When it got here to rising and selling his aerial firefighting firm, Montana businessman Tim Sheehy was, for years, outspoken about the necessity to fight world local weather change, even publicly supporting a serious initiative to curb emissions and spend money on local weather resilience.
However since launching his Republican bid for Senate in June, Sheehy has toed the social gathering line on local weather, railing in opposition to what he calls the “local weather cult” and the “disastrous socialist Inexperienced New Deal.”
On one hand, his sudden shift is unsurprising, given he’s searching for the Republican nomination in an more and more deep-red state. Right here’s how Montana author James Conner not too long ago summarized the political panorama: “That is what a candidate does to organize for a Republican major. Acknowledging that the globe is warming gained’t damage him in a basic election, however it’s going to in a major.”
However, it’s a shameless show of opportunism and partisan rhetoric that comes because the nation suffers quickly worsening local weather impacts — and as Sheehy’s firm, Bridger Aerospace, continues to tout itself as a pacesetter within the struggle in opposition to planet-warming greenhouse fuel emissions.
Sheehy and his marketing campaign didn’t reply to HuffPost’s request for remark by press time.
A embellished former Navy SEAL, Sheehy is campaigning for an opportunity to tackle Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in 2024. He’s broadly anticipated to face far-right Rep. Matt Rosedale (R-Mont.) within the Republican major, though Rosedale has not formally introduced his candidacy.
Sheehy based Bridger Aerospace in 2014 after retiring from the army. The corporate has grown exponentially in recent times, with a fleet of 28 plane, together with a number of water scoopers, which have assisted in battling fires throughout the Western U.S. and components of Canada. In 2022, the corporate raked in additional than $46 million in income — 96% of which got here from federal contracts, in keeping with firm filings with the Securities and Alternate Fee. Sheehy earned practically $5 million in wage and bonuses as the corporate’s CEO final yr and owns firm inventory that as of Friday was valued at $83 million.
Sheehy has continued to function Bridger’s chief government officer since launching his Senate bid, and marketing campaign ads have prominently featured the corporate’s plane. If elected to the Senate, he would have oversight over the identical federal companies which have bankrolled his enterprise. All of this has raised battle of curiosity questions, as Bloomberg and NBC Information have reported.
Local weather change has been a serious a part of Bridger Aerospace’s advertising and marketing and enterprise technique.
In a presentation to traders this month, the corporate boasted that its mission is to “straight assault CO2 emissions to fight local weather change.” One slide features a graphic detailing the “vicious cycle” between more and more catastrophic wildfires, carbon air pollution and planetary warming. One other notes that “local weather change has elongated the lively northern hemisphere hearth season.”
In a separate presentation this month about its second-quarter earnings, Bridger wrote that “demand for aerial firefighting continues to develop pushed by local weather change, inhabitants transferring to wildfire susceptible areas and shift from floor to air-based suppression.”
A Bridger submitting with the SEC for the 2022 fiscal yr options the phrase “local weather” dozens of occasions, largely within the context of how local weather change may impression the corporate’s future enterprise.
“We’re not in a position to precisely predict the materiality of any potential losses or prices related to the bodily results of local weather change,” it reads. “We consider that rising world temperatures have been, and sooner or later are anticipated to be, one issue contributing to growing charges and severity of wildfires. Local weather change and world temperatures are impacted my [sic] many variables, nonetheless, and can’t be predicted with certainty.”
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), chair of the highly effective Nationwide Republican Senatorial Committee, is amongst a number of Republicans who’ve endorsed Sheehy, citing his expertise as a fight veteran, profitable businessman and job creator.
However what Daines and others aren’t speaking about is how the Republican hopeful made his fortune serving to confront a disaster that the GOP has for many years denied and downplayed whereas working to spice up the manufacturing of planet-warming fossil fuels.
Sheehy additionally appears to be distancing himself from that legacy. Someday earlier than Sheehy introduced his Senate bid, Bridger scrubbed local weather language from its web site, together with a line in regards to the firm “combating on the entrance strains of local weather change,” ABC Information reported final month.
