User:Nowa/Debbie Dooley RS

Reference 1: Greening the Tea Party https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/green-tea-party-solar Publisher- The New Yorker By Carolyn Kormann

February 17, 2015 The solar-energy business is booming. The average cost of installing solar panels has dropped by half since 2010, and a new solar electric system is now installed somewhere in the United States every four minutes. The growth extends well beyond the rooftops of American homes and small businesses; last week, Apple announced that it is investing in an eight-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar solar farm in Monterey County, California, which it says will power its operations in the state by the end of 2016. Although solar is still small, supplying less than one per cent of the country’s electricity, its growth has alarmed the energy industry’s old guard—coal, oil, and utility companies. Working primarily through conservative advocacy groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec), which lobbies at the state level, and Americans for Prosperity (A.F.P.), which was founded by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists, this coalition is doing its best to weaken the nascent industry, particularly rooftop solar. In a curious twist, however, alec and A.F.P. have found themselves butting heads with—and even losing battles to—tough-minded, pro-solar branches of the Tea Party.

Debbie Dooley was one of the twenty-two organizers of the first nationwide Tea Party protest, in 2009. A preacher’s daughter from Louisiana, she is a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party, on the board of directors of the national Tea Party Patriots, and, since 2012, has been a fierce solar-power advocate. “I thought that the regulated monopoly in Georgia had far too much power,” she told me recently, describing the dominant utility company in her state. “They had begun to look out for the best interests of their stockholders instead of their utility customers.” Solar, she said, promised to give people energy autonomy. “The average person cannot build a power plant, but they can install solar panels on their rooftop, and they should be able to sell that energy to friends and neighbors if they wish.”

Dooley led a fight to persuade Georgia’s all-Republican utility commission to require Georgia Power to buy more of its energy from solar sources. A.F.P. fought back, sometimes in ways that Dooley found troubling. “They would put out completely false information,” she told me. Through mailers, mass e-mails, and Twitter, “they said that adding solar would cause disruption to the power supply and your household appliances. Electricity would be forty per cent higher! I don’t think they were really expecting me to go after what they were saying as forcefully as I did. I just ripped them to shreds over not being factual. We won that battle.” (A.F.P. did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) That was in 2013. Dooley had teamed up with the Sierra Club to form the Green Tea Coalition. Later, that coalition helped defeat an effort by Georgia Power to impose heavy fees on customers with rooftop solar systems.

Dooley and her environmentalist partners have tacitly agreed to disagree about many things, starting with climate change. “That’s something we don’t get involved in,” she said. “If you mention climate change, they’re going to tune you out.” She meant her Tea Party compatriots, of course, with whom she emphasizes, when she talks about solar energy, the free market, consumer choice, and national security. “Rooftop solar makes it harder for terrorists to render a devastating blow to our power grid,” she said. “There’s nothing more centralized in our nation. If terrorists were able to take down nine key substations, it would cause a blackout coast to coast.”

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

If Turtles Could Talk: A Kenyan Fisherman’s Stand Against Poaching

Utility companies are not wrong to fear rooftop solar. Its popularity, if unchecked, will certainly cut into their profits and, perhaps, into their budget for maintaining the electrical grid. Hence an alec campaign, revealed by the Guardian last winter, to promote legislation to penalize individual homeowners who use rooftop solar and to label them “free riders.” This effort is part of a broader campaign against renewable energy—solar, wind, biomass—that alec, whose leading members include such fossil-fuel giants as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy, has been conducting for years. In 2012, according to the Guardian, “The group sponsored at least 77 energy bills in 34 states,” many with the goal of blocking renewable-energy efforts and weakening clean-energy regulations. The model legislation developed by alec in this area is called, of all things, the Electricity Freedom Act.

Solar is prospering in spite of these efforts, and not only among wealthy liberals in California. According to the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, the majority of solar-equipped households in New York and Massachusetts are located in neighborhoods with a median income of between forty and ninety thousand dollars. A recent study by researchers at Yale and the University of Connecticut found that socioeconomic and demographic factors like income, party affiliation, and the unemployment rate had little influence on the spread of residential solar-power systems in Connecticut between 2005 and 2013. The main factor that seemed to drive whether a household installed such a system was whether a neighbor had recently done so.

