Tennessee’s next governor will have the power to help shape the policies and priorities for the state’s land, air, climate and water.
Governors can veto state legislation that favors highly polluting energy sources, challenge federal rollbacks on environmental regulations and direct state agencies to fund programs designed to improve air quality or reduce heat risks.
While the state is likely to elect its first female governor this fall, the two leading candidates represent vastly different perspectives on energy and environmental priorities.
Republican candidate and U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn has aligned her campaign with President Donald Trump’s agenda. The Trump administration has taken at least 570 actions that directly threaten the environment, climate and human health since January 2025.
Blackburn plans to support Tennessee’s nuclear buildout
Blackburn has consistently voted “anti-environment” throughout her career in Congress, according to the advocacy group League of Conservation Voters, which gave her a lifetime voting score of just 3% on environmental issues.
If elected governor, Blackburn promises to focus on expanding the state’s nuclear energy supply and support projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority’s planned small modular reactors in Oak Ridge.
“Tennessee has always been a leader in advanced energy and clean coal technologies, and the road to America’s nuclear renaissance runs right through Oak Ridge,” Blackburn said in a statement to WPLN News. “With ever-growing electricity needs, nuclear power provides a sustainable, efficient, and reliable source of power that won’t let Tennesseans down when they need it most.”
Last year, Blackburn became vocal about expanding Tennessee’s nuclear industry to support data centers for artificial intelligence. She penned an editorial with Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-TN in Power Magazine asking TVA to hire an interim CEO and search for external leadership to lead a nuclear buildout.
“The 21st century will be America’s next Golden Age only if we can supply the vast amounts of power required to run artificial intelligence, quantum computers, and advanced manufacturing,” the senators wrote.
They argued that nuclear energy was the “only viable” solution, and the U.S. was falling behind the world’s energy leader China in expanding nuclear capacity — the U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet but has added little new capacity while China has nearly doubled its nuclear footprint in the past decade. The senators also argued that TVA was preventing a large buildout of nuclear reactors due to a “paralysis of analysis.”
“TVA could be to the nuclear race what NASA was to the space race,” they wrote.
As a senator, just in the past two years, Blackburn has also denied funding for veterans exposed to toxic chemicals, repealed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rule under the Clean Air Act that places pollution control requirements on facilities emitting hazardous air pollutants, and allowed Congress to use the proceeds from public land sales to reduce the federal deficit — which can benefit real estate developers and extractive industries like oil and gas. She also voted against bills designed to protect federal funding to support clean energy manufacturing, at times Tennessee’s largest economic driver of new investments, and federal funding for residential clean energy tax credits.
In 2020, Blackburn voted against a bipartisan bill called the “Great American Outdoors Act,” which provides funding to public lands and Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Throughout her career, Blackburn has voiced misinformation on climate change. She argued with Bill Nye “The Science Guy” in 2014 about the scientific consensus on planetary warming and claimed “Earth is no longer warming” in 2016. The planet is, in fact, facing warming at an increasingly accelerated rate due mostly to the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and animal agriculture.
WPLN asked Blackburn about her current position on taking climate action, including whether she supports phasing out fossil fuels, and TVA’s recent announcement to reinvest in its coal plants.
“I fully support the use of fossil fuels,” she said in a written statement.
She had received the ninth-highest amount of donations from fossil fuel interests of any member in Congress as of December 2025, according to an analysis by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress.
Jerri Green plans an AI data center moratorium, climate resiliency efforts
The Democratic nominee Jerri Green is a lawyer and city council member in Memphis.
If elected, Green plans to introduce a statewide moratorium on data centers aimed at “stopping AI companies from running polluting, unpermitted power plants in our neighborhoods and rural communities,” she told WPLN News.
Last week, Green unsuccessfully voted not to delay a vote on a 12-month moratorium on new data centers in Memphis. (City lawmakers are next expected to take up that matter on Oct. 20.)
Green also plans to enforce clean air and water regulations in rural and urban communities that face the most industrial pollution, invest in renewable energy and hold utilities accountable for how they respond to energy demand, which has largely come from data centers in recent years.
“We must aggressively protect Tennessee’s rivers, forests, farmland, and public lands from pollution and overdevelopment to preserve them for future generations of Tennesseans,” Green told WPLN.
On her campaign website, Green lists plans to implement AI literacy in schools, fine large corporations that replace 25 or more workers with AI to pay for local job retraining, require data centers to use recycled water and take back tax breaks from companies that replace “promised Tennessee jobs with robots.”
The Democratic nominee also promises to ensure state-level emergency protections for farmers affected by drought and market swings, invest in rural water systems and prepare communities for climate resilience and disaster recovery.
“Tennesseans deserve a governor who values clean air, safe water, and protecting our land for the next generation, rather than rubber-stamping corporate pollution for short-term profit,” Green said.
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