at the Chevy Bolt. You can tell he’s scoffing. He walks up to the 24-year-old salesman, who tells him: “This car can beat a Corvette off the light.” “No way,” says the hunter. “Yes way — I’ve got a Corvette, and this car beats me.”

Once people check these things out, they start deciding, “Hey, I think I’d like one of those.” Particularly once we can meet BYD’s range and charge time at a competitive price — at that point, people won’t even remember what gasoline costs. All of that makes it real. The affordability, the thrill of a car that gives you pickup when you need it. Pretty cool gadgets. And that’s how minds change.

Q: Your willingness to speak honestly about climate change cost you your seat in Congress but earned you the Profile in Courage Award. What does courage on this issue look like for leaders today?

What I’d say to my former colleagues — I guess I’m their former colleague now — is this: if you’re not willing to lose your seat in Congress, there’s really very little reason to be there. The whole point is to lead.

If all you’re doing is following people where they’re already going, amplifying their fears, mirroring their fears back to them except louder — what are you doing? If you hold on to that seat for dear life like it’s the best thing you could ever possibly have, you’ll end a long career and wonder: “What happened? I stood for nothing. I took no risk. All I did was tell people what they were already telling me. I didn’t lead.” I can’t imagine anything worse than that.

So yes, I lost an election. But I didn’t lose my soul. There’s a big difference. We ask service members to die on literal hills in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Couldn’t we ask for a politician or two to die a figurative death on Capitol Hill? It’s not the worst thing that can happen to you. You led. You got shot in the back — that’s typically where it comes from, when you step up and start leading. But you were leading. You did what you were supposed to do. Go ahead and risk your seat. Lead. Just don’t end up with that terrible thing: a long career, and nothing to show for it.

Q: Standing here in 2026, do you feel the United States is beginning to choose the path of meeting this challenge?

I think we are going to choose the path of meeting this competition and leading this energy revolution. There are forces arrayed against that — vested interests that would like us to double down on burning rocks. But I think we’re going to figure out that it just isn’t working for us anymore.

The buggy whip manufacturers organized against Henry Ford and the Model T, and they had good points — his cars were catching fire, the tires were blowing out, the horses were rearing up. People were getting hurt. But the car got better. Now here we are: “Oh, EVs don’t go far enough.” Well, the battery’s better now. The range is better. The charge time is faster. The price is coming down. Go check it out. That’s what’s going to happen to the people with the burning rocks: there’s a new competitor on the scene with a much better product, and consumers are going to choose it.

Hopefully we can accelerate that point of convergence, because while I believe it’s inevitable, getting there sooner means cleaner air sooner and healthier lives sooner.

Q: If you could speak directly to conservative voters who care about economic strength, national security, and the future their children will inherit — what would you want them to understand?

If I could expand that question slightly — I’ve got something to say to both my right-of-center friends and to left-of-center people who might be listening.

To the right-of-center folks: this is an incredible opportunity, and we don’t want to miss out on it. If you had invested in Ford Motor Company when Henry Ford rolled out that first Model T, you would have done very well. If we can invest early in this new energy system and win this competition for the future, we’re going to do really well. That’s the case I’d make.

To the left-of-center folks, I’d say this: don’t treat this as too good a crisis to waste. The instinct to load the wagon — to attach every cause to climate legislation — is understandable, but that wagon is sinking in the muck. If you could just take some weight off, and pull it across the finish line with a simple price on carbon, paired with a reduction in other taxes, applied to imports at our borders — we might actually get there. But if you load it with everything else, it’s not happening.

Just implore left-of-center folks to reach out and find a way to make this work right of center. If we do, we can bring America together and lead the world. That’s the ultimate objective. That’s what’s possible.