In Georgia, thanks in part to Dooley’s efforts, the State Senate is likely to pass a bill that will make rooftop solar easier and cheaper for residents to install. (The House just passed it unanimously.) “Georgia is the new sunshine state,” Dooley told me happily. When we spoke, she was driving to the old sunshine state, Florida, which has notably limited options or incentives for solar investors. Dooley is helping lead the launch of a major ballot initiative that would amend that state’s constitution to allow individuals and businesses with solar panels to sell the power that they generate directly to their tenants or neighbors. (Current law permits only utility companies to sell electricity.)

Floridians for Solar Choice, the group behind the initiative, is an inchoate alliance of libertarians, Christian Coalition conservatives, liberal environmentalists, and eighty-five Tea Party groups—Dooley’s people. They need to collect seven hundred thousand signatures by next February to get the measure on the ballot the following November. The stakes in Florida are high, and Dooley and her colleagues expect substantial resistance from the utility companies and their allies. Last fall, however, a Republican pollster found that seventy-four per cent of Floridians support the goals of the ballot measure. “I’ve got other states saying, ‘Please help us,’ ” Dooley told me. “But Florida is ground zero.”

Reference 2: https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/4/18/15339266/debbie-dooley-tea-party-conservative-republicans-renewable-energy Publisher - VOX

I’m a Tea Party conservative. Here’s how to win over Republicans on renewable energy. By Matteen Mokalla Apr 18, 2017, 11:30am EDT

Activist Debbie Dooley has some choice words for individuals who believe that fossil fuels have no impact on the environment. “If you think fossil fuel is not damaging the environment,” she says, “pull your car in a garage, start up your engine, and inhale the exhaust fumes for a few minutes and see what happens.” You could be forgiven for suspecting that Dooley might be a Democrat. According to a Gallup poll conducted last year, 85 percent of Democrats believe humans are contributing to increases in global temperature. But she’s not. Dooley is a conservative, gun-owning Trump supporter who also happens to be a co-founder of the Tea Party. Dooley runs Conservatives for Energy Freedom, where she advocates for the expansion of renewable energy and for cuts to government regulations she believes hinder that growth. Through her efforts, she has even won over unlikely allies such as Al Gore. According to Dooley, the problem with her fellow conservatives is that “they've been brainwashed for decades into believing we're not damaging the environment.” As a result, Dooley speaks with them about renewable energy in a political language conservatives respect, using phrases like energy freedom, energy choice, and national security. When speaking to conservatives in these terms, “you have a receptive audience and they will listen to you,” Dooley says. “If you lead off with climate change, they're not going to pay a bit of attention to anything else you say.” Watch this episode of Vox Voices to learn more about how Dooley’s discusses the environment with fellow conservatives and why she thinks caring for the environment is not necessarily anti-Republican.

Reference 3: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/business/energy-environment/debbie-dooley-energy.html Publisher – New York Times A Gun-Owning Trump Fan’s New Crusade: Clean Energy Debbie Dooley, an early Tea Party organizer who backs President Trump, says embracing alternative energy is part of a consistent worldview.

Debbie Dooley at an Atlanta park powered by solar energy. A Tea Party backer and Trump supporter, she crosses partisan lines in campaigning for alternative energy.Credit...Melissa Golden for The New York Times

By Ivan Penn Feb. 28, 2018 LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — Debbie Dooley’s conservative profile seems impeccable. The gun-owning daughter of a Baptist preacher, she was an early organizer for the Tea Party movement. She voted for President Trump and still supports him.

But when it comes to energy, her independent streak sends her down a different path: She takes issue with some of Mr. Trump’s signature positions, goes up against some of the nation’s biggest utility companies and often crosses conventional partisan lines.

Ms. Dooley opposes the tariff the president imposed on solar-panel imports in January. As for coal, which Mr. Trump has championed, it will never “be the king it once was,” she said. She accepts that human activity is causing climate change — and worries that it will threaten the health of the next generation, including her 9-year-old grandson, who has asthma.

To her, those beliefs are consistent with the rest of her worldview. “We should be focusing on the technologies of the future, not the dinosaur technology of the past,” Ms. Dooley said. “Our energy grid is vulnerable to attack. Rooftop solar keeps us safe. People like solar.”

What’s more, she contends that embracing clean energy affirms the populist beliefs the Tea Party espouses. The monopoly control of utilities over energy supplies stands in contrast to the free market, she said, while solar and wind power represent energy freedom.

