How a Koch-funded campaign is trying to reverse climate action in Vermont todayheadline

This story is a partnership between VTDigger and Grist.

For about two decades, Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political network, has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into stalling climate action nationwide. Founded by Charles and David Koch, the libertarian oil billionaires behind Koch Industries, the group has local chapters that block renewables standards, clean car rules, and carbon pricing at the state level. For decades, it’s been a bulwark of climate science denial that has shaped the modern-day Republican party. After notching wins against climate policy in states like Ohio and Kansas, the group is now testing its playbook in one of the bluest states in the country: Vermont.  

In March 2023, the group launched its Vermont presence as part of its 50-state strategy to involve Americans for Prosperity in traditionally more progressive states like California and New York. In the two and a half years since, the group has spent tens of thousands of dollars launching mail and digital campaigns targeting the state’s energy legislation like the Affordable Heat Act. It has also testified in favor of repealing laws like the Global Warming Solutions Act. 

The work in Vermont is being led by Ross Connolly, the group’s 34-year-old northeast regional director. Connolly, who grew up in New Hampshire, where he now lives, has said that his work in Vermont was focused on deregulating state government and helping residents realize their American dream. On a recent podcast, he called Vermont “bizarro-New Hampshire.” He later said that was due to its geographic upside-downness along with its politics, which zigged to the left while New Hampshire zagged to the right.

“I could talk endlessly about all the good things New Hampshire’s doing and all the bad things that Vermont has done,” Connolly said on the podcast, 802 Scoop. Vermont’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, “has been a great champion for Vermonters here, but there’s a lot more work to do here than New Hampshire.”

In July, the group launched an affordability road show, and in a media release, Connolly wrote that “the state’s progressive majority has chosen to inflate taxes and increase regulations” and “advance their own radical agenda.” He expressed gratitude to Scott for his “continued commitment to Vermonters despite the progressive majority.”

Vermont, often the first to go blue on national election nights, has served as a testing ground for national legislation like the right to same-sex marriage and now a law to hold oil companies accountable for their pollution. Perhaps one of its best-known exports, U.S. senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, has a long history of opposition to Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity. He was a vocal opponent of the Citizens United case, which opened up election influence to the billionaire class.

“So many groups on the right, center-right, don’t get involved in the northeast outside of New Hampshire or Pennsylvania,” Connolly said in an interview before an event the group hosted at a golf course this month in Rutland, Vermont. “If we don’t fight for people in those areas, we’re never going to make any sort of difference.”

But well-funded campaigns like the ones Americans for Prosperity has launched in Vermont — with a total of $186 million at the national group’s disposal, according to its 2023 nonprofit filings — are unfamiliar for the small state, where grassroots politics have long ruled. The annual tradition of Town Meeting Day, for example, marks a regular practice of direct democracy at the local level. 

Americans for Prosperity claims its driving mission is helping Vermonters afford to live in the state. But its founding and financing by some of the richest oil men in the world, and a history of spewing climate disinformation, casts that in doubt. 

Americans for Prosperity is one of the first conservative dark money groups to enter Vermont politics in a big way. Other high-profile groups have often supported liberal causes, and those groups have often funded candidates. Americans for Prosperity doesn’t directly fund candidates; its nonprofit status means it seeks to influence policies and elections through other means like mailers, ad campaigns, and in-person meetings. AFP-Action, an associated super PAC, does spend hundreds of millions on federal elections in support of right-wing politicians, but has not yet invested in a Vermont candidate, according to Connolly.

In Vermont, Connolly said Americans for Prosperity aims to help make the state more moderate. Its arrival comes on the heels of an election where Vermont lost more Democratic seats than any other state in the nation, and the state is struggling with rising housing, health care, and education costs, which makes its affordability message especially salient. 

The organization has been planting seeds in Vermont, especially when it comes to energy policies it hopes to see repealed. And as the group has repeatedly said on podcasts, during panels, and in an interview with VTDigger, it plans to root here permanently. 

Over the summer, the group organized about half a dozen speaking events, including in Rutland. Four legislators spoke at the panel event, including three first-term Republican legislators from Rutland: Representative Todd Nielsen, Representative Chris Keyser, and Senator Terry Williams, who joined the legislature in 2023 and serves on the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy.

While organizers expected 30 people in Rutland, about 15 came, including local officials and former legislators.

