Former (R) Congressman (R-SC4 1993-1999; 2005-2011)

Founder Enterprise and Energy Initiative, and RepublicEn

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“Energy Optimist.  Climate Realist.”

 

Bob Inglis founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative on July 10, 2012 to be a pragmatic voice for free-market energy and climate solutions.
 

He was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1992, having never run for office before. He represented Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, from 1993-1998, unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Senator Fritz Hollings in 1998, and then returned to the practice of commercial real estate law in Greenville, S.C. In 2004, he was re-elected to Congress and served until losing re-election in the South Carolina Republican primary of 2010.

 

In 2011, Inglis went full-time into promoting free enterprise action on climate change and launched the Energy and Enterprise Initiative (“E&EI”) at George Mason University in July 2012.  E&EI is a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt, educational outreach that lives to demonstrate the power of accountable free enterprise.  E&EI believes that climate change can be solved by eliminating all subsidies, including the implicit subsidy of the lack of accountability for emissions.  By creating a level playing field in which all costs are transparently “in” on all fuels, E&EI believes that the free enterprise system will deliver innovation faster than government regulations.

 

E&EI supports an online community of energy optimists and climate realists at republicEn.org.

 

For his work on climate change Inglis was given the 2015 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.  Inglis was a Resident Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics in 2011, a Visiting Energy Fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment in 2012, and a Resident Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics in 2014.  He appears in the film Merchants of Doubt and in the Showtime series YEARS of Living Dangerously (episodes 3 and 4), and he spoke at TEDxJacksonville.

 

Bob grew up in Bluffton, S.C. and earned a degree in political science from Duke University in 1981.  He graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1984 and later moved to Greenville, S.C., where he practiced commercial real estate law prior to and between his years in Congress.  Inglis and his wife Mary Anne (Duke 1982) have five children (a son and four daughters) and live on a small farm in in northern Greenville County, South Carolina.