Ken Paxton Is the Face of a Sea Change in the Republican Party

Most Republicans oppose environmental regulation. But Texas’s attorney general has attacked the energy transition in a way that upends a generation of conservative consensus.

As some see it, the Texas Republican primary for U.S. Senate is a battle for the future of the party: Longtime incumbent John Cornyn represents the conservative establishment, while Attorney General Ken Paxton is a rising MAGA firebrand. After Tuesday’s election, that battle will continue, as neither candidate broke 50 percent, and therefore they will face each other in a runoff in May. While Cornyn is a staunch fossil fuel ally—no one would mistake him for an environmentalist—Paxton has gone a step further, pioneering an unorthodox attack on renewable energy that upends a long-standing conservative principle.

Paxton’s ascent is notable for a few reasons. Coverage of the race typically notes his impressive array of scandals and legal imbroglios, such as being indicted for securities fraud in 2015; being successfully sued by four of his own deputies in 2020 after he allegedly fired them for reporting him to the FBI for abusing his office to help a wealthy donor; dropping $2.3 million in campaign money on private lawyers to defend him in his impeachment trial; and being accused of infidelity by his wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce shortly after the launch of his Senate campaign. Paxton has also made headlines for his hard-line positions as attorney general, such as declaring in 2022 that his office would consider gender-affirming health care for trans kids to be a form of “child abuse” and threatening multiple Texas hospitals with legal consequences if they were to provide a court-approved abortion to a Texas mother of two with elevated medical risks.

But it’s arguably in his environmental actions that Paxton most clearly exemplifies the growing battle over what the Republican Party stands for. And it’s not because of the industries his work has typically championed (coal) or demonized (renewable energy, particularly wind power). It’s because of the way he’s pursued his goals.

Paxton has been one of the foremost crusaders in recent years in the growing conservative war on ESG—short for “environmental, social, and governance” principles, which may be adopted by companies or used in investing decisions. In this camp’s view, ESG is part of a “woke agenda” to discriminate against fossil fuels.

In late 2024, Paxton and 10 other Republican state attorneys general sued three large asset managers—Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street—alleging a “conspiracy” to “artificially constrict the market for coal through anticompetitive trade practices.” As TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted at the time, this was a striking argument, given that coal use was declining for purely economic reasons and “the three financial firms Paxton is suing, moreover, have never given the impression of being all that committed to environmental goals.”

But the suit also indicated a move away from the Republican Party’s typical championing of free-market ideology. “Traditionally the conservative legal movement has been very in favor of investor choice,” said Yale law professor Joshua Macey. The “typical” conservative position on ESG investing might be to say that if corporate and personal investors “don’t like Vanguard’s approach to ESG they can go to a different fund. But Paxton decided to work with the power of the state to be incredibly prescriptive about what mutual funds and index funds can do.”

Last week, Vanguard settled the suit for $29.5 million. BlackRock and State Street continue to fight it.

Vanguard’s settlement was more likely driven by political strategy than a belief that it would lose the case, two experts I spoke to said. The suit in general “did not make strong legal arguments,” said Macey, although he noted that the case raised an “intellectually interesting problem” that academics have previously identified about when investor ownership of publicly traded corporations could potentially start to raise antitrust concerns. “To my knowledge, there has never been evidence brought that would satisfy the Sherman or Clayton acts that this is occurring,” Macey said, “but it’s the one legal argument that was both interesting and would not have been dismissed out of hand.”

This lawsuit is one of a few ways that Texas and Paxton have helped lead the conservative fight against ESG investing and the energy transition more broadly. Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of As You Sow, a group focused on social and environmental change via shareholder advocacy, pointed to Senate Bill 13, the state’s 2021 law banning investment and contracts with financial institutions deemed to be “boycotting” various energy companies, i.e., fossil fuels. Paxton in 2023 announced that his office would be investigating 21 financial institutions to see whether they were boycotting fossil fuels—a remarkable declaration given that the banks listed included Bank of America, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo, all of which consistently top the lists of fossil fuel financers. A federal judge ruled last month that S.B. 13 was unconstitutional.

To Fugere, the actions of Paxton and his allies here aren’t just anti-environmental but “anti-capitalist,” in that they go against investors’ financial incentives. “As an investor,” she said, “if you care about your client’s ability to make money on the market, you’re concerned about climate change. If you’re investing in automakers that are behind in electric vehicle technology, you have to ask the question, Is this company going to be in business for the long term if it’s missing out on new technology?”

Both Fugere and Macey noted that coal is hard to defend from a free-market standpoint. “In some ways,” Macey said, “Republicans could be celebrating the Texas electricity market, which has consistently driven down costs in what appears to be the most aggressive free-market approach, and also has the most installed renewable capacity of any market in the country.”

The conservative antipathy to renewable energy isn’t new, of course, but Macey noted that the explicit rejection of free-market ideology is. “Paxton signals a shift in not even the Republican Party or conservative legal movement’s views about environmental protection,” he said, “but how they understand regulation of the corporation and the corporate form—to a more highly prescriptive approach that limits shareholder discretion.” It’s “a 180-degree shift from what they have done for the previous thirty years.”

