Tim Sheehy’s “Shameless Opportunism On Climate”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, August 21, 2023
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monica@mtdems.org
Helena, MT – Mitch McConnell recruit Tim Sheehy has been caught frantically trying to rewrite his record on climate change – again – as he faces down a potential brutal GOP primary.
As HuffPost reported, just two years ago Sheehy praised California Governor Gavin Newsom’s $15 billion package to fight climate change – a package that included several priorities similar to the Green New Deal. Sheehy also penned an op-ed calling for “international cooperation” on climate change weeks after the United States rejoined the Paris Climate Accord.
As Sheehy campaigns for U.S. Senate, he’s changed his tune, tweeting his criticism of the “climate cult.”
HuffPost: Double Dip: A GOP Senate Candidate's Shameless Opportunism On Climate
By Chris D’Angelo
August 19, 2023
When it came to growing and promoting his aerial firefighting company, Montana businessman Tim Sheehy was, for years, outspoken about the need to combat global climate change, even publicly supporting a major initiative to curb emissions and invest in climate resilience.
But since launching his Republican bid for Senate in June, Sheehy has toed the party line on climate, railing against what he calls the “climate cult” and the “disastrous socialist Green New Deal.”
Sheehy and his campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment by press time.
Sheehy has continued to serve as Bridger’s chief executive officer since launching his Senate bid, and campaign advertisements have prominently featured the company’s aircraft. If elected to the Senate, he would have oversight over the same federal agencies that have bankrolled his business. All of this has raised conflict of interest questions, as Bloomberg and NBC News have reported.
Climate change has been a major part of Bridger Aerospace’s marketing and business strategy.
But what Daines and others aren’t talking about is how the Republican hopeful made his fortune helping confront a crisis that the GOP has for decades denied and downplayed while working to boost the production of planet-warming fossil fuels.
Sheehy also seems to be distancing himself from that legacy. Sometime before Sheehy announced his Senate bid, Bridger scrubbed climate language from its website, including a line about the company “fighting on the front lines of climate change,” ABC News reported last month.
Another section of the website, on the economy and energy, notes that the U.S. must “take a strong stand against the disastrous socialist Green New Deal that would destroy Montana’s economy and jobs and devastate our communities.”
But as recently as two years ago, Sheehy publicly supported major climate initiatives, including a blue state legislative package with provisions that mirror aspects of the Green New Deal, a progressive set of guiding principles to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and build climate resilience.
In March 2021, a few weeks after President Joe Biden reentered the United States into the Paris climate accord, Sheehy published an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune applauding a newly formed, bipartisan wildfire caucus in Congress. In it, he called for global cooperation to fight climate change.
Several months later, Sheehy appeared on CBS News to discuss the growing threat of wildfires in the West and a $15 billion climate package that California had recently passed into law. In the interview, he discussed the many complex factors driving extreme fire, including climate change and decades of fire suppression that have left forests choked in excess fuels.
The California climate package that impressed Sheehy so much contained billions for wildfire, forest and drought resilience. But it also funded Green New Deal-esque initiatives that have become a target of the GOP’s environmental culture wars, including $3.9 billion for electric vehicle investments and grants for environmental justice projects.
“The latest example of a liberal activist judge trying to legislate radical Green New Deal disastrous policies from the bench,” Sheehy wrote on social media. “We must fight back and take a strong stand against the climate cult and their job-killing agenda.”
Just not when it involves securing government contracts to confront the threat of climate-exacerbated wildfire, apparently.
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