Wyoming’s dominant Republican Party is in turmoil over the fraught topic of climate change, an important issue in the nation’s largest coal producer and location for the largest uranium reserves and second largest uranium production.
The issue pits the state’s governor, Mark Gordon, who is pushing a policy position that the Cowboy State should work to reduce its carbon footprint, against an important Republican state senator, Cheri Steinmetz and what may be a majority of her GOP colleagues. It’s entirely internecine. Ballotpedia describes Wyoming’s politics: “Wyoming has a Republican trifecta and a Republican triplex. The Republican Party controls the offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature.”
This week, Gordon chaired a two-day (Feb. 7-8) Western Governor’s Association “Decarbonizing the West Initiative Workshop” in Denver, hosted by Colorado’s Democratic Gov., Jared Polis. The workshop focused on direct air capture of CO2, transport, and storage. The week before, the Cowboy State Daily reported, “Gordon and the Wyoming Energy Authority confirmed six projects focusing on carbon reduction, renewable energy and carbon capture to receive a share of $157 million in federal, private and state money.
Gordon’s views on climate policy, outlined in a statement last November: “The idea of being net negative is about using a coal-fired power plant, biofuels from our forests and carbon capture and sequestration as a more practical means to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, instead of just changing to wind or solar.”
In December, he defended his approach on the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes.” He said, “We needed to be aggressive, and we needed to really address this issue,” adding that he supports the “all-of-the-above” strategy.
The TV interview was recorded in September, about a month before Gordon made widely-reported comments at a Harvard University meeting that Wyoming “needs to urgently address climate change by going ‘carbon negative.’” That prompted a resolution from the Wyoming Republican Party, at the urging of the far-right Wyoming Freedom Caucus, expressing “no confidence” in the governor.
In retaliation for Gordon’s Denver appearance this week, Steinmetz organized an ”oversight hearing” on carbon negative and net zero policies, schedule for today. She said the hearing would be conducted through the legislature’s joint Agriculture State and Public Lands and Water Resources Committee. The committee has no Democratic members. The Senate partisan composition consists of 29 Republicans and two Democrats.
Wyoming’s dominant Republican Party is in turmoil over the fraught topic of climate change, an important issue in the nation’s largest coal producer and location for the largest uranium reserves and second largest uranium production.
The issue pits the state’s governor, Mark Gordon, who is pushing a policy position that the Cowboy State should work to reduce its carbon footprint, against an important Republican state senator, Cheri Steinmetz and what may be a majority of her GOP colleagues. It’s entirely internecine. Ballotpedia describes Wyoming’s politics: “Wyoming has a Republican trifecta and a Republican triplex. The Republican Party controls the offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature.”
This week, Gordon chaired a two-day (Feb. 7-8) Western Governor’s Association “Decarbonizing the West Initiative Workshop” in Denver, hosted by Colorado’s Democratic Gov., Jared Polis. The workshop focused on direct air capture of CO2, transport, and storage. The week before, the Cowboy State Daily reported, “Gordon and the Wyoming Energy Authority confirmed six projects focusing on carbon reduction, renewable energy and carbon capture to receive a share of $157 million in federal, private and state money.
Gordon’s views on climate policy, outlined in a statement last November: “The idea of being net negative is about using a coal-fired power plant, biofuels from our forests and carbon capture and sequestration as a more practical means to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, instead of just changing to wind or solar.”
In December, he defended his approach on the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes.” He said, “We needed to be aggressive, and we needed to really address this issue,” adding that he supports the “all-of-the-above” strategy.
The TV interview was recorded in September, about a month before Gordon made widely-reported comments at a Harvard University meeting that Wyoming “needs to urgently address climate change by going ‘carbon negative.’” That prompted a resolution from the Wyoming Republican Party, at the urging of the far-right Wyoming Freedom Caucus, expressing “no confidence” in the governor.
In retaliation for Gordon’s Denver appearance this week, Steinmetz organized an ”oversight hearing” on carbon negative and net zero policies, schedule for today. She said the hearing would be conducted through the legislature’s joint Agriculture State and Public Lands and Water Resources Committee. The committee has no Democratic members. The Senate partisan composition consists of 29 Republicans and two Democrats.
According to the Rocket Miner newspaper, Steinmetz neglected to alert the leadership of her oversight hearing. The Rocket Miner noted that Steinmetz “failed to notify both Senate President Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, and House Speaker Albert Sommers, R-Pinedale, of the hearing. Driskill and Sommers sent out a news release Thursday to clarify the event is not sponsored by the Legislature. In the release, both lawmakers said neither of them was consulted prior to Steinmetz’s announcement.”
The news release continued, “While Sen. Steinmetz is free to hold an event in the Capitol auditorium on whatever issues she chooses, it is disingenuous to present such an event as sponsored by the Wyoming Legislature.”
Gordon spokesman Michael Perlman noted that Steinmetz has supported carbon capture, utilization, and storage in the past, “joining her fellow senators in unanimously passing Senate File 47 – Carbon Storage and sequestration-liability in 2022.”
Steinmetz, a native of the tiny town of Lingle (population 468 in the 2010 census) in Goshen County in her rural district in east-central Wyoming, has a background of insurance sales along with her husband. She was elected to the Wyoming house in 2015 and the Senate in 2018. In February 2022, Steinmetz offered an amendment to an appropriations bill to eliminate a University of Wyoming gender studies program. It passed by a 16-14 vote. It failed in the Wyoming House. She is also a strong supporter of gun rights, a popular position in Wyoming. She is up for reelection in 2006.
Gordon, 66, is the scion of old eastern money, through the American Woolen Company, and is distantly related to the late, legendary World War II General George S. Patton. Gordon was born in New York City, grew up on the family ranch in Johnson County, Wyo., and earned a B.A. degree in history from Middlebury College in 1979.
His political baptism came in 2008, when he ran for the Republican nomination for Wyoming’s only U.S. House seat, which was vacant. Despite important support from some prominent Republicans and state newspapers and an apparent lead in the contest, he lost to Cynthia Lummis. She later became one of the state’s two U.S. senators. In 2012, he was named Wyoming treasurer and was elected treasurer in 2014. He ran for governor in 2018, won, and was reelected in 2022.
Commenting on the political fracas over climate policies, University of Oxford business professor Robert Eccles, an American with ties to Wyoming, wrote in Forbes, “I suspect that Mr. Gordon will stick to his guns as Governor of the Cowboy State and do the hard work of governing, something the Freedom Caucus at all levels is incapable of doing. Instead, the raison d’ etre of these puerile and pathetic pols is to generate narcissistic and self-indulgent political theater.”
–Kennedy Maize