Interview with Ricky Bradley, Executive Director of Citizens' Climate Lobby, on Bipartisan Climate Advocacy

01

Journey to advocacy

Will Duhl: To start, I think it would be great if you could talk a little bit about how you got involved in climate advocacy and your journey throughout Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) over the years.

Ricky Bradley

My advocacy didn't emanate from an overwhelming sense that I needed to help everyone. It actually started as anger over how I felt people were being manipulated. It stemmed from my own experience with my mother having a stroke. She was the strongest person I knew, a pillar in the community who raised four kids on her own and ran a business. Yet, as soon as she recovered enough to move around, she wanted to return to smoking, which caused her stroke. It broke through that childhood sense of security when you realize your parents aren't invincible; they are human like everyone else.

Years later, I dug into the history of how doubt around cigarette smoking was manufactured, just as it was around climate change. That was my epiphany moment. I realized something was wrong and I needed to get involved because I had been part of the problem unknowingly for years.

I grew up in Alabama and lived in the South most of my life. Climate change wasn't an issue we talked about back then, so it didn't have a partisan angle to it when I discovered it. I was able to read through the data, look at the factual record, and form my own beliefs. I started from a place of anger, but that wasn't a sustainable way to approach it. Then I happened upon Dr. James Hansen's book, Storms of My Grandchildren. As I got through the science, he offered a practical economic solution: carbon pricing with a dividend returned to households. Coming from an MBA background, I knew that while free markets are great in theory, they are run by humans and need government guardrails to maintain a level playing field.

Around that same time, I revisited Montana a decade after living there. Glacier National Park has some of the lowest lying glaciers in the world, and seeing how much they had changed in just ten years made it clear that I could do something more impactful through organizing and mobilizing. I called Citizens' Climate Lobby, and within two days I was tapped to be a group leader and help develop the organization in Texas.

As a conservative, I wanted to bring a message of bringing people together to see past ideology. The toxic partisan ties people have today profit off division. I believe people are generally good and that we can find common ground without getting triggered by differences of opinion. Money is power in politics, and as an organization, we will never outspend our opponents. We have to connect with people differently by bridging divides, finding shared values, and repairing the ideological gap. Anger is a short-term motivator, but long-term success comes from people who internalize nonpartisanship as a core value.

02

CCL background and strategy

Will Duhl: For those who may be unfamiliar with CCL, could you describe what the organization is, its key goals, and what your main focuses are right now?

Ricky Bradley

We have one mission: to empower everyday people to build bridges, bridge divides, and build political will for effective climate solutions in Congress. We bring people together to set aside their ideology and work in a nonpartisan way.

For the first two years of our existence, we supported cap and trade. When that died in the summer of 2009, we pivoted to advocate for the policy Dr. Hansen highlighted: a carbon price with a full dividend returned back to American households, combined with a border adjustment to protect domestic consumers and manufacturers. We advocated for that policy for over a decade. I am proud that we helped form the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucuses in both the House and Senate to show members of Congress that they could discuss climate solutions without being penalized by their voters back home.

We built our brand in Congress around being a helpful resource rather than rolling in and pointing fingers. We always ask ourselves: what can we do to make it easier for members of Congress to support our legislation? They are normal people who care about their jobs, reputations, and families, so we approach them with a spirit of generosity. Our flagship bill, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, was introduced in three consecutive Congresses and reached nearly 90 co-sponsors across all political parties.

However, climate change is happening right now; we are living in the age of consequences. We had to ask ourselves whether we should focus exclusively on a major policy that reduces the most emissions but has a lower chance of passage, or if we should also support policies with a 40% chance of passing that can bring down emissions right now to reduce human suffering. Making that pivot over the last six years has involved tough, ongoing discussions. People can get attached to a specific policy, but the true strategy of our organization is not a single policy; it is the people doing grassroots nonpartisan advocacy. We are working to find clarity on how to be the biggest force for good both right now and in the future.

03

The political climate

Will Duhl: I wanted to ask about the current political climate on sustainability and climate change at the federal level. What is the sentiment when talking to officials, and what is the organization doing to push back against actions by the Trump administration that counter climate progress?

Ricky Bradley

From a climate advocate perspective, it is maddening to see the federal government paying developers not to build renewable energy. However, while an administration can move quickly, Congress holds the purse strings, budgets the money, and disperses the funds.

