David Spence: You don’t have to talk to people in person anymore. You can talk to them online in your social media community, which tends to be ideologically homogenous. It’s people who think like you do. And so all of this has the effect of distorting the picture of complex regulatory issues and of politics generally that people are seeing.
Bill Loveless: It’s no secret Republicans and Democrats don’t see eye to eye on climate change. According to a Pew Research survey conducted earlier this year, just 12% of Republicans and Republican leaners think climate change should be a top priority for the President and Congress. Meanwhile, the official 2024 Democratic Party platform states there’s nothing more important than addressing the climate crisis. Energy and environmental law, professor David Spence says, today’s news and social media are responsible in part for this divide. In his new book, Climate of Contempt, David argues it’s all but impossible for the government to take significant action to address global warming in a media environment focused on persuading more than educating. So what’s keeping the US from moving more quickly toward its net-zero carbon emissions goal? How have the two major parties, particularly Republicans, shifted in their climate ideology over the last few decades? And how much agency do voters actually have to turn things around?
This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Bill Loveless. Today on the show, David Spence. David is the Rex G. Baker Chair in Natural Resources Law in the School of Law at the University of Texas Austin. He’s also a professor of business, government and society in the McCombs School of Business at UT, where he teaches courses in energy and environmental regulation. He’s also a co-author of a leading Casebook Energy, Economics, and the Environment. I talked with him about his latest book, Climate of Contempt, How to Rescue the US Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship. I asked David about his perspective on the intense political polarization growing in the US in recent years, and his prescriptions for getting us offline and engaging with each other in person as a way to push regulatory politics forward. I hope you enjoy our conversation. David Spence, welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange.
David Spence: Thanks for having me.
Bill Loveless: Well, David, your book’s an interesting one and certainly a timely one. But first, tell us a little bit about yourself, your career, and how it brought you to where you are today.
David Spence: Sure, happy to. So I’ve been a professor of Energy Law and Regulation at the University of Texas for 27 years now. Before that, I was a grad student at Duke University, and before that I was a practicing energy and environmental lawyer. So I’ve been around this field for a very long time. At Texas, I’m fortunate that I have a lot of students who are interested in energy issues, and that allows me to have a teaching portfolio and a research portfolio that’s focused only on those kinds of issues. So it’s a real privilege for me.
Bill Loveless: Yeah, and certainly the location where you live, where you teach is an important element I think in your observations on energy and all. And I’d like to talk to you a little bit about that in a few minutes. But again, regarding the book, why write this book and why write it at this time?
David Spence: Yeah, interesting question. I had for some time now, let’s say five to seven years, a sense that the dominant narratives in energy politics were missing some important things. And the goal of writing the book was to provide an account of US energy transitions both past and present, that is more in line with the empirical social science research and what we know about energy politics than the prevailing narratives. And also to explore how the modern media environment, particularly the conflation of reporting with advocacy and modern information flows, is really affecting, and I would say distorting our understanding of the politics of the energy transition. And I think this is true whether or not someone is on social media, I think it’s affecting the entire information environment and the entire political environment.
Bill Loveless: You write in the book at the outset that you found in your discussions with students and all that there was a lot of misunderstanding or simply lack of understanding about these issues. But the impression I had, I mean, yes, the book is obviously written I think with a lot of students, not only your students at UT, but students elsewhere and young people in mind. But I think it appeals to a broader audience. That’s my read of it. I mean, would you agree with that?
David Spence: Yeah, that’s my intention. I mean, obviously my views are shaped by what I see. And students were front of mind for a lot of the work that I did on the book. But I think this is a book that ought to be accessible to anybody who either is or wants to be an energy policy wonk.
Bill Loveless: You also refer to an intended audience that would be what you call the Climate Coalition.
David Spence: Yeah, the potential climate coalition because I think there’s broader support for stronger climate policy than we see reflected in congressional decisions. And so part of the book is aimed at identifying the disconnect there.
Bill Loveless: What is the climate of contempt today in the United States as the country nears a national election?
David Spence: That part of the title is really a reference to the change over the last say 10, 15 years in the tone of political discussion as it affects energy and climate policy, but also more generally. And I trace a lot of that to social media and ideological media and the effect it has on our perception, but it is much easier in the modern environment to express contempt for adversaries and to reach the conclusion that they deserve that contempt when we are sort of swimming in an information environment that censors what we see, distorts our picture of both our allies and our opponents and shows us only the worst of the other side. And so it can seem logical to regard policy opponents with contempt. I don’t ascribe ill will to people that are reaching these conclusions, but I do think we are not seeing the whole picture and we’re not seeing the parts we do see very clearly.
Bill Loveless: And that, as you know, has changed in the last 10 to 15 years. I began covering energy policy in Washington in the 1980s, and while there were certainly partisan divides, there was some collaboration because members of Congress found that they had some mutual interest despite their strong disagreements, perhaps on many other issues. But that you say has changed significantly and I would certainly agree with it, but for those who may not have a sense of history here, help us understand how this climate, this political climate has in fact changed over the decades.