Over the last five years, she has unabashedly linked arms with environmental groups championed by the left, like the Sierra Club. And on Thursday, she is set to appear at an event in San Francisco with a member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee — Christine Pelosi, daughter of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader vilified by the right.

“You can have success if you have environmentalists look at saving the environment as an ethic, and evangelicals as saving God’s creation,” Christine Pelosi said. “You don’t have to agree on everything.”

While Ms. Dooley’s efforts are still an anomaly in conservative circles, she has formed a group called the Green Tea Coalition to rally more conservatives around renewable energy.

ImageSolar panels going up in Florida, where residential solar installations have increased in the wake of lower panel prices and voter approval of a tax break for home solar users. Solar panels going up in Florida, where residential solar installations have increased in the wake of lower panel prices and voter approval of a tax break for home solar users.Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images

“Debbie is being a little bit of a trailblazer on the climate issue, but she was always a trailblazer on clean energy,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, an environmental advocacy group based in Knoxville, Tenn.

Ms. Dooley sees the Trump administration’s tariffs on solar-panel imports as the latest in a series of impediments to clean energy. A former information technology systems analyst — “probably why I am so drawn to innovative energy technology” — she is particularly critical of policies that make it more difficult for consumers to become more self-reliant for their energy.

Climate Forward There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it in your inbox. At 59, from her rental home here in the Atlanta suburbs, she works full time on utility, clean energy and climate issues with a total budget of $90,000 a year, using funds from the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation and other donors. She has worked to persuade legislators and regulators in her state to embrace measures that would foster greater use of solar power.

But it wasn’t easy. “I didn’t just put my head in the sand like an ostrich,” Ms. Dooley said. “Let’s face it: They had to come kicking and screaming.”

She is also having a wider impact, taking on some of the nation’s largest utilities.

Proponents of residential solar power like Ms. Dooley accuse utility companies and the energy industry at large of waging war on efforts to free consumers from their power companies, even if only for a slightly lower electric bill.

For the utilities, which are facing flat or declining consumption, residential solar power threatens the bottom line. They have responded by spending tens of millions of dollars to combat consumers’ efforts to untether themselves from the electric grid.

A new study by the Sustainable Investments Institute, a nonprofit group that conducts research on efforts to influence corporate boards, found that utilities had spent $50 million between 2011 and 2016 to block clean energy in seven states: Alaska, California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon and Washington.

Despite calling itself the Sunshine State, Florida lags behind states like New York and New Jersey in residential solar installations. But a 2016 campaign resulted in overwhelming voter approval of a constitutional amendment to provide a property tax exemption for solar installations. In a referendum months later, voters rejected a utility-backed measure, presented as pro-solar, that would have actually allowed new fees on home solar users.

Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy spent a combined $14.8 million on the referendum campaign. Ms. Dooley worked to counter their efforts, standing with environmentalists and business groups and helping win support from the Christian Coalition and self-identified libertarians.

Her side prevailed. And aided by the property-tax break and lower solar-panel prices, Florida more than doubled the number of residential solar projects in 2016 compared with the previous year, according to the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Clean-energy proponents are determined to build on such successes. According to research by the University of California, Irvine, the California Institute of Technology and the Carnegie Institution for Science, 80 percent of the nation’s power needs can be met by solar and wind.

Although she backed the Florida tax break, Ms. Dooley said she was convinced that alternative energy sources could hold their own without government intervention. “I think solar and wind have progressed to the point that they don’t need subsidies,” she said. “The government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.”

That conservative shading to her argument might appeal to Republicans. Still, red states — particularly in the South — have been resistant to residential solar power, a review of data from the solar industry organization has found. If they support solar power at all, their utilities tend to want to produce it themselves.

Of the 10 states with the most residential solar power, eight voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Of the 10 with the most solar capacity at utility scale, six voted for Mr. Trump.

Randy Wheeless, a spokesman for Duke Energy, insists that utilities are embracing cleaner technologies, noting that a decision by the company to forgo building a nuclear plant in Florida included plans for new solar farms. He said Duke was one of the few utilities in the country to file comments opposing the solar-panel tariff.

Mr. Wheeless also said Duke had recently been adding 300 residential solar customers in Florida each month.

But Lauren McDonald Jr., a member of the Georgia Public Service Commission who led efforts to bring more solar to his state, said the utilities simply didn’t want to depart from the business model they had operated under for a century, despite the changing world of energy.

