Indiana Sen. Mike Braun thinks climate activist Greta Thunberg is inspiring.
In President Trump’s world, that is a controversial statement for a Republican senator to make about the 17-year-old Time Magazine Person of the Year who has become a punching bag for a climate skeptic president who questions the established science linking human activity to climate change.
“I would never want to diss someone like that,” Braun said recently, pointedly omitting Trump’s attacks on the “very angry” Swedish teenager. “She’s talking about an issue that she ought to be sincerely concerned about because if we don’t, we’ll pay a consequence for it. So yes, I admire her.”
The freshman senator who ran in 2018 as a Trump loyalist in Vice President Pence’s home state is not just an unlikely Thunberg supporter — he’s a self-described conservationist readying to push a reluctant Republican Party forward on an issue many in the GOP have long denied or ignored.
During an extended interview with The Washington Post in December, Braun was not especially interested in landing attacks against Democrats before Trump’s impending impeachment trial in the Senate. Instead, he was focused on voicing the climate-related concerns of his four millennial children and his future plans as the chairman of the new bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus.
“I think there have been a lot of Republicans in the closet on climate,” Braun said of his efforts to recruit others to the group he rolled out in October with Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.).
Senate Republicans and Democrats try again to work together on climate change
In the interview, the senator outlined an ambitious timeline to raise GOP awareness on climate change as the country’s “next biggest issue.” He wants to discuss his climate evangelism with Trump before the president is “debating whoever the Democratic nominee is” in the 2020 race for the White House.
“We as Republicans will have a void there if there’s no comment or view about climate,” Braun said, a nod to bubbling GOP fears that a party without a meaningful climate change plan will continue to hemorrhage young voters.
Just this week, Trump rolled back protections for U.S. wetlands and small waterways. It is just one of dozens of environmental rules and regulations designed to mitigate the effects of climate change being targeted and repealed under a president who withdrew the country from the Paris climate accord, which sought to cap global carbon emissions.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week, Trump called activists like Thunberg, who also attended the forum, “perennial prophets of doom” who must be rejected for “their predictions of the apocalypse,” though he also endorsed an initiative to restore and conserve one trillion trees.
One of the president’s top officials, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, took a cue from his boss and mocked activists like Thunberg for urging investors to stop putting their cash in fossil fuel stocks.
“Is she the chief economist or who is she? I’m confused,” Mnuchin said of Thunberg. “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.”
Despite the inflammatory rhetoric coming from the top, Braun has managed to coax a few of his more moderate Republican colleagues to join him in the new climate-themed caucus. Even so, many Republicans are loath to implement the kind of restrictions on industry that would make the most difference to the environment.
Between the two of them, Braun and Coons have thus far rounded up six other senators to join them: Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Angus King (I-Maine), Michael F. Bennet (D-Col.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Braun and Coons say additional members will be announced in coming weeks after the conclusion of Trump’s impeachment trial.
“We’ve got a pretty compelling group of folks,” Coons told The Post in an interview last week.
Like most odd couples, the story of how the stars aligned for the bipartisan alliance on perhaps the most polarizing issue of the moment — after impeachment, of course — varies depending on who you ask.
After nursing his grudge against Braun for defeating his good friend and then-Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) in 2018, Coons finally met with Braun, as he does with all new senators. He knew the two shared a background in manufacturing but “was very pleasantly surprised to talk at length about his experience in conservation,” Coons noted.
“Coons came to me because he knew there was nobody left to ask,” Braun said, only half-joking. “But he didn’t know I was a conservationist and had a real background in the discussion.”
“Is that what he said?” Coons laughingly exclaimed. “Look, this is a guy who is serious about addressing problems and when I asked about climate change, his answer was rooted in his kids and grandkids and the passion they have for being engaged in trying to tackle this multigenerational issue,” Coons said.
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