Paxton’s face-off with Cornyn, then, will be more than merely a conflict between a scandal-ridden hard-liner and a more traditional conservative. It’s also a contest about how far the Republican Party is willing to go, overturning decades of free-market conservatism in its crusade against renewable energy.

Stat of the Week$43.6 billion

That’s the amount of tax money estimated to be spent on tax credits for carbon sequestration. The number figures prominently in a letter recently signed by over 125 environmental groups, calling for Congress to stop extending these tax credits given to oil and gas companies that capture carbon only to use it in “enhanced oil recovery.” Read South Dakota Searchlight’s coverage of the topic here.

Noem’s spending limits have frozen millions in disaster aid, Democratic report charges

Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem’s policy of requiring her personal approval for expenditures over $100,000 is holding up huge quantities of disaster aid, according to a new report from Senate Democrats. The Trump administration disputes the claim, but The Washington Post notes that the report, compiled with the help of whistleblowers, “corroborate[s]” accounts the Post has independently received from “numerous current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency officials” about the funding delays:

The report identifies what it says are “at least 1,034 FEMA contracts, grants, or disaster assistance awards” that have been delayed or remain pending, including for victims of July’s deadly flooding in Texas and the catastrophic Hurricane Helene, which hit swaths of the Southeast in the fall of 2024.… It identifies a range of programs it says were affected, including leasing of rental units for Hurricane Helene survivors; urban search and rescue in North Carolina; technical assistance task orders for multiple disasters in Florida; unemployment assistance for Texas, Oklahoma and Kentucky; housing inspections for storm-battered homes; and crisis counseling.

The report identifies what it says are “at least 1,034 FEMA contracts, grants, or disaster assistance awards” that have been delayed or remain pending, including for victims of July’s deadly flooding in Texas and the catastrophic Hurricane Helene, which hit swaths of the Southeast in the fall of 2024.… It identifies a range of programs it says were affected, including leasing of rental units for Hurricane Helene survivors; urban search and rescue in North Carolina; technical assistance task orders for multiple disasters in Florida; unemployment assistance for Texas, Oklahoma and Kentucky; housing inspections for storm-battered homes; and crisis counseling.

Read Brianna Sacks’s and Brady Dennis’s full report at The Washington Post.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Water Wars

The president’s efforts to pin a sewage spill on Democrats point to a broader vulnerability.

Why is water so different from air? It sounds like the start of a joke. But it’s a fair thing to wonder after the Trump administration last week officially revoked the so-called endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that climate change threatens human health and that greenhouse gases were therefore an appropriate subject for federal regulation under the Clean Air Act.

This move paves the way for the elimination of all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. These rollbacks may kill a lot of people long before the associated climate effects kick in, though, because the emissions that the government has been regulating also reduce general pollution. The Environmental Defense Fund projects that the rollbacks could trigger an extra 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055.

The Trump administration is not at all concerned about blowback, though, and in fact was making victory laps much of last week, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saying that all the extra carbon dioxide in the air would be good for plants.

Contrast that with how eagerly President Trump is trying to blame Democrats for a recent large sewage spill into the Potomac River.

“Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., who are responsible for the massive sewage spill in the Potomac River, must get to work, IMMEDIATELY,” the president posted Tuesday on Truth Social. “If they can’t do the job, they have to call me and ask, politely, to get it fixed. The Federal Government is not at all involved with what has taken place, but we can fix it,” he added. “This is a Radical Left caused Environmental Hazard.”

None of this is true, of course—as Maryland Governor Wes Moore pointed out, the federal government is actually responsible for overseeing the segment of sewer line that failed. And maybe that’s why Trump decided to weigh in.

But this is also an odd issue for Trump to highlight. Although the spill of over 200 million gallons of raw sewage is widely being referred to as the largest in the nation’s history, it hasn’t resulted in any boil-water advisories yet—and water quality is not exactly a signature Trump issue anyway. In his first administration, he scrapped the Clean Water Rule, significantly narrowing the scope of federal water protections. This time around, his administration is also attempting to roll back federal protections.

This isn’t the only story recently suggesting that clean water may have political significance that clean air doesn’t. Last week, Charlie Hope-D’Anieri wrote about the wild-card candidacy of a retired water scientist running for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. Chris Jones almost certainly will not win, Hope-D’Anieri acknowledged. But he’s upending long-standing, almost sacred conventions in Iowa politics by challenging the ethanol industry, and arguing “that farmers should be required to make basic, specific adjustments to their practices to prevent the ruination of the state’s water supply.” And, perhaps surprisingly, he’s getting some traction, including good turnout at campaign events.

On Tuesday, Inside Climate News reported a new poll that suggests Jones’s early success is not just a freak accident. “Eighty-five percent of voters in Iowa’s first and third U.S. House districts,” reports Anika Jane Beamer, “say they would be more likely to vote for an elected official who prioritizes protecting clean water, including cutting industrial agriculture pollution.” These are both “vulnerable, narrowly Republican districts,” Beamer notes. It’s not impossible that these will be some of the districts that determine whether Democrats flip the House in November.