Williams said he was expecting more. He heard about the group two weeks earlier when Rachel Burgin, the organization’s northeast regional deputy director, contacted him. Burgin, who lives in Georgia, is one of three lobbyists registered in the state through 2026, along with Connolly and Lauren Schley, whose LinkedIn page says she works for Americans for Prosperity out of Washington, D.C.

No one who works for Americans for Prosperity on Vermont issues lives in Vermont, Connolly said, though he noted one person in the national office lives in the state.

State Senator Anne Watson, a Democrat, said groups like Americans for Prosperity opposed the energy transition because it undercut the profits of its oil tycoon founders. 

“Vermonters need to be savvy about that,” Watson said, “and recognize when outside influence is coming in to try and affect our policies and our elections.”

AFP sets its sights on energy policy

While the group first arrived in the state in 2023, it launched its first campaign last summer by attacking a first-of-its-kind climate policy — Act 18. The law studied the feasibility of a clean heat standard, which was intended to lower fossil fuel emissions from thermal energy sources like heating oil commonly used to warm Vermont homes.

“We focused on it because we came here and heard from Vermonters, and that was the one thing we heard across the board, was the concern on energy costs, and if that bill was implemented the amount of money that would cost the state and ratepayers,” Connolly said.

Supporters of Act 18 said the law was intended to regulate price-volatile fossil fuels and speed up the transition to cleaner sources like electric heat pumps. In a press release last year, Vermont House Speaker Jill Krowinski, a Democrat representing Burlington, wrote the cost of heating oil had jumped from $2 per gallon in 2020 to $5.87 per gallon in November 2022.

“The goal of the Affordable Heat Act is to help insulate Vermonters from fossil-fuel price swings, and to make it easier and more affordable for them to transition – if they want to – to more sustainable energy sources,” Krowinski wrote. 

But Americans for Prosperity opposed Act 18 and in May 2024 launched “a major five-part mail and digital campaign” that initially cost more than $63,000, according to the group’s disclosures. Another group within the state, Vermonters for Affordable Heat, supported by the state’s locally owned fuel dealers, spent around $11,300 on postcards and a petition opposing the law. 

Liberal groups spent much more money in support of the law, but that money largely came through super PACs, political action committees that can raise unlimited sums of money to fund campaigns but cannot coordinate directly with parties or candidates. The out-of-state Green Advocacy Project, a Washington, D.C.-based pro-clean heat group, contributed three times that — $180,000 — to a Vermont super PAC to boost candidates supporting the program. 

Within Vermont, the super PAC Vermont Conservation Voters, part of the national League of Conservation Voters, spent almost $218,500 on pro-clean heat mailers, ads, and videos, endorsing candidates with environmental records the group supported. While it supports election reform that wouldn’t allow for super PACS, the organization’s political director, Justin Marsh, told VTDigger in November that the growing presence of Americans for Prosperity was the reason they spent more than in past election cycles. 

Legislators, local officials, and advocates who spoke to VTDigger said they weren’t aware of any other conservative out-of-state group like Americans for Prosperity spending tens of thousands of dollars to influence Vermont politics.

Other groups like the Ethan Allen Institute, part of the State Policy Network, another Koch-affiliated group, have occasionally run conservative advertising campaigns in the state, according to Ben Walsh, climate and energy program director at Vermont Public Interest Research Group, an environmental advocacy organization. But that group has far less funding and is not concentrated on climate policies, he said.

“I imagine a group like AFP with long and well-documented ties to the fossil fuel industry has a real interest in making sure policy that’s good for clean energy and bad for fossil fuels is not enacted, and if anything, it’s a little surprising that they didn’t show up sooner,” Walsh said. “But now that they’re here, they’re making it very clear that anything good for the transition to clean energy is something they oppose.” 

In March 2025, a month before Americans for Prosperity settled a lobbying violation with the state, the political advocacy group launched a second state-wide mail campaign, spending $13,425 between March 13 and June 12, according to lobbying disclosures.  

The mailer said Vermonters should call their legislators and ask them to repeal Act 18, claiming the law “guarantees energy price hikes across the state,” according to a media release. The associated mailer, sent to Vermont households this spring, stated “Vermonters want Energy Abundance. Vermonters are responsible. They do not need Government mandates.”

If it had moved forward, Vermont’s clean heat standard would have been the first in the nation. But lawmakers never passed the program, largely because a Public Utility Commission report found the program would be too expensive to implement without help from other states in the region.

“Vermont was considering this first-of-its-kind clean heat standard that would hold fossil fuel companies to a standard of actually reducing carbon emissions in a way that the electric utility sector has had to do for decades,” said Elena Mihaly, vice president for the Vermont chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation, a clean energy advocacy group based in New England. “They were trying to nip it in the bud here in Vermont before it got out.”