A spokesperson for Sheehy informed ABC on the time that it was nothing greater than a routine web site replace.
But his rhetoric on the marketing campaign path would recommend in any other case.
Sheehy’s marketing campaign web site options an points web page that’s chock-full of favourite Republican speaking factors. In a piece on forest administration, Sheehy touts having created 200 jobs within the aerial firefighting sector earlier than railing in opposition to each the federal authorities — his firm’s greatest shopper — and “radical environmentalists.”
“I’ve a singular perspective on what the federal authorities is failing to deal with relating to tackling wildfires—they should let Montana begin managing our federal lands,” the web site reads, seemingly flirting with a full embrace of the unpopular motion to switch management of federal lands to states. “We additionally want to face sturdy in opposition to the unconventional environmentalists who’re suing and shutting down timber initiatives with frivolous litigation. If we will responsibly handle our forests, we will harvest timber, create high-paying jobs, and scale back the specter of wildfires.”
One other part of the web site, on the financial system and power, notes that the U.S. should “take a powerful stand in opposition to the disastrous socialist Inexperienced New Deal that will destroy Montana’s financial system and jobs and devastate our communities.”
However as not too long ago as two years in the past, Sheehy publicly supported main local weather initiatives, together with a blue state legislative bundle with provisions that mirror facets of the Inexperienced New Deal, a progressive set of guiding ideas to rein in greenhouse fuel emissions and construct local weather resilience.
In March 2021, just a few weeks after President Joe Biden reentered america into the Paris local weather accord, Sheehy printed an op-ed within the Salt Lake Tribune applauding a newly shaped, bipartisan wildfire caucus in Congress. In it, he referred to as for world cooperation to struggle local weather change.
“There are a number of explanations for the proliferation and escalating harm of wildfires, and addressing these causes requires renewed consideration of native, state and federal governments and — relating to local weather change — worldwide cooperation,” Sheehy wrote.
A number of months later, Sheehy appeared on CBS Information to debate the rising menace of wildfires within the West and a $15 billion local weather bundle that California had not too long ago handed into legislation. Within the interview, he mentioned the various complicated components driving excessive hearth, together with local weather change and a long time of fireside suppression which have left forests choked in extra fuels.
“In the end what he’s doing is lastly bringing the mandatory legislative and authorities focus to the wildland hearth situation, which has been plaguing the U.S. for many years,” Sheehy stated of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. “And the way we’ve addressed it has actually been antiquated and an incremental strategy that’s underfunded, under-resourced, undermanned, and put all the scenario right into a class the place we’re all the time reacting to the fires as an alternative of being ready for them forward of time.”
“It’s nice to see at the least one among our state leaders now stepping up and offering the right quantity of funding and sources to deal with the problem,” he added.
The California local weather bundle that impressed Sheehy a lot contained billions for wildfire, forest and drought resilience. But it surely additionally funded Inexperienced New Deal-esque initiatives which have turn into a goal of the GOP’s environmental tradition wars, together with $3.9 billion for electrical car investments and grants for environmental justice initiatives.
Within the weeks since asserting his Senate marketing campaign, Sheehy’s rhetoric has solely grown more and more partisan and weird. In an interview with Fox Information final month, he referred to as American fossil fuels “the cleanest type of power identified to man” — a wildly inaccurate assertion.
Earlier this week, a Montana choose dominated in favor of 16 youth plaintiffs who sued the state in 2020 and argued that state companies had violated their constitutional proper to a “clear and healthful surroundings” by approving fossil gasoline initiatives with out contemplating local weather impacts. Sheehy joined Daines and different Montana Republicans in attacking the choose, the younger Montana plaintiffs — his would-be constituents — and Democratic local weather insurance policies.
“The newest instance of a liberal activist choose attempting to legislate radical Inexperienced New Deal disastrous insurance policies from the bench,” Sheehy wrote on social media. “We should struggle again and take a powerful stand in opposition to the local weather cult and their job-killing agenda.”
Simply not when it includes securing authorities contracts to confront the specter of climate-exacerbated wildfire, apparently.