“Their business is to generate electricity, transport it and to sell it,” Mr. McDonald said. “Anything that might come into play that might derail that agenda, they don’t give up easily.”

Neither, it seems, does Ms. Dooley.

When she talks about clean energy and climate change, she clutches her cellphone and pulls up a picture of her grandson, Ayden Sides.

“I fully believe we should be good stewards of what God gave us,” Ms. Dooley said.

Reference 4: https://www.ajc.com/blog/politics/atlanta-tea-party-rally-years-later/IDZflCPxSnzSiNBO5haFRM/ Publisher – Atlanta Journal Constitution

An Atlanta tea party rally, 10 years later In this AJC file photo from April 15, 2009, tea partyists pack Washington Street in front of the state Capitol. Caption Credit: Kimberly Smith POLITICAL INSIDER By Jim Galloway Updated April 12, 2019 Precisely 10 years ago today, workers were throwing up a pair of stages at the front of the state Capitol. One was for Sean Hannity, who would offer the color commentary on Fox News. The other would raise up the firebrands who would spark the internal rebellion within Republican circles known as the tea party. Thousands of older, mostly white Georgians flocked to the Atlanta protest the next day, one of 300 nationwide. It was April 15, the deadline for filing federal income taxes. Attendees didn’t number 20,000, as would be claimed that night. But the Capitol crowd was large enough to roil Georgia politics for years to come. The tea party is why we’re still arguing about health care in Georgia. One can theorize, and many do, that the tea party is the reason we have Donald Trump in the White House today.

On Monday afternoon, the 10th anniversary of that first tea party gathering in Atlanta will be marked with another, smaller rally — this one on the newish Liberty Plaza. That’s on the Downtown Connector side of the Capitol. U.S. Sen. David Perdue will be there. He’s up for re-election in 2020, and perhaps will wear the blue jean jacket that helped him win in 2014. Ralph Reed, another Trump champion, will be there, too. The messaging will be different than it was 10 years ago. The 2009 protesters, who modeled themselves on the Revolutionary-era Boston tea vandals, decried a federal government they said had lost touch. Remember that in 2009, Democrats controlled the White House and both wings of Congress. Being on the outside was suddenly fashionable. One of the Atlanta speakers was former U.S. House majority leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, whose Freedom Works operation was a primary organizer of many tea party groups around the nation. Before he took the stage, Armey addressed charges of artificial grassroots. “I plan to tell everybody they need to make it clear it’s their gathering,” he said. “It’s not organized by big shots in Washington.” With President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the Great Recession still with us, and a federal bailout of banks and other industries underway, the tea party was all about the federal debt that was about to sink us. “I look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis, which for years was the gold standard in terms of predicting what the deficit and the impact on the economy economic plans are going to have, and they’re telling me that the numbers are not sustainable,” Hannity told a local reporter that day, tossing in words like “collapse” and “frightening” as well. But that concern has dropped away. Likely because of a 2017 tax cut, pushed through by the Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress, that will add nearly $1 trillion of additional debt over the next decade. Debt and deficits have become unpleasant topics. Instead, Monday’s rally will be about “stopping socialism”, said Debbie Dooley, who helped organize the 2009 event and is putting together Monday’s as well. She’s posted helpful suggestions for signage, including this one: “Socialism brings mass poverty, oppression, and tyranny!” It is important to note that, despite the fact that the 2009 stage was dominated by men that night — remember Joe the Plumber? — the Atlanta rally was organized by a group of socially conservative women who were at the Capitol that session, working their issues. Dooley was one. Then there was Jenny Beth Martin, a Cherokee County housewife who would be quickly swept into the national movement. Virginia Galloway, working for the anti-tax group Americans For Prosperity, was another (and is no relation to the author). Ten days out, when Fox News announced it would televise the Atlanta event (and others), it was Galloway who took charge of raising the necessary $25,000 to put on the event. She’ll be one of Monday’s speakers. There were many others. But of those three, Dooley is the one who has stuck closest — to Atlanta, and the disruptive ambitions of the tea party. “The tea party set the stage for Donald Trump. We railed against the Republican establishment. We were not fans of the Bush family and their influence in the Republican party,” Dooley said in an interview this week. “Up until that point, the environment was that if you’re Republican, you don’t criticize other Republicans. I think the tea party changed that dramatically,” Dooley said. “At the first few tea parties, people were just as upset at the Republican establishment as they were at the Democrats.” Dooley has indeed been a disruptor — a description she also uses for Trump, whom she endorsed in 2016, long before other tea partyers fell into line. In 2014, Dooley set up camp in the House district of Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat him. In 2018, she campaigned against two Republican incumbents for the state Public Service Commission, for their support of continued construction of two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle. For four years, the Atlanta Tea Party had two co-equal leaders. One was Dooley. The other was Julianne Thompson, a former congressional aide and ex-communications director of the Georgia GOP. She wasn’t there for the Atlanta rally, but joined soon afterwards. “After the bailouts and what seemed like government spending out of control, I became an activist in the movement,” Thompson said. She became a witness to the most important shift in the tea party movement in Georgia. As the recession smoothed out, a new focus was placed on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Thompson was the tea party representative on an advisory panel, set up by Nathan Deal in 2012, that urged the Republican governor to drop plans to set up state-sponsored health care exchanges that would help connect the uninsured to insurance companies. “At the end of the day, no one could really articulate why we shouldn’t do it,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican consultant who was Deal’s director of communications at the time. “But everybody was terrified of looking like they were embracing Obamacare. The politics of the moment required you to be outraged about anything that fell under Obamacare.” That paralysis extended to the ACA’s provision – downgraded from a requirement by the U.S. Supreme Court – that states expand their Medicaid rolls to include those whose income put them slightly above the federal definition of poverty. In Georgia, that would have covered some 650,000 of the uninsured. That fever may have passed. Last month, the Legislature gave Gov. Brian Kemp permission to move in the direction of expanded health care coverage, but how far he’ll go remains an unknown. It could depend on how a 10-year-old tea party movement defines socialism on Monday.

