How Identity Politics Shape U.S. Energy Policy

Throughout American history, opposing political parties have at times set aside their differences to create “republican moments”— periods of bold, bipartisan action to address critical challenges. 

Today, such moments may seem unlikely, yet the need for collective action remains urgent. This is particularly true for accelerating the transition to a low-carbon energy system and tackling climate change.

On the podcast, David Spence of The University of Texas School of Law discusses his new book, Climate of Contempt, which explores the roots of the current political divide in this country and how that divide has manifested in the politics of energy. Spence examines the growth of identity politics in the U.S., how even the best-intentioned of actors can stoke partisan flames, and opportunities to re-establish bipartisan dialogue to advance the clean energy transition.

Full Transcript

Andy Stone: Welcome to the Energy Policy Now podcast from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m Andy Stone. Throughout American history, opposing political parties have, at times, set aside their differences to create what are known as Republican moments, which are periods of bold bipartisan action to address national challenges. Such moments may seem unlikely in the current political climate, yet the need for collective action remains urgent, notably in accelerating the transition to a low carbon energy system.

On today’s episode, we’re going to explore the roots of the current political divide in this country, and how that divide has manifest in the politics of energy. My guest is David Spence, an expert in natural resources law at the University of Texas at Austin. His new book, titled Climate of Contempt, explores the rise of identity politics in the United States, and the parallel emergence of a fiercely partisan divide over energy policy. On the podcast, Spence will discuss how intensifying political tribalism can obscure common goals, and how even the best intention of actors can unwittingly stoke partisan flames, and he explores opportunities to reestablish bipartisan dialogue on the energy transition. David, welcome to the podcast.

David Spence: Thanks, happy to be here.

Stone: So the title of your book is Climate of Contempt. What is the contempt that you’re referring to in that title? And in broad terms, how does this manifest in the effort to address climate change in this country?

Spence: Yeah, good question. The contempt is really a reference to two things. Political scientists and pollsters have been documenting an uptick in partisan animosity over the last couple of decades, really, throughout the 21st century, and that animosity has gotten ever more bitter. This is something distinct from ideological polarization. It’s an enmity between the two parties that is reaching alarming levels, if you look at the data. So that’s one of the things I’m referring to in contempt. And the other is something that will be familiar to users of social media, and that’s the tone of dialogue online, generally, but particularly, dialogue about politics.

Stone: So early on in the book, you draw parallels with major challenges in American history that were successfully addressed through this concept of the Republican moment. Could you introduce us to some of those key Republican moments in this country and the political environments that enabled them?

Spence: Yeah, so the first part of the book, which is chapters one through three, really goes through the history of the creation and evolution of the regulatory systems that Congress created that now still apply to the energy industry. And most of those statutes were enacted in response to bottom up pressure from voters, or politicians seeing an opportunity to address some problem that they realized voters were unhappy with. And so if you’re my age or older, you’ll remember the most recent era of our ability to do that, which was sort of the 1970s into the ‘80s, when a whole bunch of environmental health, safety, consumer protection laws were passed by Congress.

They were responding to popular demand for environmental protection, and they were the product of democratic congresses and Republican Presidents. They got together to do that. Sometimes it’s a one party effort when the party has enough dominance. So. back in the New Deal, the energy laws that apply to public utilities today were passed in Congresses where the Democratic Party had almost unbelievable, overwhelming dominance in the House of Representatives.

The smallest margin that Democrats had during the New Deal was 196 seats. That means they had 196 seats more than Republicans did, and there was something like that in the Senate as well. And so Republican moments really consist of two things, that bottom up demand for action, and a receptive partisan environment. And it’s that receptive partisan environment that seems to have gone away, even though we have, you know, a lot of people who would like to see stronger climate action.

Stone: I wanted to ask you, you just mentioned a moment ago that sometimes one party is able to get a Republican moment through. Would the IRA be an example of one of those moments? I guess the subtext of all this is, you know, generally speaking, it doesn’t look like, otherwise, this is a period where we’re going to see a Republican moment materialize.

