By Samuel Trachtman

Conventional wisdom characterizes climate politics as a battle between fossil fuel companies, who want to continue to pollute, and environmentalists, who represent the public’s interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change. But researchers associated with BESI’s climate cluster are showing that the battle lines are becoming more muddled as clean energy grows and increasingly out-competes fossil fuels on cost. These changes could create more opportunities for ambitious climate policy action at the state level — though federal interference under the Trump administration is a major concern. 

My recent paper for the journal Energy Policy, “Building winning climate coalitions: Evidence from the U.S. States,” studies state-level climate policymaking in three important U.S. states that went from split control of government to unified Democratic control in 2018: Colorado, Illinois, and New York. Each enacted ambitious climate policies in the next four years. The paper, co-written with BESI Climate research lead Jonas Meckling and Berkeley Sociology Ph.D. candidate Irem Inal, argues that ambitious climate policy requires, on the one hand, building and maintaining broad pro-climate coalitions, and on the other, fracturing fossil fuel opposition through policy designs that garner support from carbon-intensive interests with decarbonization options. 

Opportunities to build broad coalitions have grown due to clean energy deployment, greater philanthropic support, the emergence of mass mobilization on climate, and the rise of environmental justice groups. In the states we study, successful coalitions generally combined the expertise and lobbying resources of professionalized environmental organizations with the people-mobilizing capacities of grassroots, EJ-oriented organizations. Elements of the clean energy industry were relatively less important, though they were generally involved in shaping bill provisions that would directly affect the industry. 

Outside of environmental groups and clean energy, our cases show support for climate legislation extending to somewhat unlikely places: electric utilities and industrial labor unions Though much existing literature explores how these groups tend to impede progress, and in our cases they likely could have blocked the bills, most utilities and industrial labor unions ended up neutral or supportive — with a caveat. Their lack of opposition depended on the inclusion of provisions that would provide them with concrete economic benefits — for instance, project labor requirements on renewables buildout (for labor) and compensation for transition costs (for utilities). Such provisions, of course, can have downstream effects on the pace and cost of energy transition, so tradeoffs must be considered.

The possibilities for compromise were enhanced by the fact that many utilities and unions recognized unavoidable shifts towards renewables and electrification, and sought to balance protecting current interests (often in fossil fuels) with ensuring their future position in a renewables-powered and electrified economy. Indeed, none of the bills we studied faced unified fossil fuel opposition — and likely would have failed to be enacted if they had. Overall, in the context of Democratic control, fossil fuel business interests had less power to block than we anticipated. 

The broad findings are optimistic, arguing that the broadening of climate advocacy and cost declines in renewables have moved the interest group politics of climate from fossil fuel dominance to a more contested landscape. However, the new state-level politics of climate change can only advance climate policy if states retain the authority to make their own climate and clean energy policies. Of course, that is now under threat with the second Trump administration. 

You can read the full open-access paper now via Science Direct.

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