When the administration submitted its initial budget proposing deep cuts to climate science and research agencies like NOAA and the Department of Energy, the media treated it like a final decision. But that is just the start of the process. In July of 2024 and 2025, we went to D.C. alongside scientific organizations to advocate directly to Congress. We pointed out that these agencies fund local communities, predict extreme weather, and monitor crop yields, providing essential safety and comfort to American society. When Congress finalized the budget the following February, they rejected nearly all of those proposed cuts to climate research across four major agencies. Because most legislation requires a 60-vote threshold in the Senate, our system forces compromise across party lines, and that protective dynamic held firm. While some executive actions may be illegal and belong in the courts, our job is to stay focused on grassroots outreach to Congress to demonstrate the economic and security benefits of clean energy.

Regarding the mood in Congress right now, there are members on both sides genuinely committed to legislating. A clear example of this is the bipartisan work on permitting reform in the Senate. A power line project shouldn't take 17 years to move from Arizona to California. Four committee leaders—two Republicans and two Democrats—have been negotiating a comprehensive package.

That package contains essential provisions for both sides. On one hand, it includes provisions that help build out transmission lines to move renewable energy where it is needed, alongside reforms that mandate earlier community engagement so developers address concerns upfront rather than facing late-stage lawsuits. On the other hand, it incorporates adjustments to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that set faster deadlines for filing lawsuits, while streamlining agency reviews into a single centralized timeline rather than stacking them consecutively over years. Furthermore, the package features a crucial bipartisan "certainty provision" ensuring that once a project is fully permitted, a new presidential administration cannot step in and cancel it or pick winners and losers.

Members of Congress will always introduce extreme "marker bills" to signal their ideal positions, but the actual committee work involves blending those ideas into a practical compromise. If leaders support clean energy because it lowers costs and improves energy security, we should accept them as allies without forcing a litmus test that requires them to use specific climate terminology. We are not here to win a debate; we are here to lower emissions.

04

Community engagement

Will Duhl: Building on the idea of community engagement, how important is community input to CCL, and how are you working to involve and galvanize communities across the country?

Ricky Bradley

Community engagement is vital. Providing people with the opportunity to weigh in beforehand produces better outcomes for everyone involved. While digital mobilization like sending emails is important, it is not sufficient on its own. You have to sit down face-to-face with members of Congress and community members to build connection, understand their values, and establish common ground.

It is also important to note that CCL is strictly a climate organization, not a broad environmental or climate justice organization. That distinction is important. Environmental groups often want to protect everything at all times, but because we are in an active climate crisis, we have to evaluate pragmatic tradeoffs that lower emissions, even if they don't align with traditional environmental viewpoints.

We carefully preserve our position as the only national, nonpartisan grassroots advocacy organization operating at the federal level. That means we have to be thoughtful about organizational partnerships. If we partner with a partisan group, we must consider how that affects our brand and whether it makes it harder for a conservative or moderate member of Congress to support our bills. We focus on bringing people together around the specific items we agree on rather than trying to solve every issue at once. Balancing that single-minded focus with our volunteers' desire to build broad local coalitions is an ongoing challenge, but keeping our eyes on passing federal legislation is what makes us effective.

05

Outlook for the future

Will Duhl: Given all the negative headlines and competing perspectives on climate change, what is your overall outlook on the future of our planet, and are you optimistic that we can make a difference?

Ricky Bradley

I am optimistic because I know we have already made a difference. Early in my time at CCL in Texas, a colleague who previously worked at ExxonMobil helped reframe how I view information. He pointed out that pessimistic industry projections, like early claims that electric vehicles would only make up 1% of the car market by 2030, were often just consensus reports generated by oil and gas interests rather than objective facts. Models get refined over time through peer-reviewed science, and the sheer volume of climate science today is clear and established.

The consequences of climate change are already happening, and human nature often suffers from a recency or location bias where people only react to immediate local disasters. I once thought major events like Hurricane Sandy or extreme flooding in Houston would instantly shift the entire landscape, but human mindsets change incrementally.

What gives me hope is that a clear majority of Americans now accept that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity. People are exhausted by the toxic polarization in our country, which you can see in the growing number of voters leaving major parties to register as independents. There is a massive appetite for a different way of doing things.

If a million people who show up to protest also took the time to sit down for a respectful, constructive conversation with their member of Congress, the impact would be massive. I see this working every day across the country, like our CCL volunteers in Utah who go on an annual hike with Republican Senator John Curtis. Those quiet stories of bipartisan relationship-building don't always make the news, but seeing dedicated citizens get trained, organized, and active within their government is what proves to me that this approach wins out in the long run.