Spence: Yeah, I would agree with that summary. But the inflation Reduction Act was a one party effort. It was one of those rare instances where the filibuster didn’t come into play in the Senate. So it wasn’t through what they would call regular order in Congress, it was a situation in which you didn’t need 60 votes to get something done, you only needed 51. And in that case, the Vice President cast the tie breaking vote. But yes, it was a one party effort in that sense.

It differed from prior Republican moments in that, every single statute I talk about in part one of the book was passed by 75 percent support or more in Congress. So, you know the idea that durable change might require more than bare majorities, you know, is out there, and I think we’re going to really need either more bipartisan support for strong climate action, or replacing members of Congress who oppose climate action with those who would support it.

Stone: And that’s so important, because we’re seeing the change of administration over the last decade or so, and how many advances on energy policy quickly get rolled back.

Spence: Yeah, and we saw the same thing after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, where its coverage was narrowed, and the Dodd Frank Act similarly. These are two laws that passed during the Obama years, you know, in heavily partisan ways, and barely passed, and they’ve just been nipped at by opponents ever since.

Stone: You make a very interesting point also early in the book, and you note that the rise of partisan politics in this country has paralleled the decline in confidence in regulation to solve the problems that the country faces, including in the energy space. And there’s an interesting quote you put here. You say that, “Energy policy over the past four decades has been a mostly deregulatory affair.” Could you explain this parallel in the rise in partisanship and decline in confidence in regulation? And I’m curious, do these two have a common driver?

Spence: Yeah, at least in part. They have a common driver in this sort of growth in popularity of a certain conservative approach to regulation that started in academia, but then spread to the policy community, and then, ultimately, to politicians themselves, and it comes mostly from economics. It was a late 20th century movement, let’s say, within academia, that started to articulate reasons why markets might be more efficient at providing social benefits than regulation.

You know, it spread through the Republican Party pretty quickly, but it also had some adherence in the Democratic Party, I think mostly because they saw it as a way to win elections, and I’m thinking of Bill Clinton primarily. But even before Clinton, the Carter administration deregulated parts of the energy industry as well. And remember, that regulation was much more heavy handed than anything we see now.

Pretty much the entire value chain of natural gas and electricity was controlled by regulators at the federal level, the wholesale markets, and at the state level, the retail markets. And in some places, it was just decided that the rationale for that regulation, that this was a natural monopoly, just didn’t apply to parts of the industry. And so that’s why we have here in Pennsylvania now a competitive wholesale market, market pricing competition for, you know, selling, and also a retail market that’s competitive here in Pennsylvania as well.

Stone: Well, deregulation of the electricity industry really began in the 1990s as all this other partisanship really started to polarize.

Spence: Yeah, and so I didn’t really answer the other part of that question, which was that growth of conservative ideas and the spread of conservative ideas also started to push the Republican Party to the ideological right after the Reagan years, and that movement, which political scientists have measured and documented, has continued. And the Democrats have started moving left, or did start to move left about two decades later. And so we see the parties moving ever further apart. In fact, they’re farther apart ideologically now than at any time in the modern regulatory era.

Stone: David, on this issue of deregulation, you point out in your book that both Democrats and Republicans have largely supported it over the last couple of decades. And you actually really are very specific here, that you’re talking about FERC commissioners of both political parties supporting this. How have they both supported it, but through very different philosophical agendas?

Spence: Yeah, philosophically, we think of deregulation as a conservative idea. However, there is a segment of the Climate Coalition who sees investor-owned utilities as an impediment to the development of green energy projects, particularly early on, the wind and solar farms. And so some of the Obama appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, particularly the commissioner back then, Jon Wellinghoff, were real champions of competitive markets, because they saw that as a way for wind and solar to get into the market more easily.

And in fact, that’s probably exactly right. That is, in competitive markets, whatever you want to invest in, whatever can become competitive, is what gets built. And because wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of electricity on a marginal cost basis, it means that the people who run the grid always use them when they’re generating power. And for investors, that’s a great feature, because you can predict roughly how much power they’re going to sell over their lifetime, which means you can predict your revenues, not entirely, but better than other sources who are further down the dispatch queue.

