Crossing ideological boundaries can move us toward energy solutions, according to a new book.
In “Climate of Contempt: Rescuing the Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship,” Professor David Spence critiques the top-down narrative blaming the wealthy and powerful for obstructing the struggle to achieve climate goals. Instead, the Rex G. Baker Centennial Chair in Natural Resources Law argues for a voter-centric, bottom-up explanation of national climate and energy politics, one that identifies bitter partisanship as the main roadblock to a net zero carbon future.
Spence’s book is “about energy policy—specifically, the law and politics of charting a reasonably timely path toward net-zero carbon emissions in the United States. This is the so-called energy transition.” The book resulted from Spence’s years of work on the subject. (And, as the preface acknowledges, more than 20 Texas Law students across all program years provided research assistance.)
We recently spoke to the author about the inspiration for his book, why political divisions are being exacerbated, and how readers willing to overcome them can move society in a new direction.
What was the origin of your book?
I developed an impression about the politics of the energy transition. My sense of climate politics—how we enact policies to reduce carbon emissions—wasn’t really being reflected in the public debate and was very underrepresented in the scholarly literature. I had the impulse to write it all down and get that perspective out there. That was really the impetus for the book.
To get there, I started a website in 2018 designed to highlight scholarship that was being under-attended to in the public debate on the trade-offs that an energy transition entails. But then I went broader. People have a different impression of climate politics than the political science and other scholarly literature suggests. And so that was the basis for my desire to write the book.
Your readers will learn what influences policymaking on climate issues. Can you describe your target audience?
It’s for people who want to dive deep into this stuff, anybody who wants to be a policy wonk on the energy transition, and who is willing to take their time to grapple with all the issues. It’s not a fast read, but it’s digestible by an otherwise broad audience of people. Ideally, I’d love to see it adopted in courses on climate or energy politics. And I’d also love to see journalists who work in this field read it.
What’s been missing from the climate debate that you wanted to address?
Partially, it’s about who controls the policy process, how much control they have, and how complex the problem is. In the public debate, but also in legal scholarship, you see a lot of people characterizing the policy process as really under the tight control of economic elites, particularly oil and gas companies, utilities, who “capture” both in Congress and agencies. That’s not consistent with the empirical literature on who controls the policy process, which is far more nuanced than that.
The book has two parts, with three chapters in each. In the first part, I really wanted to underscore that political complexity. The system isn’t nearly as rigged as people think. It’s a lot more complicated. The other part of the book is about energy transition trade-offs, and how, in our pluralistic society, sincere people disagree about how to make those trade-offs. The future of the energy transition, just like the regulatory issues of the past, involves conflict between people of goodwill on both sides. I wanted to re-inject some of that complexity and nuance into the public discussion.
How do you explain the term ‘regulatory capture’? Do you have any examples?
People infer capture much too easily. When we lifted the nationwide 55 mph speed limit, that led in a predictable way to thousands of additional deaths on the highway. There were good reasons for doing it. We wouldn’t infer that it was because Congress was captured by trucking interests or gasoline manufacturers. Energy regulatory decisions are the same. Different people can have different definitions of what’s in the public interest.
We have much cheaper forms of clean energy, and we’re learning how to make renewables and the electric grid more reliable.
David Spence
Too often, when obstacles arise to furthering the energy transition—say, building a wind or solar farm or transmission lines—pundits and writers characterize that opposition as either misguided or insincere, or they treat those opponents as tools of some hidden economic interest. We need to be more careful and save our inferences of capture for the situations in which we can see real evidence that it actually happened.
We want our energy to be reliable, clean, and affordable. There’s tension between each of those three foundational principles of the energy system, and if you push too hard on one you bump into the others. For example, when you push too hard on the environmental part, you make energy too expensive or less reliable. Today those trade-offs are much easier than they used to be. We have much cheaper forms of clean energy, and we’re learning how to make renewables and the electric grid more reliable. We just need to be a little bit more circumspect about the effects of these trade-offs as the transition progresses. And we need to be more charitable to the people who are raising objections. I think we’re much more likely to solve these problems, and in a way that can lead to the construction of political majorities for the transition, if we are a little more understanding of opponents as they raise these concerns.
