CLIMATE CHANGE
Extracting Fossil Fuels Today Harms Climate Politics Tomorrow
New research finds when the fossil fuel industry grows, political forces opposed to climate policy also strengthen
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, public opinion and social movement activity supporting more aggressive climate policies intensified. Nonetheless, U.S. governments have proved largely unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to levels recommended by scientists.
The story at the federal level is largely one of elite polarization and gridlock: Republicans have opposed nearly every Democratic climate bill, and Democrats have needed unattainable supermajorities to pass any climate policies (until 2022). At the state level, many states have passed some sort of climate policy, but many also haven’t.
Despite growing concern about climate impacts and support for emissions-reducing policies, why have U.S. governments lagged on climate policy?
In a recently published article in the journal, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, I show quantitative evidence that the fracking boom seemed to cause American state governments to implement less stringent climate policies. (The fracking boom caused U.S. natural gas production to double from 2005 to 2020, overtaking coal in 2015 as the dominant U.S. energy source for electricity production.)
For experts, this verifies long-standing political-economic theories of climate politics: larger fossil fuel energy endowments will lead to less ambitious climate policy. For practitioners, this should reinforce the political-strategic understanding that fighting fossil fuel expansion can mean less political power for your opponents.
Moreover, while we’ve understood that Democratic elites largely support climate policies and Republicans largely oppose them, the fracking boom shocked both Democratic and Republican-controlled states (see one map here) — and the overall effect of fracking on climate policy stringency is still, on average, negative. Certain state governments didn’t just avoid passing climate policies because Republicans were in charge or because Democrats weren’t. The massive fossil fuel resource shock of the fracking boom created an additional impediment to stringent climate policy implementation.
Climate politics scholars such as Leah Stokes, Matto Mildenberger, Samuel Trachtman, Jessica Green and others have argued and shown that the economic power of extractive industries generally creates more political power to advance pro-fossil fuel energy policies. That work has primarily relied on detailed case studies. Until recently, though, there has been little systematic, quantitative evidence to falsify this proposition (see one exception here).
I focus on the period of 1999–2015. The fracking boom started no earlier than 2004 (outside of Texas, dropped from the analysis), which I count as the beginning of possible “treatment” time periods. As the following figures show, states with access to oil or natural gas reserves accessible via fracking technology subsequently implemented less stringent climate policies, compared to states with no fracking possibilities. To discover this, I study two climate policies that state governments control: (1) the mandated share of electricity to come from renewable energy sources and (2) adoption of the Low-Emission Vehicle (LEV) policy pioneered by California in the early 1990s (originally measured for this paper).
I primarily rely on standard “difference-in-difference” regressions, which include pre-treatment covariate measures. This allows me to control for how Republican, conservative, fossil-fuel dominated, and economically strong any state was before experiencing the fracking boom (I also employ “two-way fixed effects” regressions).
All versions of the analysis show statistically significant differences in climate policy outcomes for fracking versus non-fracking states: fracking seemed to cause states to mandate 2–4 percentage points less renewable electricity (over 3–6 years) and be 22–26 percentage points less likely to adopt LEV (over 3+ years). Crucially, the “treatment effect” only consistently appears for states that had more significant fracking potential—specifically, those whose state land areas were at least 10% covered by fracking energy source reserves (i.e., 16 states).
Regarding our understanding of climate politics, that fossil fuel industry growth negatively impacts the stringency of climate policy is mostly unsurprising. However, I argue an additional, distinct theoretical point: these findings provide evidence of “business influence,” since the growth of an economic sector biased government policy in its favor.
We therefore need to expand our understandings of business influence (see debate here versus here), which is traditionally conceived of as purely “instrumental power,” i.e., the intentional deployment of corporate resources to bias policymakers’ decisions. Political scientist Charles Lindblom’s notion of “structural power” is useful here: corporations in our capitalist political economy have tremendous power to shape preferences, processes, and policy outcomes because they are the source of voters’ jobs and governments’ tax revenues. While I don’t offer proof that “structural power” influence happened here, many studies of business influence claim to find no evidence of influence. I argue that tests of business’ political influence need to account for structural power, as well.
The precise mechanisms though which fracking—and increased profitability of U.S. fossil fuel companies—impacted state government policymaking remain somewhat uncertain. It may be that these corporations are directly lobbying or spending more campaign money to advance their political causes. It may be that they are intentionally engaging in PR campaigns to sway public opinion to their side in fracking states. Or it may be a deeper, more subtle form of influence. The policy preferences of the expanded ranks of fossil fuel workers and/or energy consumers in fracking states may have moved in an anti-climate direction because of their dependence on new reserves of fossil fuels.
This last possible mechanism is worth dissecting further. It is surely true that reliance on any resource strengthens any given political actor’s preference for its continuation. For that reason, political commentators, like Matt Yglesias at his Substack Slow Boring, have argued—and recent events have shown in part—that lower (fossil fuel) energy prices (achieved through more extraction) can create the political conditions necessary to implement more stringent climate policies. However, this logic relies on climate policies imposing economic costs on households and industries—which is mostly untrue of investment-oriented climate policies.
Subsequent research will need to further disentangle distinct mechanisms through which economic resource growth influences the policy decisions of legislators and executives. Understanding which mechanisms are more potent influence channels for fossil fuel companies—and big business, broadly—will clarify our scholarly understanding of the American political economy. Further, it will help democracy and climate reformers know where to direct their political strategies.
For now, political practitioners should never forget that when more fossil fuels are extracted, it will be harder to beat extractive interests in future political contests.
