Strange, Bad Solar Energy Policy Turns Slightly MAGA
A mysterious super PAC posing as a pro-solar energy group is funding some attack-knife ads ahead of the midterms.
The same PAC is producing a spot hitting Anthony Constantino, a pro-Trump congressional candidate in upstate New York, because someone used his sticker printing company to make stickers that read, "Kill the cop."
Attack ads are everywhere in the last month before the November election. But these points are slightly different. The semi-anonymous PAC doing the funding and advertising is the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, a pro-solar organization. It is partially funded by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and run by a team of New York City political activists.
“Playing hardball politics, is that what our opponents are doing in oil and gas?” said Larsen, co-founder of blockchain finance company Ripple and a major supporter of the Investment in Tomorrow Coalition. And I just think the solar industry - I don't know how to describe it - has been a little bit good.
Green mobs don't usually act like this, with knives out, ready to stab an opponent between the ribs. They tend to make appeals based on scientific consensus, or fear of what will happen to a warming planet without collective action. They are also traditionally Democrats, but several prominent members of the MAGA movement are now also speaking out for solar energy. Texas, the home of the fossil fuel business, is fast becoming a solar powerhouse. There are signs that the Trump administration's all-out opposition to solar energy may be starting to break, at least a little, after years of slashing subsidies for green technology and throwing up one roadblock after another to clear power projects.
Some of Larsen's natural allies on renewable energy are less than happy with the PAC's efforts, arguing that they alienate the decision makers who need them most. But energy policy, especially solar energy, is changing.
Larsen's PAC is committing $15 million to seven prominent opponents of renewable energy in this year's congressional elections. That's more than the roughly $5 million they've already spent in the primary, campaigning against Republican Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina (whom the PAC called a "traitor to MAGA"), Andy Ogles of Tennessee ("He doesn't even bother going to work") and Chip Roy ("the strong side of Texas"). Island, Dan McKay is gone. They lost all four of their primary matches.
As for Roy, the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition spent nearly $1.5 million to block his run for Texas attorney general. Most of the money went to advertising on right-wing platforms like Truth Social and Rumble. The word "solar" is never mentioned.
"Don't talk about renewable energy. Don't talk about climate," says Chris Coffey, chief executive of the consulting firm Task Strategies, which runs the PAC. "The best issue we can. And in the GOP primary, we have to savage this guy for not being MAGA enough."
Roy received 100 percent from Heritage Action, the political arm of the Trumpist think tank. Coffey said he took issue with several Democratic activists who worried that replacing Roy and other PAC targets might not be less radical — on climate or any other issue. Without their far-right backgrounds, these surrogates might even be stronger candidates in the general election.
"Who cares? Who cares? Like, it can't get any worse," counters Coffey, a veteran of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's town hall. "At least we'll extract some payback."
The PAC is currently spending $2 million on ads accusing Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana of corruption. It takes aim at Brandon Herrera, Republican of Texas, for his "senior repeal" jokes and his plan to get rid of Social Security. Then there's the $1.5 million ad campaign about Bobert and the Beetlejuice incident. "If Lauren Bobert can't be trusted in a room full of kids, then she can't be trusted in the halls of Congress," says the commercial's narrator.
Other special interest organizations have been playing this playbook for decades. Pro-labor and anti-gun regulation groups regularly try to make examples of politicians who oppose their agenda. Historically, green groups have not been this aggressive. That's a problem, says Steph Bush, board chair of the Community Clean Energy Coalition. While his group has raised nearly $2 million for its campaign, Stabush says he's backed out-of-town candidates because someone else has taken a less friendly approach — and the super PAC affiliated with the League of Environmental Conservation Voters is spending another $50 million.
"As a vast renewable energy industry, we should be loved, respected and feared," Bush adds. We must have a carrot and we must have a stick.
James Carville, a Democratic pundit and former campaign manager, doubts the stick is big enough. "Twenty million - what do you think the carbon industry spends in a year?" he recently told Washington Monthly.
Roy, for his part, insisted that the PAC's spending played "zero role" in his race (while his campaign released statements condemning "California radical Marxists trying to buy the Texas election.") Fellow solar target Ralph Norman warned of "elites" running "a million dollar attack ad against me," while Ogles complained, "They literally They want to make an example of me."
"They were the difference makers," Chris Berger, a Republican political consultant in Tennessee, said of the solar group. If the PAC doesn't come in with $2 million, I don't think Charlie [Hatcher, the Ogles' main opponent] will win.
