David Spence, University of Texas at Austin – The Misunderstood Politics of the Energy Transition

The Academic Minute

Who is to blame for slowing the transition to a low carbon energy future?

David Spence, Rex G. Baker Chair in Natural Resources Law at the University of Texas School of Law, and Professor of Business, Government & Society at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, has some ideas.

David Spence is a professor of energy law and regulation at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Spence’s research and teaching focuses on government regulation of the energy industry. He is author of Climate of Contempt: Rescuing the Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship (Columbia Univ. Press, 2024), and co-author of the energy law textbook Energy, Economics and the Environment (Foundation Press, 6th Ed., 2023). Professor Spence earned his Ph.D in political science from Duke University, his J.D. from the University of North Carolina, and his B.A. from Gettysburg College.

The Misunderstood Politics of the Energy Transition

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Polling tells us that most voters care about climate change and favor a transition to a lower carbon energy future. The main obstacle to that aspiration is not the energy industry and its affiliated politicians It is the outsized political influence exercised by the most intensely partisan voters.

In my research I offer an example: The 2021 Build Back Better bill, which would have imposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector. That bill passed the House on a party line vote but failed in the evenly divided Senate because every Republican — plus Joe Manchin — opposed it.

Manchin is a Democrat representing a very red state that is getting redder, and backing the bill would have provoked a sharp negative reaction from his constituents.

Today most Congressional seats are “safe” in that they are dominated numerically by voters of one party or the other. Politicians in these safe seats keep their jobs not by addressing what their average constituent wants, but rather the demands of voters at the fringes of the dominant party.

The most partisan Republicans are often too confident that the energy transition will be impossible, or impossibly costly. Their Democrat counterparts are often too certain that it will be easy, or bring only benefits to the voting public.

Building legislative majorities requires breaching this divide — getting outside of our ideological bubbles and talking to our fellow citizens across partisan boundaries.

Climate policymaking is a bottom-up problem that requires a bottom-up solution: putting down our phones, thinking critically about our own views, and talking politics with the friends, family, and neighbors with whom we disagree.

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