Young Republicans want action on climate change — so why is the party ignoring them?

For those despairing over the country’s seeming inability to mount a sustained attack against the threat of global warming, a close look at recent polls gives cause for hope.

In a simple division along party lines, Democrats favor abandoning fossil fuels, only questioning the speed of the transition, while Republicans say that the U.S. should never stop using them. This is not the whole story, however — studies that track views on climate change across different age groups reveal an emerging fissure between younger Republicans and their elders that could help break the deadlock over climate policy.

For example, polls find that GOP millennials (those between the ages of roughly 27 and 42) and younger conservative voters appear to be more willing to prioritize non-fossil energy sources than Generation X and baby boomer Republicans. Moreover, younger GOP millennials and Generation Z constituents are growing increasingly displeased with the elected officials who are supposed to represent them. Roughly half of the younger GOP generations want lawmakers to take more action to address the looming threats of climate change. Only a quarter of their pre-millennial elders share their view.

Few in the Republican base are immune to the harmful impacts of more intense heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods, but unlike boomer and Generation X Republicans, younger conservatives don’t have to change their minds when new information challenges long-held views. Furthermore, millennials and post-millennials are well aware that it is their future that is on the line. They are the ones who will be around longest and suffer most from a rapidly warming climate. And, if we continue with major investments in fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure, they are the ones who will inherit the burden of the stranded assets, as rising climate-related damage generates pressure for early abandonment of these facilities.

Ultimately this poses a problem for Republican lawmakers who are single-mindedly focused on unfettered energy markets, lowering consumer energy expenditures, and attaining international market dominance for U.S. energy industries. At first glance, these goals may appear to be justified, but they pale in relation to the immediate and long-term impacts of climate change on the health and well-being of their constituents.

Many Republicans in Congress nonetheless continue to adhere to the right-wing philosophies being espoused by their traditional think tanks. In coordination with other conservative groups, the Heritage Foundation has been hard at work on Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page roadmap for a possible Republican administration. On climate change, the report is singularly focused on ripping any engagement with the issue from all federal activity — essentially pretending that the issue does not exist. Favored measures include backing out of the Paris Climate Agreement for the second time, killing government-supported climate research, and relaxing constraints on greenhouse gas emissions.

The Project 2025 report is able to draw strength from the free-market doctrine because it conveniently ignores Adam Smith’s qualification about limits to the “invisible hand” when social issues are at stake. The Heritage view is that a free market, unencumbered by government intervention, will make good choices for the economy, the environment and public welfare more generally. The Heritage Foundation’s plan of action for a conservative administration only makes sense on the assumption that there is zero connection between human activity and the changing climate (or what some Heritage authors like to call “extreme weather”). That assumption has no basis in fact. Project 2025 is built on a foundation of willful ignorance regarding the reality and seriousness of climate change.

There are many explanations for why Republican officeholders are out of sync with a growing part of their base. Despite the mounting evidence of climate-related disasters, the problem is only now being recognized within their overall constituency. Having denied in the past that change was happening, or denied that human action is involved, they are now reluctant to admit that they have been wrong for several decades. A further difficulty is that acknowledging the reality and seriousness of climate change contradicts the long-standing climate denial of presidential front-runner Donald Trump. Finally, if Republicans in Congress admit the reality and seriousness of human-caused planetary warming, such honesty may jeopardize their easy access to financial support from well-endowed fossil fuel interests.

At every point in the political process, each officeholder or aspirant must make a political calculation. Considering the political composition of the communities they represent, what do they need to do to build a winning coalition?

For the time being, many Republican candidates seem to believe that a winning coalition requires opposing climate action, killing climate provisions of the current administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, and touting the Heritage Project 2025 plan.

But the political landscape is always changing. The number of GOP voters discontented with this approach is likely to swell as the present-day millennials and Generation Z Republicans replace their elders in GOP leadership positions. And all too soon the present-day young will themselves be replaced by Generation Alpha — a cohort with an even larger climate change bulls-eye on its back.

For the sake of the planet, we can only hope that younger Republicans speak out forcefully and that their elders start listening — and, most importantly, that dissatisfaction with the party’s failure to address climate change is expressed in the voting booth. At a time when elections are determined by a miniscule percentage of the electorate, perhaps even the present discontent can make a difference.

Richard Richels served as lead author for multiple chapters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the areas of mitigation, impacts and adaptation. He also served on the National Assessment Synthesis Team for the first U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Henry Jacoby is the William F. Pounds Professor of Management, Emeritus, in the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and founding co-director of the M.I.T. Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

Benjamin Santer is an atmospheric scientist who has worked on all previous Scientific Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Emeritus, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He served as convening lead author for multiple chapters and the Synthesis Report for the IPCC from 1990 through 2014 and was vice-chair of the Third US National Climate Assessment.