Oil and power: the effectiveness of state threats on markets

Short Circuiting Policy examines clean energy policies to understand why US states are not on track to meet the climate crisis. After two decades of leadership, American states are slipping in their commitment to transition away from dirty fossil fuels toward cleaner energy sources, including wind and solar. The author argues that organized combat between advocate and opponent interest groups is central to explaining why US states have stopped expanding and even started weakening their renewable energy policies. Fossil fuel companies and electric utilities played a key role in spreading climate denial. Now, they have turned to climate delay, working to block clean energy policies from passing or being implemented and driving retrenchment. Clean energy advocates typically lack sufficient power to overcome electric utilities’ opposition to climate policy. Short Circuiting Policy builds on policy feedback theory, showing the conditions under which retrenchment is more likely. Depending on their relative political influence, interest groups will work to drive retrenchment either directly by working with legislators, their staff, and regulators or indirectly through the parties, the public, and the courts. Also, the likely effects of policies are not easy to predict—an effect termed “the fog of enactment.” But over time, federated interest groups can learn to anticipate policies’ consequences through networks that cross state lines. Examining US energy policy over the past century, and Texas’s, Kansas’s, Arizona’s, and Ohio’s clean energy laws in the twenty-first century, the author shows how opponents have thwarted progress on climate policy. Show more