Growing up as a conservative who also deeply cared about nature, Chris Barnard found it strange that only the left seemed to talk about the environment.
"But if you look at conservative history, on environmentalism, on conservation, there was such a strong and rich legacy," Barnard, now the president of the American Conservation Coalition, told Fox News Digital.
As the modern left dominates the green movement with what Barnard deemed "apocalyptic" outlooks and disastrous policy proposals, he and other right-leaning environmentalists are pushing the GOP to re-embrace its conservationist roots.
"Conservation and conservatism are two sides of the same coin," Barnard said. "And we know that the original conservationists are hunters and farmers and ranchers and people that live on the land and that have such a direct personal relationship to the land."
Republican President Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872. Fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt was known as the "conservation president" for designating around 230 million acres of public lands as national parks, forests, monuments and bird and game preserves.
President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and President Ronald Reagan signed the Montreal Protocol, a global agreement to reduce production and use of ozone-depleting chemicals.
"It's really only in the last few decades that [the environment has] become a more liberal or left-wing issue," Barnard said to Fox News Digital.
Heather Reams is the president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), a right-of center nonprofit. She started to notice a shift in attitudes toward environmentalism in the late '90s and early 2000s when she was fresh out of college and working on Capitol Hill.
"It just became like this mantra that we need to change our way of life in a way we hadn't seen before," Reams said to Fox News Digital.
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Former Vice President Al Gore was sounding the alarm on global warming, first with flip chart presentations, then his 2006 hit documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." There, he predicted the global sea level could rise as much as 20 feet "in the near future," and warned that the U.S. must embrace renewable energy.
The "Al Gore kind of approach … deeply polarized this conversation," Barnard said. "Partly because I think he's actually misrepresented some of the science and made predictions that didn't come true."
"A lot of conservatives looked at that and said, 'Well, that didn't come true. So why would I believe you on any of the other stuff?'" Barnard added.
In a 2009 speech in Denmark, he highlighted research claiming "a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free" within seven years. While NASA reported in 2022 that Arctic sea ice has been shrinking, it has yet to totally disappear in the summer.
A representative for Gore did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
More recently, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken charge on climate change, pushing for policies like the Green New Deal.
Reams told Fox News Digital liberal politicians intertwined climate change with "social services and the Democratic agenda," alarming small-government conservatives.
"If you acknowledge the climate is changing, then you also want big government — international government — to solve the problem," Reams said of the left's perspective. "That's where we saw a lot of Republicans just say, 'I don't want anything to do with that.'"
As Democrats grew louder on the environment, polls showed Republican engagement slipping.
Just 14% of Republicans age 55 and older polled by Gallup from 2019-2022 said they worried "a great deal" about the environment, compared to 40% of Independents and 64% of Democrats in the same age group.
A fifth of Republicans ages 35-54 said they don't worry about the environment at all, the most of any political demographic polled.
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Republican politicians, Barnard said, have largely fallen silent, or been outright dismissive. Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly called it a "hoax," as have lawmakers like Rep. Bob Good, R-VA.
"There is no climate crisis. It is a hoax," Good said during an impassioned speech against the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which included $369 billion for climate initiatives.
"This is the one crisis that even Democrats could create," the Virginia Republican continued. "They've been crying about the climate sky falling for 40 years now, predicting the world would end in 12 years. It is a lie."
Such rhetoric isn't helpful, Barnard argues.
"A lot of conservatives rightfully look at climate solutions nowadays and are skeptical because they think that it's going to make America weaker and it's going to make their lives harder," Barnard said.
But "just because we don't like the solutions or we don't like the extremism, doesn't mean we can just ignore the fact that there is an issue altogether," he added.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed record-high global temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations in 2023, according to a new report.
"The fact is that emissions are going up, and that we have the technology to bring them down," Reams said, arguing that the U.S. is among the cleanest energy-producing countries, even when it comes to fossil fuels and other sources vilified by many on the left. CRES embraces an "all-of-the-above" approach, meaning greater domestic production of fossil fuels, renewable and nuclear energy, and mineral mining.
She portrayed the problem as more than a matter of climate, but a "geopolitical game … the United States can win if we engage."
"We need to be using U.S. ingenuity," she said. "We need to be using U.S. innovation and all of our resources to be competitive in the world. To beat China, to beat Russia, to stay on top and help developing nations rely on countries like the United States for resources rather than adversarial countries."
