During his four years as the U.S. Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, like most of his fellow Republicans, did not take climate change seriously. At his retirement from the Senate in 2007, the League of Conservation Voters gave Frist a lifetime rating of 7 percent for his legislative environmental record.

Since then, the former heart and lung transplant surgeon has looked closely at the science of climate change, and he now sees the connections between human well-being and planetary health. “Our national leadership too often, and I was probably a part of that at the time, has failed to connect those dots with what the urgency of today requires,” he told Cara Buckley of The New York Times.

“In earnest writings, folksy videos recorded on his front porch in Tennessee, podcasts, speeches and congressional testimony,” Buckley reported, “Mr. Frist has been highlighting the inseparability of planetary and human health.”

“A healthier planet means healthier people,” said Frist, who now chairs The Nature Conservancy’s global board of directors. “The science shows it. Our experience shows it. Nobody can really argue against that.”

“The human impact has been left out of the equation for too long,” he told Simmone Shah of Time magazine. “The best way to appeal to [people] is to start with how the changing climate will impact you and your children and generations to come. It's important now. It'll get increasingly important every day that goes by. I find that’s not disarming, but realistic, because that is why people are concerned.”

In June, he published a minute-long video detailing how ecosystem collapse and wildlife habitat loss imperil children’s brain development and immune response, by reducing their exposure to beneficial microbes. On Substack, where he has around 31,000 followers, he’s written about the ways air pollution speeds up cognitive decline. In 2023, he presented data to the Senate Budget Committee showing how rising temperatures lead to escalating health care costs. He is also writing a book about how climate and nature shapes human health. He told Buckley that he’s aiming to “depolarize” the climate conversation.

She wrote that Frist “comes across as straightforward and plain-spoken, like an old-fashioned kindly doctor.” According to his office, he has more than 130,000 followers across his social media platforms and got more than 2.5 million impressions on LinkedIn last year.

His target audience, he said, is the center right. “People who are reasonable, rational, appreciate science, educated not necessarily in college degrees, but educated in the sense of listening to other people, treating them with dignity, always assuming the other person might be right,” he explained.

Republicans such as President Theodore Roosevelt helped establish the GOP as the party most committed to protecting the environment. Unfortunately, that commitment has waned–to put it mildly. “There’s a very small group of us known right-of-center climate advocates, the so-called eco right, who see this really dire forecast,” said Alex Flint, the executive director of Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative group that supports carbon taxes. “It’s lonely.”

Yet, Buckley reported, Flint and Frist believe that their party will come around, eventually. “In the long run, there is going to be a political response forced by the reality of the changing climate,” said Flint. “It is inevitable.”