A North Carolina Republican is launching a US$175-million campaign to persuade his party to take climate change more seriously.
“I always felt a little alone out there as a Republican, and so I started ClearPath to create a dialogue around this in a way that hadn’t been done before,” Charlotte-based audio-visual entrepreneur Jay Faison told Politico. “We think there are real Republican solutions to the problem.”
- Be among the first to read The Energy Mix Weekender
- A brand new weekly digest containing exclusive and essential climate stories from around the world.
- The Weekender:The climate news you need.
The bulk of Faison’s campaign will run through the ClearPath Foundation and consist of “a social media and online advertising blitz, backed by state and national digital advocacy efforts and a series of strategic grants,” Goode writes. He’ll also put $10 million into a political action committee modelled on Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action.
The challenge for initiatives like Faison’s is that climate change “doesn’t really register as an issue with many Republican primary voters,” said ex-Heartland Institute staffer Eli Lehrer. “It isn’t that they are denying anything. They just don’t care that much. I don’t care that much. It’s unlikely that I will vote primarily where someone stands on climate change.”