And so we have all this investment in wind and solar, including in my state of Texas, which has a competitive electricity market, and we have long led the country in wind generation, and we’re probably soon to overcome California in solar generation. And so a lot of people on the climate left champion markets on those grounds. Now, Texas — we need to add a footnote here. Texas doesn’t regulate, really, the building of a power plant hardly at all. You have to register the fact that you’re building a power plant, and really, it’s local zoning, and interconnection to the grid, and other things that are the only relevant approvals. Every other state has some kind of state level approval for a power plant.

Stone: Well, talking about Texas, right? You point out in the book as well that Texas has a lot of wind, and how did it get there? It got there through markets, essentially.

Spence: Mostly, yeah.

Stone: Mostly. California has a lot of solar, and it got there through regulation. So both of these paths work, right? But you also noted that Texas may be moving away from the wind it created.

Spence: Yeah, so I do think that both of these paths can work, and there’s a scholarly debate that I outline in chapter five of the book about, you know, which is better. I stay agnostic in the book about those things. But you’re right, they both are, you know, going great guns toward wind and solar, or solar in particular in California, wind and solar in Texas. What I referred to about Texas was that state level politicians, particularly after Winter Storm Uri, have gotten worried about the growth of renewables, and have started propping up natural gas fired power in ways that are really outside the market.

So they say they love the market, but they’re happy to sort of juice the market for natural gas. And it hasn’t slowed, so far, the development of solar. What slows the development of wind and solar in Texas and everywhere is the lack of transmission. And so, you know, any place that we can build transmission, we’re going to unleash a lot of investment in wind and solar, which is going to, in most parts of the country, bring down prices and give you cleaner power.

Stone: And there’s a fair amount of politics underlying that gas versus wind debate around a Winter Storm Uri. What was the real cause of the of the shortages? And it appears, factually, that that was gas supply and gas plants —

Spence: Freezing, yeah.

Stone: Freezing, yeah.

Spence: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, everything froze, but we were relying most on gas at that time, and that was —

Stone: The wind wasn’t winterized, as I understand it.

Spence: Right, that’s right. And some progress has been made, but, you know, Texas Republicans only impose regulation on that particular industry sort of kicking and screaming. And so it’s been slow and halting.

Stone: Another phenomenon that goes along with this, along with this move away from regulation, is also the fact that regulatory institutions in this country, and the regulatory process seem to be framed as serving narrow interests of a certain group rather than protecting citizens broadly. At least, that seems to be a trend. I wonder if you can explain this shift?

Spence: Yeah, it’s definitely true that the popular debate often frames outcomes that we don’t like from the policy process that way, as sort of controlled by either rich people or corporate elements. And as I say in the book, the empirical literature from political science and other social sciences tells a lot more complicated story there. But it’s human nature to do that. One of the studies, in fact, it’s a fairly recent study, says that we sort of over-infer capture of the regulatory process when the outcome isn’t the one we wanted, or we ascribe it to something, you know, that delegitimizes the process.

And so, I think the bottom up part of that is missing, and part of what this book tries to do is fill in that part of the story. You know, as we have gotten into the 21st century and voters have become more negatively partisan and more ideologically polarized, that’s been accompanied by the rise of very safe seats in Congress. Seats that are overwhelmingly dominated by one party or the other, so that you don’t risk losing in the general election if you are the nominee of the dominant party.

But you still have a risk of losing in a primary. And in primaries, the people who matter, the people who vote, are the more extreme ideologically and the more negatively partisan members of your party. And so some of the behavior we see today in Congress, I think, is designed to please those voters. So there’s still a bottom up element to all of this. I’m not saying that there isn’t a top down element. I’m saying that we’re missing that latter part of the story.

Stone: You know, along these lines, you push back in the book on the idea that corporate lobbying by incumbent interests, from big energy companies to electric utilities, has played an important role in slowing the progress of the energy transition. If I understood that correctly, my view on this was that those lobbying interests would only serve to stoke the partisan division. So what is the chicken and the egg here?

Spence: Yeah, it’s definitely true that the oil and gas industry trade associations spread disinformation about climate change, particularly in the early part of the 20 — or late 20th century, and the early part of the 21st century. The big oil companies no longer support those groups, but other people do. And so there is still misinformation out there, which can influence voters. The way I would probably put it, and the way I hope I put it in the book, is that corporate lobbyists still do, or anyone who’s benefiting from the status quo, still lobbies to avoid changes to the status quo.

