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The Politics of Solar Energy Are Getting Weird, Mean, and a Little MAGA
A mysteriously named political action committee has started running ads reminding voters in Colorado about that time GOP representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and her date were caught on camera in 2023 getting handsy during a performance of the musical Beetlejuice.
That same PAC is producing a spot hitting Anthony Constantino, a Trumpist congressional candidate in upstate New York, because someone used his sticker-printing company to briefly make stickers that read, “Kill the Police.”
Attack ads are everywhere in the last month ahead of November’s election. But these spots are a little different. The semi-anonymous PAC that’s funding and making the ads, the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, is a pro-solar-energy outfit. It’s funded in part by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and run by a team of New York City political operatives.
“Playing hardball politics, that's what our opponents do, right, in oil and gas? And I just think the solar industry has been—I don't know how to describe it—a little too nice,” says Larsen, the cofounder of the blockchain finance firm Ripple and a major backer of the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition.
Green groups don’t usually act like this, with knives out, ready to stab opponents between the ribs. They tend to make appeals based on scientific consensus, or fears of what will happen to a warming planet without collective action. They’re also traditionally Democratic, but a few high-profile members of the MAGA movement are now speaking up for solar too. Texas, the home of the fossil fuel business, has quickly become a solar powerhouse. There are some signs that the Trump administration’s across-the-board opposition to solar may be starting to crack, at least a little, after years of slashing greentech subsidies and throwing up one roadblock after another to clean power projects.
Some of Larsen’s natural allies in the renewables field aren’t too happy about the PAC’s efforts, arguing that they’re alienating the decisionmakers they need most. But the politics of energy, especially solar energy, are changing.
Larsen’s PAC is devoting $15 million to go after seven of the more prominent opponents of renewable energy in this year’s congressional elections. That’s on top of roughly $5 million they’ve already spent in the primaries, cutting ads against Republican representatives Ralph Norman of South Carolina (whom the PAC called a “MAGA traitor”), Andy Ogles of Tennessee (“He doesn’t even bother going to work”), and Chip Roy (“chosen the side of powerful pedophiles”) of Texas. A PAC that received funding from Invest in Tomorrow has also gone after one Democrat, Rhode Island governor Dan McKee. All four lost their primary races.
In Roy’s case, the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition spent almost $1.5 million to stop his run for Texas attorney general. Most of the money went to ads on right-wing platforms like Truth Social and Rumble. The word “solar” was never mentioned.
“Don't talk about renewables. Don't talk about climate,” says Chris Coffey, the chief executive of the consultancy Tusk Strategies, which is running the PAC. “Pick the best issue that we can pick. And in a Republican primary, we should savage this guy for not being MAGA enough.”
Roy received a 100 percent rating from Heritage Action, the political arm of the Trumpist think tank. Coffey said he got some pushback from a few Democratic operatives, who were concerned that replacements for Roy and other PAC targets might not be any less extreme—on climate or any other issue. Without their far-right track record, the argument went, those replacements might even be stronger candidates in the general election.