The Trump White House and its allies in Congress have been overly hostile to renewables, which they believe are intermittent energy sources dominated by China. The government has done everything it can to promote oil, gas, and coal production while crushing renewable alternatives, from tying up green projects in bureaucratic knots to taking billions of dollars in solar subsidies and paying billions more to companies to stop building offshore wind farms. Trump's team then tried to get other countries to adopt similar approaches. "If you don't escape the green energy scam, your country will fail," the president told the United Nations General Assembly last year.
But Trumpists have shown little less hostility toward solar than offshore wind farms, which the president says cause cancer, "kill all your birds" and drive whales "crazy."
"While the wind is dead, the sun is just in the ICU," Richard Goldberg, a former member of the government's National Energy Dominance Council, tells WIRED.
This has provided a small but real opening for the promotion of solar energy in America's first cluster, especially as energy prices rise at home, the war in Iran raises oil prices worldwide, and the expansion of AI data centers creates an insatiable borderline need for more power.
In February, the American Clean Power Association launched a campaign to do just that, releasing a poll from former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway's consulting firm showing that 75 percent of MAGA voters in key states support the idea of adding more solar power to the national mix. According to an internal memo reviewed by Politico, there will soon be "paid media partnerships with podcasts like Katie Miller's Pod" (hosted by a former DOGE spokeswoman who is married to White House deputy policy chief Stephen Miller) as well as "advertising and sponsorships with right-of-center publications."
Katie Miller, a one-time adviser to renewable energy advocate Elon Musk, has since frequently pushed for solar power on social media. "Over 70% of new utility-scale capacity went to states won by President Trump," one of his posts read. "Electricity production is a national security issue, not a party issue." (Miller, who did not respond to requests for comment for this story, has previously denied receiving any funding from the Clean Power Group.)
There is also the problem of the data center. China has had no trouble powering its data centers, thanks in part to its massive deployment of renewables — 315 gigawatts of solar power was added to the grid last year, nearly six times more than the U.S. added from all sources combined. The United States is in a completely different situation. MAGA-minded solar promoters are trying to use this gap to make a Trumpian argument for renewable energy. Worries about the weather are over. There is a fear of losing the artificial intelligence competition to China.
T1 Energy, which bills itself as one of the few all-American solar companies, has hired Checkmate Government Relations, a lobbying firm headed by longtime hunting buddy Donald Trump Jr., and Tower Strategy, headed by a former CIA operations officer, Rick de la Torre. Its case for running these lobbies has been to make the case that the government's beef is not with solar energy at all. With Solar is Chinese they've done it in a kind of flexible language that has become stock in MAGA's business.
“U.S.-made utility-scale solar is one of the few technologies that can be deployed at the speed and scale needed for data centers,” de la Torre wrote on LinkedIn. China knows this. That's why it continues to flood markets, squeezing profit margins and keeping American producers on the defensive.
"Washington has a choice. Treat solar manufacturing as a strategic industry, the way we now treat semiconductors and critical minerals," he added. Or just claim to "compete with Beijing".
There are signs that this debate may be on the rise. In August, the Trump administration added a 15 percent tariff and a new price floor for foreign-made solar components. T1's CEO hailed it as a win for domestic supply chains and manufacturing. More recently, negotiations have been ongoing in Congress on a bipartisan licensing reform bill that would, among many other things, make it easier for solar providers to connect to the electric grid.
That's led some solar executives to question whether it's smart for the group to bash Republicans, just as few seem to be moving in the solar direction.
"We've been hard at work talking to Republicans about why supporting solar and batteries helps energy abundance and affordability. "And we've been successful," says Russell Gold, T1's executive vice president of strategic communications.
Tom Mazzei, CEO of solar energy company CleanChoice Energy, serves as Executive Chairman of the Investing in Tomorrow Coalition (PAC). The founders include Peter Davidson, CEO of Aligned Climate Capital, and Michael Brun, former executive director of the Sierra Club. But it's Larsen who has provided the bulk of the seed money for the PAC — having raised $6 million of an initial $7 million or so by Aug. 31, according to Federal Election Commission records.
He has had a bumpy record of political forgiveness recently. Earlier this year, Larsen spent $3.5 million to support congressional candidate Alex Burs, who was targeted by the AI industry and lost his race. Larsen's company, Ripple Labs, gave nearly $100 million to Fairshake, a pro-crypto PAC that made electoral gains in 2024 but lost a major fight when its preferred bill to regulate cryptocurrencies died in the Senate.
A willingness to attack isn't the only way Larsen's PAC differs from others in the green movement. Not long ago, renewable energy advocates talked about an "energy transition" away from old, dirty fossil fuels and toward newer ones. Cleaner Larsen instead suggests red-zone politicians embrace the idea of fossil and renewable energy sources coexisting, even as the PAC he funds throws haymakers at solar foes.
"You can be pro-oil and pro-gas and pro-solar," he says.