You know, I think the way we overcome that opposition to the change is by the creation of Republican moments. And so what I’m trying to argue is that it makes more sense to pay attention to those bottom up forces, because that’s how we get past lobbying. We’re not going to ever outlaw lobbying. We’re trying to restrict it in certain ways, and we don’t allow, say, public utilities, we ought not to allow public utilities to get their lobbying expenses back from ratepayers and things like that.

But it is a form of commercial speech, it’s petitioning the government, and it’s very, very unlikely that we’re going to outlaw it. And the political science literature is quite qualified, or it’s not quite clear that lobbyists for big oil companies, or anybody who’s wealthy controls the policy process and the way the popular debate seems to perceive it.

Stone: Yeah, I want to jump into the current moment here. We’re leading up to a Presidential election in about a month and a half. And in this election cycle, it feels at least to me that energy and climate may be less salient issues to voters than other issues which are really hot buttons, like reproductive rights, the economy, etcetera. And Kamala Harris has seemed to largely avoid polarizing stands when it comes to this. Much different from what Biden was talking about before he became President with all of his climate plans. To what extent are energy and climate a key factor, or key electoral drivers this cycle?

Spence: Yeah, I think that’s a complicated question, or the answer is complicated. We’re used to reading polling results where people are asked, what are the most important drivers of your vote? And almost always, in fact, I think I could probably say always, environmental issues, including climate, fall down to the lower levels of those priorities. We have to remember that what we’re seeing there are sort of the average voter result. There are some voters who will care about climate and put it as much higher ranking issue as a driver of their vote. And there are people in certain places where it might be more important to them.

I think Vice President Harris’s campaign strategy, as you describe it, is not to go really hard on sort of green New Deal, aggressive, bold climate policy. And I think that’s explainable based on the desire to win the few remaining places where elections are really contested, right? And that means not only the Electoral College votes that she’s seeking. I mean, there are, what, seven states that people think are, you know, really contestable? But also the House districts and Senate jurisdictions where, the sort of 15 percent of those that are not safe for one party or the other.

And many of those are places like Western Pennsylvania, where the oil industry exists, or New Mexico, where Democrats can be elected, but there’s a big oil industry. And so I think the sort of moderate message you’re seeing from her is probably a reflection of that. It’s yet another indication of worrying about sort of the most important voters, which are the ones that determine outcomes in the swing districts and states.

Stone: Regarding the election, and this is pertinent to this election, and elections in general, you mentioned the phenomenon of effective politics, where it’s not so much about voting for the candidate that I want, but it’s voting against the candidate who I perceive as standing for values that do not align with my own. Is this so strong that you would see voters voting against candidates and against policies that are very clearly in their interest? And I’m thinking, for example, here of the IRA, which has provided funding to a lot of red state projects in this country that benefit areas that might not vote for those policies generally. Are effective politics so strong that people will clearly vote against what they see as being in their own potential best interest?

Spence: Yeah, the social science literature says that, at least for some voters, the answer is yes. And really, what we’re talking about here, when we talk about affective partisanship or affective negative partisanship is attachment to party as part of your cultural identity. And it’s not even that much about issues, it’s really about sort of a statement of who I am. And it’s increasingly negative in the United States, in that statement is really aimed at stopping the other party from gaining power or stopping it from getting what it wants, which is why we sometimes see Republican politicians and voters turning against ideas that were first championed by Republicans when they’re proposed by Democrats.

We also see members of Congress taking credit for money that comes through the Inflation Reduction Act to their district even though they voted against the statute. They must not feel as though they risk losing the election when they do that. They’re charged with hypocrisy when they do that. But they’re able to take credit, and probably most of them won’t feel electoral consequences for doing that.

And so this idea of a cultural attachment to the party can sometimes override issues and even issues that relate to self-interest. There’s a great — I mean, I shouldn’t plug someone else’s book when I’m here to talk about my book, but I cite a great book that’s — probably many of the listeners have heard of called Strangers in their Own Land by a sociologist named Hochschild, which, you know, goes into deep detail about a community in Louisiana that suffers environmental harm because of actions of a major employer in the area, and the only people they blame are regulators and government, even though those regulators have — their budgets have been cut so that they really can’t regulate effectively this huge employer. And so this is sort of a phenomenon we’re seeing now, and social media really amplifies it in a big way.