That makes sense. Your fourth chapter looks at the modern media environment. Why is that important to consider?
In one way, that’s the fulcrum of the book. That chapter talks about how we used to gather information. For example, the 1970s was the last time when Congress passed major regulatory laws. I tie that to old media and that slower system of getting more complete, curated news, with plenty of time to read it. I think there’s a connection between that form of news gathering and more bipartisan, moderate politics we had back then. Today, everything is reversed: We have a glut of news, and the industry is super competitive and fast. Outlets may want to adhere to traditional journalistic norms—like being complete, double-checking sources, and aspiring to objectivity. But those norms are hard to maintain when there’s a race to be a timely part of the information flow.
Because we’re inundated with all this information, which is collectively less reliable than it used to be, and because we’re in a hurry but don’t want to miss anything, we skim, look at headlines, and don’t read the whole article. And when you don’t read the whole article, you don’t get the qualifications, nuance, and the caveats that train you to think critically about news as you consume it. That’s hurting us and hurting our politics.
We’re certainly seeing political division. Do you have recommendations for communicating with people on the other side of difficult issues?
The last chapter of the book discusses how to do that. I found that a lot of different disciplines—political scientists, communication scholars, psychologists—all had similar recommendations. Their advice was to talk to people who hold different policy views than you do, and to do so in an open-minded way.
Most people develop skewed perceptions of the opposing side, so they’re extremely skeptical about engaging opponents. That’s because we hear more about the most extreme people on the other side than the reasonable middle. Those extremists generate clicks online and bring an audience.
It’s much better to talk about politics in person.
David Spence
But it’s much better to talk about politics in person. The incentives and structure of online communication bring out the worst in us: The internet is an incredibly efficient machine for disseminating propaganda and inciting negative emotion, both about opposing arguments and opponents. Whereas when you talk in person, it’s usually with people you know, you have an interest in preserving the relationship, and you have all the context that face-to-face communication provides. If you know the person, you can either credit or discount their views based on your knowledge of them. Online, it can be anonymous, and the conversation happens in front of an audience, which warps the conversation in the same way that reality TV isn’t real. So, shifting more of our acquisition and processing of information offline and talking to our friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers about these issues respectfully and civilly would be a good thing.
Agreed! Having respectful in-person conversations is something we can all practice more.
The most important thing is to talk across ideological and partisan boundaries. You don’t want to be insulated in an ideologically homogenous world—that’s how your view of reality gets distorted.
It’s not about persuading somebody in the first conversation. It’s about developing a relationship and tying your concerns to what you have in common with the other person. That builds credibility and trust. You might not always persuade the other person to adopt your point of view, but it’s worth having the conversation and understanding one another better.
How does being in Texas influence your conversations and work on energy topics?
I want the energy transition to happen—not unconditionally, but I want it to happen. But in Texas, you just can’t help but have an appreciation for the other side. Many of our students go to work in the oil and gas industry. In other places, they may not be able to put a human face on that industry. Living in Texas broadens your perspective on energy issues.
Texas has the most oil and gas, the most wind energy, and we’re about to have the most solar. We use the most energy and emit the most pollution. So, it’s a very rich place in which to acquire a deep understanding of the energy industry.
What about Texas Law specifically?
There’s no better place in the whole country to study energy. I tell students this: there are other places that may be just as good on the oil and gas side, and there are other places that are just as good on the electricity side. But there’s no better place that combines the two.
Listen to Spence discuss his research on the Academic Minute. For his blog, book appendices, supplemental resources on media bias, political communication scholarship, energy transition podcasts and blogs, related books, and a glossary of energy terminology, visit Spence’s Climate of Contempt website.