Reference 5: https://www.cnbc.com/2013/12/11/atlanta-braves-stadium-deal-smacks-of-cronyism-tea-party-leader.html Publisher - CNBC

SPORTS Atlanta Braves stadium deal ‘smacks of cronyism’: Tea party leader PUBLISHED WED, DEC 11 20133:21 PM ESTUPDATED WED, DEC 11 20134:19 PM EST Jeff Morganteen @JMORGANTEEN Braves stadium flight ‘smacks of cronyism’: Tea party activist The tea party may bill itself as patriotic, but that doesn’t mean its members support funding America’s pastime with taxpayer dollars. A $672 million proposal to move the Atlanta Braves from their downtown home to a brand new stadium in nearby Cobb County has drawn heat from the local Atlanta tea party chapter, led by co-founder Debbie Dooley, also the national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots. Financing for the proposed deal would come from a mix of public and private sources, including county bonds that could cost up to $600 million over 30 years. Dooley said the taxpayer will end up bearing the brunt of the expense. Mike Plant, Atlanta Braves executive, left, listens to public comments during a Cobb County Commission hearing regarding building a new stadium. Mike Plant, Atlanta Braves executive, left, listens to public comments during a Cobb County Commission hearing regarding building a new stadium. David Goldman | AP Dooley said Republican county lawmakers hammered out the deal in private, without voter input. Cobb County’s commissioner did not return a request for comment from “Squawk on the Street.” “It is the government picking winners and losers,” Dooley said on “Squawk on the Street.” “They are using public funds. The taxpayer will get the shaft in this. And the political cronies and well-connected stand to make millions of dollars off of this deal.” Supporters of the deal say a new stadium would generate enough economic activity and revenue to make up for the expense. Dooley, though, said she doesn’t care where the Braves end up, as long as taxpayers don’t foot the bill. “The Braves have a right to move wherever they want to move, as long as it’s paid for with private funds,” Dooley said.

Reference 6: https://www.texasobserver.org/conservatives-cultivate-taste-green-tea-party/ Publisher - Texas Observer

CONSERVATIVES CULTIVATE TASTE FOR A GREEN TEA PARTY by CARL LINDEMANN

SEPTEMBER 25, 2014, 1:58 PM, CDT

Tucker Eskew is no stranger to thankless tasks. Eskew was the Republican operative who, in 2008, had the honor of tutoring Sarah Palin on being a vice-presidential candidate. Now, he’s ready to take the heat from fellow Republicans for tackling climate change and championing green energy. Eskew and a crew of fellow conservative green activists brought their mission to Austin yesterday for a lightly attended event. Billed as “a fresh conservative take on energy policy,” the summit attracted about 60 people to the Paramount Theater downtown.