Stone: Well, you talk a lot about the role and the power of social media. And there’s an interesting point you make on that in the book. You note that even the most serious experts, people who are dedicated to facts, researchers, etcetera, may amplify division online through what you call errors of a mission, particularly, say, through their social media posts. What are these errors of emission, and what does their reality, or what does the fact that they exist say about how social media fundamentally creates conditions for divisive discourse?

Spence: The modern media environment is very, very different than it was when I was a kid or when I was a young adult, in ways that really change the way people learn about politically relevant information, and the way they process that information to form beliefs. So back in the days when there wasn’t as much media as there is now, when we got our news from the nightly newscast, it was only a half an hour, or a daily paper, or a monthly or weekly news magazine —

Stone: We all had a common source.

Spence: Right. This was information that came to us from trained journalists who at least aspired to be objective and complete in the way they told the story. So we had fairly reliable information, and we had the time to read all of it. And when you read all of it, you get all the sort of complexity of the story that you won’t get if you’re skimming a whole bunch of headlines and lead paragraphs because you’re afraid of missing something, right? And so that reliable information from trained journalists is mixed in with advocacy journalism and press releases and bots and some people who are affirmatively trying to mislead you. But a lot more of it is aiming to persuade you than educate you, right? Or at least is putting persuasion before education.

Stone: Even with our most renowned media outlets, we’re seeing the tail wagging the dog, in the sense that the articles that we’re being presented with on home pages are articles that we want to see, not necessarily always articles that are most valuable.

Spence: Right. And the algorithm is sort of censoring what we see, and the traditional outlets are having to compete with these, you know, sub-stacks and other things. In order to compete for an audience, they have to get grabbier headlines and more sensational, because they’re — you know, they want to keep doing their job. And so the information we get, it’s harder for today’s students to really develop a full, deep understanding of a complex problem like climate change and energy policy.

And that’s only half the story, because the way we form political beliefs is social. And in the old days, that was face to face communication like we’re doing now. We can see each other’s expressions. We know — the people we talk with, if they’re people we know, we can credit or discredit their opinions accordingly. And that communication is designed in a way that maintains the relationship. If I have to go to work every day with someone, or if it’s someone in my household, the way we talk about it will be much different than anonymous online conversation.

And so. now you don’t have to talk to people face to face about politics. We avoid politics with the proverbial crazy uncle of thanksgiving, and we do it online, and everything happens faster online. And we get too certain about too many things too quickly online, and we do this in ideologically homogenous communities that either intentionally or unintentionally chase away dissenters. And that’s just not a good environment for understanding complex issues.

Stone: Well, it’s interesting, back in the day of print newspaper, which I very well remember, I don’t recall my heart rate jumping up every time I read an article the same way it happens today. It’s almost like we’ve been conditioned for knee jerk reactions, emotional reactions to what we’re reading.

Spence: Right. And part of that is that some ideological media outlets train us to do that. They craft stories and choose the stories they’re going to talk about in order to generate emotion in viewers, often negative emotion. And the research that I summarize in the book shows that stories with — that have negative emotion, and frankly, lies are shared more than truths or sort of dry factual information. And so that all amplifies all of this negativity and vitriol and nastiness. And part of my argument here is that the negative partisanship that we’re seeing is maintained and fed and strengthened by the modern media environment.

Stone: It reminds me of an old Irish saying. I think it’s an Irish saying that I heard once, that every story is half truth and half what makes it worth reading, right? Or listening to.

Spence: Yeah.

Stone: So I want to clarify here. You point out modern media, social media, the modern media environment as being the major conduit for amplifying political division. Is that true? Do you really think that that’s the main driver?

Spence: I think it’s the main driver and maintainer of negative partisanship. Ideological polarization started before these media changes took effect. So I wouldn’t blame the sort of the ideological trends on social media entirely, but they certainly feed them as well.