Connolly said his group advocated for the full repeal because progressive legislators were trying to wait it out until they had a majority again and “could force it down the throat of Vermonters when Vermonters don’t want this policy at all.” 

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Watson, chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources and Energy, which is in charge of the bill, said that while she wasn’t necessarily saying the clean heat standard should move forward, she disagreed that Vermonters didn’t want effective clean energy policies.

“We know Vermonters care about climate change, and they care about affordability,” Watson said. “Both of those things are met by advancing renewables and renewable energy sources in the state because the vast majority are cheaper than their fossil fuel counterparts.” 

Because the clean heat standard never became a law, it doesn’t impact Vermonters’ utility bills. But Americans for Prosperity has repeatedly said the state’s energy policies, including laws like the Global Warming Solutions Act, have “without a doubt” driven costs higher for consumers.

The group is also against federal subsidies for energy programs that could lower energy costs for low-income Vermonters. In the days before the Rutland event, the state lost $62.5 million promised for solar programs after the “One Big Beautiful Bill” axed federal clean energy initiatives. 

“We believe those subsidies should have ended,” Connolly said of Solar for All. Upon the passage of the Trump omnibus bill that withdrew the funding, the national group threw a party called the One Big Beautiful Bash.

Instead of renewables, Connolly said the region needed more nuclear energy, such as small modular nuclear reactors, which have yet to be developed anywhere in the U.S., as well as the expansion of natural gas pipelines. 

“We should look at all the options on the table,” said state senator Zachary Harvey, a Republican representing Rutland, of natural gas and nuclear power, after speaking at the event.

Connolly said his group was also against the Climate Superfund Act, which charges oil companies for greenhouse gas emissions between 1995 and 2024. The law applies a “polluter pays” mindset to climate recovery, potentially giving Vermont resources to build back from disasters like recent devastating floods. 

“If your concern is climate change, that does absolutely nothing to solve climate change,” Connolly said. 

“It’s sort of petty type politics where it’s like, we’re going after Big Oil and punishing them,” Connolly continued. “Vermont isn’t going to bankrupt ExxonMobil or any of these companies. You’re just going to drive them out of your state and drive energy costs higher because of it.”

On podcasts, in interviews, and during speaking events, Connolly has repeated the same talking point: Vermont isn’t going to solve climate change. Harvey agreed and said the Rutland event wasn’t about climate denialism, noting Williams told the room, “We agree there’s climate change.”

“We’re not denying climate change exists,” Connolly told VTDigger. “We’re saying the way we’re going about it in this state is hurting people, and we should put people first and solve the problem in a more reasonable and moderate way.”

‘Kingpins’ of climate science denial

Connolly’s acknowledgment of climate change may be a made-for-Vermont approach, but that tone doesn’t match the two decades of action Americans for Prosperity has taken to sow disinformation about climate science. 

It was founded in 2004 by libertarian billionaires Charles Koch and his late brother David Koch, who died in 2019. They amassed wealth through Koch Industries, an oil refinery and pipeline conglomerate that has siphoned up many other companies since their father created the business in the 1930s, profiting through deals with the Stalin and Hitler regimes, according to Dark Money, a book by Jane Mayer.

Together, the Koch family grew their worth to more than $141 billion. After years among the top ten richest people in the world, David Koch’s family and Charles Koch now rank 21st and 22nd, according to Fortune.

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They’ve used this wealth to remake the national GOP into the party of climate denial, after government regulation of pollution and a push for renewables threatened their oil empire. In 2008, they began the “No Climate Tax Pledge,” asking officials to vote against spending money to fight climate change without equivalent tax cuts. By 2013, 411 officials had signed, including a quarter of senators and a third of representatives, along with other leaders like U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. 

In that era, Greenpeace called the brothers the “financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition,” partnering with and then outspending better-known oil corporations like ExxonMobil. During the first Trump administration, they launched local campaigns through Americans for Prosperity to roll back car emissions standards. 

Under Americans for Prosperity, and a host of other front groups, the brothers have long denied the threat of climate change, and have gone as far as to say that a warming world would benefit people. David Koch told a reporter in 2010: “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food.”

