In an increasingly contentious Kentucky race for governor, where the two campaigns jab each other on abortion access and transgender rights, the issue of the environment has largely gone unaddressed.
Gov. Andy Beshear, a popular Democrat in a deeply red state, walks a tightrope on the matter. He has acknowledged climate change, but has rarely chosen to broach the touchy subject — or the fossil fuel industry’s role in it — as he looks to win a second term.
He faces Donald Trump-endorsed Daniel Cameron, whose tenure as attorney general has been marked by staunch opposition to what he calls the “radical climate agenda” of the Biden administration.
And in July, Cameron tapped Robby Mills as his running mate, a state senator who pushed legislation to protect coal-fired power plants from retirement and to divest state funds from investment firms using climate-conscious, ESG investment policies.
Experts warn of a rapidly closing window for places like Kentucky to shift away from fossil fuels, which last year made up 93% of the state’s energy portfolio. Without a change, climate projections foresee more of the record-breaking, costly disasters seen in recent years.
“The state knows what extreme weather events can look like,” said Rachel Licker, principal climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s really in Kentucky’s best interest to not be on a pathway in which those kinds of events become far more regular.”
Beshear’s balancing act
Leading the state through multiple historic disasters, Beshear’s sanguine presence in times of crisis has grown familiar.
He has stood before the cameras in a windbreaker and wearily counted the roads washed away, the houses torn asunder, or the loved ones gone missing.
He has shaken hands and shared hugs with Kentuckians who’ve lost everything, whether to twisters in the west or floods in the east. The kind of disasters that can cause this caliber of destruction are becoming more likely because of climate change, the world’s top experts say.
Beshear has long advocated for an “all of the above” energy policy, meaning investment in both fossil fuels and renewables, despite calls for rapid decarbonization from climate scientists and environmental advocates.
It’s a policy “America can’t afford,” according to the Environmental Working Group and other advocates of clean energy, who point to the increasing price of coal and ever-cheaper renewables, in addition to the rising costs of climate disasters for communities and infrastructure.
Republicans have harnessed the moderate “all of the above” phrase in campaigns around the country over at least the past decade, said J. Miles Coleman, an associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
In Kentucky, a multi-generational sense of pride in coal mining has endured, even as the industry has continued its decline. The governor’s careful choice of words has helped him dodge framing as the “anti-coal” candidate.
“Beshear has handled the coal issue masterfully,” said Steve Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky specializing in elections and voting behavior.
In publicizing thousands of electric vehicle manufacturing jobs coming to the state, Beshear has used phrases like “jobs of the future,” signaling to voters on the left “that he’s ready to see movement” on energy and climate challenges, Voss said, but “without using the language of the National Democratic Party that comes across as hostile” to the coal industry.
Many of those jobs have come, at least in part, thanks to aggressive federal incentives for electrification, and they’ve come in significant numbers. A battery manufacturing campus coming to Hardin County is slated to create 5,000 jobs — more than the state’s entire existing coal industry.
Voters tend to care more about a general sense of job creation and a growing economy, and less about how those new jobs fit into their political worldview, Voss said. Beshear has touted 21 electric vehicle projects coming to the state since he took office, “representing more than $10.9 billion in investment and the creation of more than 10,372 full-time jobs for Kentuckians.”
“He can embrace clean or renewable energy to some extent,” Coleman said. “He can’t just be seen as outright antagonistic” toward the state’s legacy industry.
But despite the governor’s moderate positions on energy and near-silence on climate change, jabs from his opposition have sought to paint him as a pawn of the Biden administration and a grim reaper for the coal industry.
Cameron and Mills fight transition, regulation
In August, Sen. Mills stood before the Public Service Commission in Madisonville, coal miners and constituents gathered behind him, and spoke against an LG&E and KU proposal to…
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