U.S. Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee’s 5th District, one of the most consistent conservative voices in the House Freedom Caucus, is under coordinated assault — not from his constituents, but from a swarm of out-of-state green energy grifters determined to purchase a more compliant lawmaker in Congress.
The vehicle is the “Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC,” a super PAC bankrolled by so-called clean-energy investors furious that their taxpayer-funded gravy train is being exposed and interrupted.
The group has already poured nearly $700,000 into the August 6 Republican primary to elevate former state Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher while carpet-bombing Ogles with negative ads.
Punchbowl News reports the PAC expects to spend around $1 million before the primary, with ads accusing Ogles of resume inflation and other personal attacks. Naturally, the ads carefully avoid any honest discussion of energy policy.
Tom Matzzie, the PAC’s chair and CEO of CleanChoice Energy, made the real motive plain: The spending is designed “to communicate a message to the other members of Congress that if you take these extreme positions, the industry is watching.”
“If you’re an extremist on American energy, you’re on our target list,” Matzzie declared.
Follow the Money
Who is writing these checks? Leading the list is San Francisco billionaire Chris Larsen, co-founder of the cryptocurrency firm Ripple. Larsen, who previously flooded Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign with more than $11 million and is now vowing to bankroll Governor Gavin Newsom, has dumped millions into Invest in Tomorrow this cycle. Indeed, records show contributions totaling well over $5 million.
Another notable donor is Jigar Shah, the former director of the Biden Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office. Shah, who oversaw the distribution of roughly $400 billion in green-energy loan authority, personally gave $50,000.
These are not disinterested philanthropists concerned about the weather. They are defending a lucrative racket. The House Freedom Caucus, with Ogles (Freedom Index score: 95) among its ranks, fought hard inside the One Big Beautiful Bill to sunset the renewable energy tax credits and other subsidies that had become the lifeblood of what President Trump labeled the “Green New Scam.”
After those provisions were stripped or sharply curtailed, the industry’s political arm went on offense. The same PAC spent $1.7 million helping defeat Freedom Caucus stalwart Chip Roy in his Texas attorney general primary. The ringleaders of the operation openly celebrated it as payback for Roy’s role in killing the subsidies and popularizing the “Green New Scam” label.
Peter Davidson of Aligned Climate Capital, a PAC founder, complained that “the whole demonization of the industry … all that came from the Freedom Caucus.”
Tennessee’s 5th District offers an especially appetizing target. Just west of Jackson sits Ford’s BlueOval City, the massive electric-vehicle and battery complex that received a conditional $9.2 billion loan commitment from Shah’s Loan Programs Office under the Inflation Reduction Act.
The project has been plagued by delays, production schedule slips to 2028 or later, and the recent dissolution of its original joint venture. With the federal subsidy spigot no longer wide open, the facility is struggling.
A congressman like Ogles, who treats green-energy corporate welfare as the scam it is, stands in the way. A more malleable successor — Hatcher, whom the PAC admits it knows little about on energy policy — would be far more useful.
Green Grift
This strategy is not new. At the United Nations COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, this writer put a simple question to a delegation of seven U.S. senators: How could they make credible climate pledges when most Americans reject the man-made global-warming hypothesis and when a potential Trump return loomed?
U.S. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, prompted by then-Foreign Relations Chairman Ben Cardin, responded by touting the “tens of billions of [tax] dollars” already flowing to GOP-controlled states and congressional districts under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“Am I suggesting that, were the former president to be our next president, everything would be fine? No,” Coons conceded. “But I’m saying that there is a broad enough and deep enough support for continuing investments to combat climate change and for the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure law.… We’ll continue to move forward regardless.”
In other words, lock in the taxpayer-funded “green energy” spending in red districts so the political constituency for the scam becomes self-sustaining. BlueOval City was precisely that kind of investment. Now that the money is tighter, the same interests are trying to remove the obstacles in Congress.
Representative Ogles has faced ethics questions, as have many politicians. But the sudden arrival of San Francisco crypto and green-energy millions to dictate a Republican primary in rural Tennessee reveals the true stakes.
These donors are not defending the “climate” or Tennessee workers. They are defending their access to other people’s money. The Freedom Caucus’s successful push to end the open-ended subsidies threatened a business model built on political favor rather than market viability. The response is classic: punish the dissenters and install more reliable vote-getters.
Tennessee voters in the 5th District will decide on August 6 whether they prefer a Trump-backed congressman who answers to them, or one who answers to the green-energy lobby that once doled out hundreds of billions from Washington and now seeks to buy influence the old-fashioned way.
The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition is transparent about its goal: make politicians fear the industry more than they fear their own constituents. That is not self-government. It is the green grift fighting for its life.
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