Where I stand
Climate change is real, and we’re the ones driving it. The planet is warming faster than at any time in at least 2,000 years, and Montana is already paying for it. The land is asking something different of us now. The climate has changed, the forests have changed, and our winters and rivers have changed with them. When the facts move that much, honesty means the answer has to move with them.
You can see it from here
You can see it from here. After a severe fire, in more and more of Montana, the forest that comes back isn’t the forest that burned. It returns as brush, or as a different kind of tree, or it takes so long that nobody alive now will hunt it. Our summers have turned into smoke seasons. The glaciers our grandparents knew are disappearing, the Yellowstone River blew past its record in 2022, and families in fire country are losing insurance coverage they can’t replace.
Ask a rancher
Ask a rancher about climate and they won’t start with a glacier. They’ll start with 2021, when every acre of this state was in drought at once and a fifth of it sat in the worst category we measure. People sold cows they had spent a lifetime breeding. Some cut hay at a fraction of a normal year and bought the rest at a price that never penciled. And the damage didn’t stop when the rain came back. Montana’s cattle herd shrank ten percent in a year and the replacement heifers shrank thirteen, which means the hole keeps widening after the drought is over. Drought is also where our fire seasons come from. A dry spring and a rainless August turn a forest into fuel, so the smoke we breathe in August starts with the water we didn’t get in May. And the same heat that bakes out a summer makes the rain-on-snow events worse when they finally come, which is how one state ends up burning and flooding in the same decade.
The wildlife we depend on
The wildlife Montana hunters and anglers depend on is feeling it too. When rivers run too warm, trout start dying and the afternoon fishing closes. A thinner snowpack costs wolverines the snow they den in, which is why the federal government listed them as threatened in 2023. Whitebark pine, a high-energy food for wildlife that also slows the snowmelt feeding our rivers, is dying from beetles, disease, fire, and heat. Warm, dry late summers bring the deer die-offs that forced Fish, Wildlife and Parks to cap deer licenses in the northeast in 2025. Outdoor recreation is nearly five percent of Montana’s economy, so a lot of paychecks here ride on that habitat.
Getting ready pays
If you’re not convinced people are driving this, that’s okay. You don’t have to agree with me on why the climate is changing to agree on what we do about it. The fire bills and the insurance letters show up either way, and every dollar we spend getting ready saves several later, in fire bills, flood repairs, drought relief, and crop-insurance checks. The federal government’s own auditors list climate risk as a threat to the budget. We can pay a little now or a lot later, and right now we’re choosing later.
Energy, done the Montana way
I’ll push a clean-energy build-out that creates Montana jobs and lowers energy bills, done the Montana way, through our co-ops and tax credits, never mandates. You’ve heard “green jobs” promised before and watched them never show, so I’ll be specific: it only counts if it pays a real wage, close to home, year after year.
Learning from the tribes
This land evolved with fire, and low, cool fire kept it healthy long before anyone tried to put every fire out. Montana’s tribal nations have been reading this land through fire and drought for thousands of years, and some are leading on climate right now, like the Blackfeet Nation with its climate adaptation plan and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai with their cultural burning and their care of the Bison Range. As a country, we have a lot to learn from that work. Where tribal practices are working, federal land managers should be learning from them and putting those lessons to work on public land, with tribes as partners from the start. Cultural burning is the clearest example. It’s good fire, set under close supervision, only in the right conditions of weather and ground, and never lit and left. That’s how the tribes have always done it, and it’s the rule I hold every prescribed burn on federal land to. None of that means telling any nation what to do. I’ll back tribal-led work, make sure federal climate dollars actually reach Indian Country, and respect every nation’s sovereignty, including over its own energy.
The right order
There’s a version of climate policy that starts by making your life more expensive and hopes you’ll understand. That’s backwards, and it’s why so much of this has failed. My order is the opposite. First, give people a real choice, because a rule that costs you money when you had no other option isn’t a climate policy, it’s a bill. Second, go after the pollution that isn’t costing any Montanan a dime: the gas that companies are venting into the air instead of selling, and the goods we import from countries that pollute their way to a lower price. Third, actually measure it, because you can’t manage what you refuse to count. Get those three things done and we’ll finally be in a position to look at whether pricing carbon would work here. That’s a question worth asking honestly, and it’s not a question anyone should be answering before Montanans have a real alternative.
A right Montanans wrote down
Montanans wrote the right to a clean and healthful environment into our constitution, and our highest court has said that right includes a stable climate. I’ll stand behind that, and I’ll carry the same standard to Washington.
What I’ll do
By the numbers
Sources: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2021); Davis et al., PNAS 2023 (post-fire regeneration); USGS and Portland State University, 2017 (glaciers); USGS Fact Sheet 2024-3035 (Yellowstone River flood); Science (2026) fuel-treatment cost-benefit; Montana Commissioner of Securities and Insurance, 2025; BEA Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account, 2024; U.S. Drought Monitor, Sept. 28, 2021, and Montana Farm Bureau Federation testimony (2021 drought and herd losses); UCLA-led study, 2025 (drought-to-flood whiplash); U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listings (wolverine, 2023; whitebark pine, 2022); Montana FWP, 2025 (deer licenses); GAO High-Risk List (climate fiscal exposure); One Big Beautiful Bill Act, July 4, 2025 (clean-energy credits); NRECA (co-op direct pay); Agri-Pulse analysis of NRCS EQIP and CSP data, fiscal 2025 (national figures); EPA Global Methane Initiative and IPCC AR6 (2021) (methane heat-trapping); CRS R48475 and Federal Register, May 19, 2025 (methane waste charge); Foreign Pollution Fee Act (Sens. Cassidy and Graham); Energy and Water appropriations report, January 2026 (carbon-intensity accounting); Neta C. Crawford, “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War,” Costs of War Project, Brown University (2019); Blackfeet Nation Climate Change Adaptation Plan (2018), CSKT climate program, and DOI National Bison Range transfer (2021); Held v. State of Montana, Montana Supreme Court (2024). Bills are named as introduced; status shifts each Congress.