“When someone says we are embracing green energy, it’s like shoving an ice pick through our ears,” says Matt Welch, head of Conservative
Texans for Energy Innovation, another pro-renewables group.
“We just say clean energy.”
or more than 140 years John Davis’s family has owned the Pecan Spring Ranch on the prairie lands of West Texas. He has a photo of his great-great-grandmother, known as “the sheep queen of Texas”, sitting in a horse-drawn carriage beneath a tree that still stands in front of the hay barn.
It’s a tough business to maintain, even with a valuable herd of Wagyu beef cattle to raise. Yet when a renewable-energy developer offered Mr Davis a large payment to put wind turbines on his land, at first the staunch Republican—and former state congressman—turned it down.
His opposition was knee-jerk. “Clean energy has been branded a liberal technology. People literally say, ‘this is AOC coming into town,’” explains his son, Samuel, referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the left-wing congresswoman whose name pops up with almost flattering frequency among conservative Texans.
Eventually, though, economic sense prevailed. As the family points out, at an average return per acre, cattle generate $8, deer hunters $15—and wind hundreds of dollars. It assures the ranch’s future.