Stone: There’s another point in the book along these lines that caught my attention. And you noted the tendency among what you call the Climate Coalition to sometimes dismiss the impact of, say, elevated energy prices as, “A small price to pay for progress,” progress on the energy transition. And you write that this appears to be dismissive of real hardship that energy prices can impose on certain households and even industries. How prevalent is this tendency?

Spence: Part of the argument in the book is that experts need to work harder to put education before persuasion, because we’re all subject to these pressures. We’re all feeling these emotions. And there’s a tremendously powerful temptation if you think that something’s important, to quote somebody in the book, “To sand the inconvenient edges off the facts” when you talk about them. And experts in particular, and I would say academics, people who really understand the issue, and writers who are on that beat, need to work really hard to put education first. And that means acknowledging all the dimensions of the thing you’re covering, even the ones that might discourage people, or some people, some readers, from supporting something that you think is important.

The very first words in my book are a quote from Bertrand Russell that says something like, never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe, or what you think would have socially beneficial effects if it were believed. I think, right now, social media makes experts and everybody — it’s turning us into lobbyists, and we’re trying to get people, the anonymous audience out there on social media, to believe something, and sometimes experts fail to put education before persuasion when they do that.

And I think the example in your question is one of those examples. You asked how prevalent it is. You know, I guess it depends on what your media bubble looks like. When I first got on Twitter, it was very prevalent in my feed. It’s not anymore. I didn’t respond to it, I guess, and so those people went went away from my feed. But it’s definitely prevalent in some places, and I include examples of thought leaders on both sides of the political spectrum using really ridiculous and hyperbolic language to mischaracterize the other side.

Stone: Is there any way to get us back to the point where we all get our information from one place? Is that possible in this world?

Spence: No, I don’t think — not all from one place, or not all from only trained journalists. I think the toothpaste is out of the tube on that. But I do think that, you know, we have to remember that, in the larger scheme of things, the internet is still young, and the generation that grew up on it is going to have experiences that eventually help them learn that it’s hurting them. They will find out that things they were absolutely certain were true, and when contradicted, they mocked the people that contradicted them, weren’t true.

And you know, it’s kind of analogous, it’s a sort of gentler version of that guy that showed up at Comet Pizza in Washington with the AR-15 and his thinking he was going to find a child trafficking ring, and when he got there and was arrested, he said, “I guess I had bad information.” He was in a QAnon bubble, that guy. We’re all in some kind of bubble. And so if we don’t work hard to sort of challenge our own preconceptions or our own beliefs or allow them to be challenged, we’re going to have some, you know, analogous experiences where we find out that something was wrong.

And so perhaps we might become more sophisticated users of the internet. And ideally, we’ll also get off of social media and talk more face to face, which is the part of the prescription in the last chapter of the book. Face to face communication with people who hold different political beliefs is incredibly valuable. I cite people from a variety of academic traditions, including University of Pennsylvania, a political scientist named Diana Mutz. This is how you really audit your own beliefs, by talking to a person that holds different beliefs.

Stone: Well, that’s an interesting problem in this day and age, right? So obviously we just talked about media, we get our information from polarized sources, and there’s not much in common. And also there’s just a simple reality of life these days. We increasingly work from home, not in the office. So we don’t have these casual conversations with people who might have very different views. So how does this happen in a world where the logistical realities of our lives, not just the media realities, but you know, where we work and the schools that we go to, are increasingly divided?

Spence: Yeah, that’s something that I hope will change. I understand why people want to work from home. One of my two kids works entirely remotely. I don’t think it’s good for him, and I think he knows it’s not good for him. And I really do believe the younger generation is probably more attuned to these pathologies than anyone else, because they’re feeling them, right? They’re already aware that, you know, social media makes them unhappy. They understand that. And I think it’s a short hop from there to the realization that social media is misleading them on politics and policy.

And so I hope that people will make efforts to follow the prescription in chapter six of the book and work to expose themselves to people with different points of view. This is not only about climate policy, but it’s really about democracy. We can’t sustain our liberal democracy if this intensity of hatred, support for political violence, is on the uptick. These are really fundamental norms of our system of government that can’t be sustained if those trends continue. And more than that, people like to understand the full aspects of an issue, of a complex issue. Students do, and we can sort of force them to in the classroom, but I think everyone really appreciates it when they have a fuller understanding, even if the process of getting there is uncomfortable.

