Facing a difficult reelection, Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown has begun defying his liberal colleagues, backpedaling his support for Green New Deal policies he once praised, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In the past year, Brown has vocally opposed Biden-Harris admin positions like a hydrogen tax credit, heightened efficiency standards for power transformers, and requirements for coal plants to cut 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. Left-wing environmental nonprofit the League of Conservation Voters has taken note, lowering Brown’s rating on its National Environmental Scorecard from 100% in 2021 to 88% in 2023, his lowest in nearly a decade and a score well below his career average of 94%.
While the scorecard for 2024 is not yet available, Brown has cast what LCV considers an “anti-environment vote” on four of the last five pieces of climate legislation to reach the Senate floor, with the fifth being a judicial appointment. His Heritage Action Score, which measures votes and co-sponsorships to show how conservative Members of Congress are, sits at 12% for the 118th Congress, triple his lifetime score of 4% and well above his previous high of 8%.
“Sherrod Brown is going to vote like this once every six years,” John McHenry, a GOP polling analyst and vice president at North Star Opinion Research, told the DCNF. “Five out of six years he’ll be pro-Green New Deal and do whatever the Senate majority leader asks of him, and the other year he’ll vote how Ohio voters actually want him to vote.”
From restricting drilling to blocking LNG exports, Joe Biden is the most anti-American energy President of my lifetime & Sherrod Brown has supported his agenda every step of the way. I’ll fight to stop their liberal plans, so America can be an ENERGY DOMINANT country once again! pic.twitter.com/MJkr15HzDy
— Bernie Moreno (@berniemoreno) January 29, 2024
In 2019, the year after he defeated Republican Jim Renacci to secure reelection, Brown scored a 100% LCV score. That same year, he told Politico that he “support[s] a Green New Deal,” and that he “think[s] we need to aggressively support climate change [legislation].” He also voted for the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which earmarked $370 billion for combatting climate change.
Republicans have criticized Brown for flip-flopping in past election cycles. In 2011, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) accused Brown of shifting his stance on tax cuts for claiming the tax cuts in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act didn’t go far enough after being a vocal opponent of the Bush tax cuts, according to PolitiFact.
In 1997, while serving as congressman for Ohio’s 13th congressional district, Brown voted for a constitutional amendment to impose a 12-year lifetime limit for congressional service, remarking, “voters support term limits because they want to get rid of the people who have been here for 20 or 30 years, like Newt Gingrich or Dick Gephardt.” In 2012, his 19th year of congressional service, Brown voted against a term limit amendment.
Brown’s recent shift on climate policy comes as he faces a challenging reelection campaign against Republican businessman Bernie Moreno, with an Aug. 26 CNN list ranking him as the third most likely senator to lose his seat in 2024. Brown currently leads by roughly 5 percentage points, Real Clear Politics polling data shows.
However, Moreno has only just started ramping up his campaign spending, launching a $25 million ad blitz on Aug. 20, according to Politico. Prior to the ad buy, Moreno had only spent about $2 million on advertising since winning the Republican primary in March.
Ohio is among the top ten largest natural gas producers in the U.S., accounting for roughly 5% of the nation’s natural gas production and reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. It is also the fourth largest producer and seventh largest consumer of electricity, with 51% of its net generation coming from natural gas in 2022.
Manufacturing, which the Department of Energy describes as an “energy- and emissions-intensive industry,” represents the “backbone” of Ohio’s economy, according to a 2022 article from Athens, Ohio-based media company WOUB media. Ohio was third in the nation in terms of total manufacturing employees and fourth in manufacturing gross domestic product in 2023, according to the “Manufacturing Counts” report published by The Ohio Manufacturer’s Association.
“As Ohio transitions to the future economy — including semiconductor production, data centers, and re-shoring of critical manufacturing — energy costs will be essential to the Buckeye State’s success,” Greg R. Lawson, a research fellow at Ohio think tank The Buckeye Institute, told the DCNF. “Green New Deal policies will have dire economic consequences not just on Ohioans but on all Americans. Anyone who advocated for those policies will have to answer tough questions.”
Average U.S. electricity prices have risen over 30% since January 2021, the month President Joe Biden took office, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Meanwhile, U.S. demand for electricity has surged in recent years due to the growth of the data center industry, with projections for U.S. electricity load growth over the next five years being raised from 2.6% to 4.7%, according to power sector consulting firm Grid Strategies. Ohio has seen an influx of data centers in recent years, with Amazon Web Services, Google, and QTS Data Centers all expanding or creating data center campuses in the state in 2023, according to cloud computing news website Data Center Frontier.
Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the NRSC, claims Brown will be unable to escape his climate record, pointing to his prior support for Green New Deal policies and a ban on some liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
“No one’s buying it,” Letsou told the DCNF. “Shameless Sherrod Brown sold out Ohio energy workers when he praised the Green New Deal and supported the devastating Biden-Harris LNG export ban. Now he’s endorsed Kamala Harris who has explicitly called to ban fracking and offshore drilling nationwide.”
The Biden administration ordered a pause on export permits for LNG export facilities in January. In February, Brown put out a competing bill that would only ban LNG exports to China and other geopolitical rivals, in what Axios suggested was a “counter-messaging” play.
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said in 2019 that there is “no question” she would end fracking if elected president, but she now claims she does not support a ban.
Like Letsou, McHenry believes the climate issue could play well for Moreno in November, but only if he messages it properly.
“People aren’t going to be happy about Democrats making electricity more expensive,” McHenry told the DCNF. “So as long as Bernie Moreno makes the case to voters, they’ll understand what’s going on. But Moreno has to show voters Brown only supports the state’s workers and energy sector in election years.”
Brown’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moreno’s office referred the DCNF’s request for comment to the NRSC.
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