“Remember the saying ‘I was country before country was cool’?” Eskew said. “Some Republicans picked that up and said ‘I was conservative before conservative was cool.’ Maybe one day, we’ll look back on this event and realize we were clean energy conservatives before it was cool.”

The hopeful message is certainly a far cry from today’s “drill, baby, drill!” conservatism. But if the movement—if you can call it that yet—is simply out to swap oil and coal for gas and nuclear, it could be seen as another variation of business as usual. But the speakers seemed eager to break some conservative taboos.

Among the panelists: former Texas Republican state Sen. Kip Averitt, now head of the Texas Clean Energy Coalition; Debbie Dooley, founder of the Green Tea Coalition and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots; former six-term Congressman Bob Inglis (R-South Carolina); and Eli Lehrer of conservative think tank R Street Institute.

“What we’re looking for are energy optimists and climate realists,” Inglis said. Though there’s no certainty in climate science, Inglis said, the risks of doing nothing are real. “And what are you going to do in the face of that risk? Proceed pell-mell, or…buy an insurance policy?”

Implacable climate skeptics need to face the political realities, he said. “If conservatives don’t step forward and say, ‘Have we got an idea for you! End all the subsidies [for oil, gas and nuclear], attach all the costs to all the fuels, and watch the free enterprise system sort this all out,’” then Democrats will go forward with their own solutions.

But Republicans face their own political risks for acting on climate change.

“We have a whole boatload of [Texas Republicans] that want to do the right thing, but they have to tip-toe around it. They get timid. They get scared because, quite frankly, they’re afraid of the tea party,” said Averitt, who served as the chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel lobby maintains its grip in Texas. As a counterpoint to the clean energy confab, the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation is hosting its own energy and climate policy summit in Houston this week featuring appearances by GOP ticket-toppers Rick Perry and Dan Patrick. The foundation, which is funded by fossil fuel interests, has been an extraordinarily harsh critic of renewable energy.

“MAYBE ONE DAY, WE’LL LOOK BACK ON THIS EVENT AND REALIZE WE WERE CLEAN ENERGY CONSERVATIVES BEFORE IT WAS COOL.”

“Renewable energy is unreliable and parasitic,” wrote Kathleen Hartnett White, a former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the head of the foundation’s energy-policy wing, in a 36-page paper she recently released making a “moral case” for fossil fuels. No one in the conservative climate realist camp appears to be on the agenda for the conference this week. But Dooley says the mood is changing. Some tea partiers, she said, are ready to take a stand, even against Koch-funded front groups like Americans for Prosperity.

“Americans for Prosperity is not tea party,” Dooley said. To combat the Koch party line, conservatives need to change the way they talk about energy.

“Talk about free markets, national security,” she said. “There’s nothing more vulnerable to terrorist attack than our centralized [power] grid. Well, it’s harder to attack rooftop solar.”

Eskew argued that the current frenzy surrounding Uber—the ride-share service that’s operating illegally in a number of cities, including Austin—offers a compelling comparison for how free markets could reshape the energy sector. Eskew compared ride-share services to rooftop solar power. Both pose fundamental challenges to highly regulated, staid industries (taxis and utilities, respectively) but provide direct benefits to the consumer.

“Let’s look at [Uber] from the perspective of the driver, not the consumer. The driver makes a capital expense purchasing the car, then is able to sell back excess capacity into the transportation grid. Isn’t that like solar power?”

For the United States to effectively combat climate change, conservatives will have to make an extremely difficult about-face. Still, the event yesterday hinted at the possibility of such a radical transformation. Katherine Lorenz, president and treasurer of the Mitchell Foundation, a co-sponsor of the event, was on hand. That’s Mitchell as in George Mitchell, known as the “father of fracking.” According to Lorenz, who is Mitchell’s granddaughter, the current shale boom has temporarily eclipsed his true legacy.

“Despite being in the oil and gas industry and having so many of his peers and colleagues think he was nuts… he was also deeply committed to environmental issues,” she said. “That’s really emblematic of what’s going on with clean energy and the environment today. We need more people to stand up for what they believe, who understand that what the rest of their party, peers and colleagues are saying might not be the right way for the Earth.”