“It’s very clear that Iowa’s water crisis has reached a boiling point,” Food & Water Action political director Sam Bernhardt reportedly said at a press conference announcing the poll results.

Now, you might be inclined to dismiss any single poll along these lines—and it’s worth noting that Food & Water Action did commission this one. But it’s also consistent with prior polling showing that water quality is a strikingly popular issue, which doesn’t seem as vulnerable to the partisan divides seen on other environmental topics. Pew polling from 2023 found that 63 percent of people thought the federal government was doing “too little” to “protect water quality of lakes, rivers and streams,” and only 7 percent said it was doing “too much”—making it the top issue when compared to air quality, climate change, protecting animals and their habitats, and protecting natural parks and nature preserves.

Regular polling from the Value of Water Campaign has also found that the number of voters calling “reliable water access” a “very” or “extremely important” issue has been rising for five years straight.

There are some caveats, of course, to how far political concern over water quality can go. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, reached appalling levels for years, and it didn’t seem to make a huge political difference. A lot of people are comfortable ignoring quality issues with other people’s water.

Still, the political relevance of water availability and quality doesn’t seem likely to fade in the near future. It’s a key concern for the MAHA segment of Trump’s supporters. And the water crisis playing out in the American West, as the Colorado River dries up, is only getting worse, affecting both blue states and red. This past weekend, the seven states trying to negotiate a solution to this missed their deadline for a second time.

Water might not be a deciding factor in the midterms this November—there are a lot of issues that might take that prize. But as a political issue, it’s not going away.

Stat of the Week3 degrees Celsius

That’s the level of global warming a new report says governments need to prepare for—double the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degree Fahrenheit) limit that leaders agreed to in 2015.

As Trump Obliterates Climate Efforts, States Try to Fill the Gap

As the Trump administration scraps the endangerment finding, Maxine Joselow has a timely report for The New York Times about how some states are trying to step up in the climate fight.

The end of federal greenhouse gas limits is an obstacle, but not a death knell, in the fight against climate change on the state level, experts said.Colorado helps explain why.In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, set an ambitious goal of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030, from 2005 levels. Colorado is now on track to meet this goal by 2032, a two-year delay for which local leaders have largely blamed the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks.

The end of federal greenhouse gas limits is an obstacle, but not a death knell, in the fight against climate change on the state level, experts said.

Colorado helps explain why.

In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, set an ambitious goal of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030, from 2005 levels. Colorado is now on track to meet this goal by 2032, a two-year delay for which local leaders have largely blamed the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks.

Read Maxine Joselow’s full report at The New York Times.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Trump Wins Another Fake Award—but He Actually Deserves This One

Here are the policies the president is embracing as the “Undisputed Champion of Coal.”

Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright convened the National Coal Council for the first time since the organization was disbanded under President Biden. He extolled the administration’s work forcing aging coal plants to stay open, and hinted at further handouts to come. Now we’re starting to get a sense of what those handouts might look like.

This week, the Trump administration announced that it would, as promised last summer, revoke the so-called “endangerment finding”—a key scientific finding from 2009 on which almost all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions is based. It will also order the Defense Department to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants, and the industry will get a 33-month extension on cleaning up coal-ash dumps containing mercury, arsenic, and other toxins (all of which are expected to seep into groundwater in the meantime). Administration officials speaking to The Wall Street Journal ahead of the Wednesday announcement additionally said the administration would “award funding to five coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kentucky to recommission and upgrade the facilities” and that “Trump will be awarded the inaugural ‘Undisputed Champion of Coal’ award by the Washington Coal Club.”

Trump famously covets fake awards that stroke his ego, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t deserve this one.

The revocation of the endangerment finding, which determined that greenhouse gases harm public health, is the biggest news. But propping up coal is societally consequential in its own right, and few think it’s a good idea. It’s economically unsustainable, and aside from warming the planet, coal combustion has been linked to respiratory problems, heart problems, cancer, cognitive impairment and decline, and death. In 2023, a study from George Mason University found that exposure to fine particulate pollution from coal combustion was associated with more than twice the mortality rates linked to fine particulate pollution from other sources.

In fact, pretty much everything that the Trump administration has proposed doing this week polls poorly—and not just with Democrats.

In 2023, Data for Progress found that 65 percent of all likely voters supported proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations restricting coal- and gas-fired plant pollution—and half of Republicans did too. More recent polling conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the GMU Center for Climate Change Communication found that 66 percent of all registered voters, including a majority of moderate Republicans (57 percent), favor transitioning the economy to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. Shockingly, even 26 percent of conservative Republicans support this. And 74 percent of registered voters want to see carbon dioxide regulated “as a pollutant”—including 76 percent of moderate Republicans and 45 percent of conservative Republicans.

This is the data you should keep in mind when reading New York Times reporters Lisa Friedman and Maxeline Joselow’s meticulous story about the small, behind-the-scenes team that has been working for years to overturn the endangerment finding. While “conservative groups and businesses immediately fought to dismantle” the finding in 2009, they write, most corporations had given up by 2017 “as they lost legal challenges and public concern about global warming began to grow.” Officials in the first Trump administration actually rejected calls to revoke........

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