The consensus of the international community says otherwise. A warming atmosphere increases food and water insecurity for much of the planet, and causes increasingly dangerous weather events like heat waves and floods. In the two decades since Americans for Prosperity’s founding, more than half a million people were killed by the world’s 10 deadliest extreme weather events so far. All those events were made worse by the burning of fossil fuels, according to a report by World Weather Attribution, an academic outfit based at Imperial College London that scientifically quantifies how climate change influences extreme weather.

And while the Koch brothers have publicly clashed with President Trump, they have benefited enormously from his elections, earning more than $1 billion per year from the first Trump administration’s tax bill. They plan to extend tax cuts and roll back regulations, including in the energy industry, through Americans for Prosperity’s work under the second Trump administration, according to a 2025 plan obtained by The Guardian. 

Their networks have also heavily influenced both Trump teams. Under the first, about 50 administration officials had ties to Koch networks, including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Today, key figures like Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have worked closely with and donated large sums to both Americans for Prosperity and other Koch-affiliated groups.

The summer campaign in Vermont comes as the second Trump administration launches an unprecedented attack on climate and clean energy policies that gained traction under the Biden administration. Along with deleting climate information and reports from federal websites, the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy have spent six months deregulating fossil fuels and slashing clean energy projects. 

Most of that work was outlined by another source of environmental skepticism that received funding from the Koch brothers: the Heritage Foundation, responsible for creating Project 2025, the unofficial blueprint for the second Trump administration. It includes the breakup of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier climate science agency, calling it “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Trump’s 2026 budget proposal eliminates the agency’s research arm responsible for helping the country adapt to climate change. 

‘Here to stay’

Vermont Democrats have made the most of Americans for Prosperity’s slip ups. 

On an August mailer, Americans for Prosperity had misspelled their URL — GreenMountainProsperity.com — instead printing GreetMountainProsperity.com. Around midnight on Aug. 8, May Hanlon, the 26-year-old executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party, spotted the error and bought the misspelled web domain for $12.19.

Now, when users visit the website, a two-minute video pops up in which Hanlon calls the Americans for Prosperity mailer “sloppy” and “full of false claims about what Democrats are doing in the state legislature.” Visitors are redirected to a webpage about Democratic wins during the 2025 legislative session, emphasizing affordability concerns like housing. 

“While Americans for Prosperity spent thousands of dollars on a recent mailer to spread misinformation about our legislators’ priorities, they misspelled their own website,” Hanlon said in a text message. “They can’t get their own website right, so it’s no surprise their claims don’t add up.” 

Months earlier, the Virginia-based group was fined thousands of dollars for violating Vermont law on a mailer asking Vermonters to contact their legislators to repeal Act 18. That mailer said the campaign was “Paid for by Americans For Prosperity Vermont.” But that group was not registered in the state. 

Vermont law requires that a lobbying advertisement like a mailer contain the name of the entity that paid for it, according to an email sent by the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, which responded to a formal complaint by Jim Dandeneau, the former executive director of the Vermont Democratic Party. 

In a settlement with the state on April 29, Americans for Prosperity agreed to stop using that name and paid a $3,000 fine.

“We don’t really comment on legal things,” Connolly said of the settlement. “That has been resolved. It was just, I think, a miscommunication. We changed our disclaimers. No problem.”

He said the fine didn’t reflect the work the group was doing in Vermont, where he said it has had over 5,000 Vermonters take direct action like mailing letters or making calls since 2023. 

“That mailer was received very positively, again focusing on the moderation of the legislature and the issues that Vermonters care about,” Connolly said. “Little disputes in election law are not top of mind for Vermonters.”

Harvey, a first-term legislator appointed by Gov. Scott in January, said Vermont needs groups like Americans for Prosperity to revitalize voters. He first met the lobbyists during a dinner in Stowe early in the 2025 legislative session, and said even though the group came from out of state, they’d made an effort to get to know legislators and were committed to policies he supported. 

For Connolly, a rightward transition in his politics came during college, when he read Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, a book that argues government planning can lead to tyranny and also radicalized Charles Koch’s politics, according to Dark Money.

After graduating, Connolly worked for Republican campaigns before joining Americans for Prosperity in 2013. The group has since expanded to 37 state chapters, but the only chapter across nine New England states is New Hampshire. 

Connolly ran that state’s chapter before taking on the entire New England region. Down the road, the nonprofit could establish a chapter in Vermont, which would give it infrastructure and full-time staff and enable a permanent presence in the state. 

“We promise we will be here for the long term,” Connolly told the audience at Rutland. “We at AFP are not going anywhere.” 

Ethan Weinstein and Shaun Robinson contributed reporting.