The Hardball Pro-Solar PAC Upending Decades of Traditional Green Energy Advocacy
A string of surprisingly niche attack ads have popped up across swing districts in the final stretch before November’s US elections: one reminds Colorado voters of the 2023 viral moment where local GOP representative Lauren Boebert was caught on camera being inappropriate with her date during a Beetlejuice musical performance, while another targets New York upstate Trumpist congressional candidate Anthony Constantino for a brief, documented link to a sticker-printing firm that once produced signs reading “Kill the Police.”
Most viewers would likely assume these spots came from a standard Democratic super PAC or union advocacy group. They would be wrong. The semi-anonymous group funding both campaigns is the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition – a pro-solar political outfit backed in part by crypto billionaire and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, and run by a team of veteran New York City political operatives.
Ditching the “Too Nice” Old Green Playbook
“Oil and gas opponents have always played hardball politics, right? The solar industry, for as long as I’ve been involved, has been far too polite to punch back,” Larsen says.
Historically, mainstream environmental and green advocacy groups have avoided bare-knuckled attack ads almost entirely, leaning instead on appeals to peer-reviewed climate science, warnings of unmitigated global warming, and broad collective action framing to win support. Almost exclusively aligned with the Democratic Party, they rarely target incumbents with the kind of scorched-earth tactics standard to labor groups or gun rights organizations.
That status quo is now shifting. The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition has allocated $15 million to take out seven of the most vocal congressional opponents of renewable energy this cycle, on top of the $5 million already spent in this year’s primary races.
Primary Upsets, With No Mention of Solar At All
Not a single one of the PAC’s primary ads mentioned solar, renewables, or climate policy of any kind. Their strategy, per Tusk Strategies CEO Chris Coffey, the veteran Bloomberg aide running the group, is deliberate:
“Don’t talk about renewables. Don’t talk about climate. Pick the most damaging, locally resonant issue you can find against a candidate. In a Republican primary, that means savaging them for not being MAGA enough.”
Their first round of targets included three far-right House Republicans: South Carolina’s Ralph Norman (branded a “MAGA traitor”), Tennessee’s Andy Ogles (called a no-show who “doesn’t even bother going to work”), and Texas’s Chip Roy (accused of siding with “powerful pedophiles”). A Democratic-aligned affiliate of the group also targeted Rhode Island governor Dan McKee. All four lost their primary races. The $1.5 million spent to block Roy’s Texas attorney general run, all dumped into right-wing platforms Truth Social and Rumble, is widely credited as the deciding factor in his defeat, even as Roy’s team dismissed the spend as “zero impact” and decried “radical California Marxists trying to buy Texas elections.”
Coffey has pushed back against concerns from Democratic operatives that the candidates replacing the ousted incumbents could be even more extreme on climate and social issues:
“Who fucking cares? It can’t be worse. At least we extracted some payback for decades of the fossil fuel industry running roughshod over our policy goals.”
The group is currently spending $2 million on ads labeling Indiana GOP representative Victoria Spartz as corrupt, and preparing a separate campaign attacking Texas Republican Brandon Herrera for his “abolish old people” comments and plans to eliminate Social Security, alongside the $1.5 million ad buy targeting Boebert’s theater incident.
Solar’s Unlikely, Bipartisan Opening
The PAC’s aggressive playbook comes at a rare inflection point for US solar policy. Texas, long the heart of the American fossil fuel industry, has already grown into a national solar production powerhouse. After years of slashing green tech subsidies and throwing up bureaucratic roadblocks for clean energy projects, even the Trump administration’s blanket opposition to renewables has started to crack – at least slightly.
Senior Trump allies have openly framed offshore wind as an existential threat, claiming it causes cancer, “kills all your birds,” and drives whales “crazy.” Solar, by contrast, is described by former White House National Energy Dominance Council member Richard Goldberg as “merely in the ICU, not dead.” That gap has created an opening to sell solar to MAGA voters on non-climate, America First lines: recent polling from former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway found 75% of MAGA voters in key swing states support expanding domestic solar capacity, framed around national security, affordable energy, and powering the AI data center boom without relying on Chinese imports.
“70% of new utility-scale power capacity goes to states President Trump won,” former White House spokesperson Katie Miller, a close Stephen Miller ally, posted on social media earlier this year. “Electricity generation is a national security issue – not a partisan one.”
Lobbyists for domestic US solar manufacturers have leaned heavily into this framing, arguing that building out American-made solar is the only way to outcompete China, which added 315 gigawatts of solar capacity to its grid last year – six times more than the US added from all energy sources combined. The argument appears to be gaining traction: the Trump administration recently imposed a new 15% tariff and price floors on imported Chinese solar components, and bipartisan permitting reform legislation moving through Congress would cut red tape for solar providers connecting to the national grid.
Growing Backlash From Clean Energy Insiders
Not everyone in the renewable space supports the PAC’s hardball tactics. Critics including Russell Gold, executive vice president of strategic communications for American solar manufacturer T1 Energy, warn that attacking Republican incumbents risks re-framing solar as a strictly partisan Democratic issue right as the movement is making historic inroads with GOP lawmakers:
“We’ve spent months working with Republicans to prove supporting solar and batteries drives energy abundance and lower bills for their constituents, and we’ve had real success. If Invest in Tomorrow turns solar back into a partisan punching bag, that would be an epic blunder.”
Democratic strategist James Carville has also noted that the group’s total $20 million war chest is a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions the fossil fuel industry spends on political advocacy every cycle.
For his part, Larsen is not pushing for a full, immediate phaseout of fossil fuels, as many traditional green groups do. Instead, he frames his project as pragmatic, non-ideological advocacy:
“You can be pro-oil and gas and pro-solar at the same time. We’re not here to pick winners and losers, we’re here to make sure no one gets to ban solar just to prop up their own industry profits.”