Stone: Well, and also, there’s the issue of cognitive dissonance. Some people, if they’re confronted with truths or realities, that is some some place they don’t want to go. It’s just too much to reconcile with affective beliefs.

Spence: Yeah, these phenomena are not new to politics. We’ve always had confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, and, you know, we’ve tried to avoid uncomfortable, conflicting thoughts. And politicians and lobbyists have always tried to leverage those human biases to the advantage of their client or their issue. What’s different now is that they can do so 24/7 at industrial scale instantly. The internet is kind of like a constant devil on your shoulder, framing every piece of information that comes to you in a way that serves some other goal besides educating you.

Stone: So I want to pull this very concretely back to the issue of energy policy, and the divide over that policy in this country. We’ve been talking broadly about this divide, and I want to ask, to what extent does partisanship in this country, and the kind of the classic red versus blue divide, to what extent does that truly align with views about the energy transition and climate? And I think there’s this vague perception that red automatically equates to anti, and blue automatically equates to pro when it comes to the energy transition, but I don’t think this is actually fully the case, particularly as we look across generations.

Spence: Yes, I agree. The younger Republicans express much more support for stronger climate policy. And when I use the term Climate Coalition, to which you referred earlier, I’m talking about everybody who might be a supporter of strong climate policy, and that’s definitely more than just Democrats. The problem is that, in Congress, members of Congress are responding to those intensely negative partisan people. And so that part of the Republican Party, which seems to dominate the congressional party right now and many of the state parties, has taken a turn against clean energy and against the energy transition.

And so the members of the party in Congress who were champions of greenhouse gas regulation have been sort of hounded out of office, people like Carlos Curbelo in Florida or Bob Inglis. And so, you know, they’ve lost. And so it looks risky to champion that issue if you’re worried about losing a primary.

Stone: You don’t want to get primaried.

Spence: Yeah. And so we need these young Republican voters to put pressure on their Republican representatives to change their tune. And the theory behind — the political theory behind the Inflation Reduction Act is that all of this economic activity and jobs will start to create a constituency in red states and red jurisdictions for stronger climate policy, because people will see their economic future tied to it. I don’t know if that’s going to win out or if negative partisanship is going to win out. But we did see 17 House Republicans sign a letter to the speaker saying, don’t repeal the IRA if we win, or at least don’t repeal all of it. And so perhaps the combination of all these things, and pressure from younger voters, if they continue to hold these views, will lead the Republican Party to accept, or to gravitate toward acceptance of stronger climate regulation.

Stone: So it sounds like you see the potential here for this imperfect alignment between partisanship generally, and views on the energy transition, to create, potentially, an opening for some sort of Republican moment?

Spence: Yeah, and I think part of that process has to be focusing on voters. I mean, it’s a bottom up problem in the first place, so we need a bottom up prescription. And I open the book, in the first chapter there’s a quote from Pete Buttigieg talking about, you know, the need to talk to people who disagree with you about this issue, because otherwise, they’re going to think of champions of a strong climate policy as the kind of people that they see characterized on Fox News or some other ideological outlet. And they don’t think of you, their grandson, or their nephew, or whatever it is, or coworker.

They’re going to be able to hold in their mind’s eye this sort of caricature of the other side. And we do the same thing on the left. I’m a Democrat, and I make clear in the book that I favor the green energy transition. We all have to sort of get out, get away from those caricatures and talk to each other. And if that’s happening while these other forces are at work, I’m more optimistic that we can see some change at the national level and get some meaningful national regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, because that’s what it’s going to take to get to net zero.

Stone: David, thanks very much for talking.

Spence: Oh, my pleasure.

Stone: Today’s guest has been David Spence, an expert on energy regulation at the University of Texas at Austin. For more podcasts, as well as energy policy research blogs and events, visit the Kleinman Center website, where you can also sign up for our monthly newsletter. Our web address is kleinmanengy.upenn.edu. Thanks for listening to Energy Policy Now, and have a great day.