WATCH: Executive Q&A with League of Conservation Voters President Pete Maysmith

 

With the GOP’s megabill now law—gutting key clean energy provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act—we turned to someone who knows how to fight back. Pete Maysmith, newly named president of the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), joined us over Zoom to talk about his first few months on the job, how LCV is preparing for the midterms, and what it’s like to be a new dad all over again.

How have the first few months gone?

The first few months have been a wild ride and enormously exciting. I’m thrilled to be in this role at LCV. I’ve got a long history both with our Conservation Voters movement, which includes our 33 state affiliates. I ran Conservation Colorado for about eight years and then I ran our campaigns program here at LCV for about another seven or eight years.

So to step into this role in this moment, when the climate crisis continues to accelerate, we know we need to take aggressive action. And then of course the politics of what’s happening at the national level with this administration and the MAGA allies that run Congress, it demands strong action. It’s both an enormously exciting opportunity and a critically important time to be doing this work.

What’s your vision for LCV for the rest of 2025 and beyond?

One, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people in this country who are angry about prices being too high. And one of those is certainly their utility bills that were already going up. The president said he would cut those in half in his first year. He has broken trust with those voters. They continue to spike and the budget reconciliation bill that just passed will drive those prices significantly higher. People are angry about that. So we are going to say that clean energy, which is the cheapest and the fastest energy to bring on the grid, 93% of all new energy that came onto the grid in 2024 was solar, wind, or batteries. Demand is spiking because of AI data centers, extreme weather because we’re electrifying things, which we need to be doing to tackle the climate crisis.

Then we take the cheapest, most readily available form of energy—wind, solar, and storage—and try and remove it from the mix. That just means that there’s less supply and it means people are going to pay even more than they are. What we’re going to do is stand with them and to hold Republican members who voted for this atrocious piece of legislation accountable in the coming months here throughout the rest of 2025.

You mentioned the reconciliation bill, which is now law—what is LCV planning for accountability for those who voted for it? There are a number of Republicans in the House who said they supported clean energy and yet they turn around and vote for this bill.

All talk, no action. We’re going to make sure that their constituents are aware of their vote and not just their vote, what it means to their everyday lives. That’s what I mean—standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people and fighting with them and standing up to these MAGA Republicans who voted for a huge transfer of wealth to even make big oil CEOs and other billionaires even richer. So it means being in communities, it means talking to people. It means connecting with people in their neighborhoods, their places of business, and their community gathering locations. It means communicating through paid venues, whether that’s TV or digital and the online world that we all inhabit in such a new and evolving way. It’s all manner of touching people during their everyday lives and making sure they understand.

By the way it’s not just increased utility prices. Prices are going to go up across the board—health care, groceries. Those issues may not be directly connected to clean energy and climate as your utility bill, which is very directly connected, but is the broader argument that this bill is making your life more expensive. That’s what we’re going to be communicating again both on the ground, talking to people, and through the airwaves and through digital and online communications.

What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?

I think the biggest risk I ever took is not long after I took over running our Colorado affiliate. I made the decision, working with lots of friends and allies, to execute a merger and to take the two leading environmental groups in the state in Colorado and put them together. We created Conservation Colorado. I thought ‘Was it going to work? Is the staff culture going to come together? Would we raise enough money?’ We didn’t want to have two plus two equal four. We wanted to increase our impact.

Now looking back well over a decade plus, now the verdict is unequivocally ‘Wow that worked and it worked in spades.’ So it was enormously exciting to do, and grow, and create and then grow this new organization—this newly formed merged organization. But it was a little scary. So, that was a risk but I’m so glad that I took it.

Finally, what’s something about you that might surprise people?

Well, I am a new dad again. So, not entirely dissimilar to you. I’m the dad of three red-haired daughters, which is amazing and the source of more joy and inspiration in my life than anything else. But I have a 23-year-old, a nearly 21-year-old daughter, and then a one-year-old daughter. So people might not expect that, but it’s just something that is a source of unbelievable joy in my life, all of them.

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