David Spence: And the first part of the book, the chapters one through three is devoted to that history and explaining the answer to your question. But the short version is that we used to be able to regulate in Congress past major regulatory statutes. There have been periods of tremendous productivity in Congress for regulating new problems. And those periods coincided with either dominance by one party or the other, or bipartisanship, which you reference in your question. And so in the 1970s when we passed a whole raft of environmental health, safety, consumer protection laws, a lot of those laws were bipartisan, passed by mostly democratic Congresses and signed by Republican presidents, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. Even as late as 1990, the Clean Air Act amendments, which was a major statute signed by a Republican president who billed himself as the environmental president, George Herbert Walker Bush. And so we’ve had that in the past.
What’s happened since is that our political environment and Congress in particular has become more ideologically polarized, and the environment has become more negatively partisan. Ideological polarization began when the Republican Party started moving right after the Reagan presidency. Democrats started moving left a couple of decades later, lagging that according to the measures that political scientists supply to these things. And the negative partisanship is a more recent phenomenon that I tie and I think is tied by the empirical literature to the modern media environment. And so people now are much more likely to be partisan as a form of sort of personal cultural identity. And that’s sort of a negative identity that is it’s more about stopping the other party from getting power and doing what it wants than it is about any particular attachment to my own party and the things it does.
Bill Loveless: Right.
David Spence: One more important fact, sorry Bill…
Bill Loveless: Of course.
David Spence: To interrupt. But the other important fact here is that so many seats in Congress are now safe seats and completely dominated by one party or the other. And so while members of Congress have always been responsive to voters when they pass legislation and when they don’t, they’re worried about what voters think of them. Right now they’re responsive to a different set of voters than they were back in the seventies when all those environmental statutes were passed. Back then we had many more competitive districts. And so members had to worry about the average voter in their district in order to keep their job. Now they have to worry about the average primary voter in order to keep their job. And that voter is much more extreme and much more negatively partisan than the average voter.
Bill Loveless: The differences between parties you quote the late Ted Halstead, the founder of the Climate Leadership Council, as saying that “The road to success on climate policy runs through the Republican Party.” What do you mean by that? What did he mean by that?
David Spence: Yeah, I mean, the legislative math is pretty simple. You have to get a majority of each House of Congress at least to pass major legislation. And in the Senate nowadays, you often have to get 60%. And so that means that building a coalition for stronger climate policy will require the agreement of people who are in the ideological middle. That either means we have to include some Republicans in that mix or conservative Democrats. And this point was illustrated pretty starkly over the last four years or so when Joe Manchin became sort of the effective dictator of legislative politics because he was the most conservative Democrat. And that’s why we couldn’t pass the Build Back Better Bill, but we could pass the Inflation Reduction Act. It’s because he was happy with the latter.
Bill Loveless: Yeah, well, and that is a pretty significant piece of legislation, the most ambitious of any when it comes to climate change, but it certainly didn’t pass on a bipartisan basis. It passed virtually entirely with democratic votes. That said, there was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Bipartisan’s part of the title where there were a number of Republicans who supported a bill that among many other things did have provisions on addressing energy and climate change such as transmission, try to help build transmission. But it’s much different than even say 20 years ago. In 2005, 2007, we had energy policy acts, which were pretty extensive passed bipartisan basis, signed by a Republican president, George W. Bush. So things have changed significantly. I agree with you even in this rather recent timeframe.
David Spence: Yeah, that’s right. And what seems to be particularly difficult these days is passing regulatory legislation, something that imposes constraints, sticks as well as carrots. It’s more easy for members of Congress to get behind subsidies and other forms of carrots than to get bipartisan support for regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
Bill Loveless: Right. And then that prompts a president to Democrat. And the same would be the case with the Republican president to use his executive authority. But that sorts of authority has come under quite a bit of opposition from the United States Supreme Court making that option even that much more difficult for the U.S.
David Spence: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And the Biden administration is choosing to try and regulate power sector greenhouse gas emissions using the same part of the Clean Air Act that the Obama administration used, and which the Supreme Court concluded in the case of West Virginia versus EPA can’t be used in that way. And so the Obama rule was struck down. There’s some differences in the Biden rule, which many of its proponents hope will satisfy the Supreme Court, but I’m skeptical if that’s the case.
Bill Loveless: David, what is it about modern media that makes it difficult to acquire what would consider to be a sound understanding of complex issues like climate change?
David Spence: Yeah. That question I think is best answered by comparing today’s media environment to the media environment that existed back when we could regulate in Congress. In the seventies when I was the age of my students today, I got my news from a daily newspaper, perhaps another national newspaper, maybe a weekly or monthly news magazine and a nightly news broadcast that lasted only 30 minutes. And I was able to consume all of that information slowly. I had time to read to the last paragraph of the stories I was interested in where all of the interesting qualifications and caveats are. And I formed beliefs about politics using that information and in part by talking to friends, family, neighbors, coworkers face-to-face with all the context that face-to-face, communication includes. And almost all of the information that was politically relevant came to me from journalists who were trained to at least aspire to objectivity and completeness.
And so the media environment back then was a unifying force. It was a source of a collective understanding of what is true. In the intervening years, the rise of ideological media, not just Fox News and other ideologically tilted broadcast networks, but also websites and talk radio shows and the like have flooded the flows of information that people receive with stories and information that’s designed to persuade them first and educate them second. So students know and people know they’re constantly being lobbied and makes it harder to figure out what’s true and what’s not true. And the information comes at them in such high volumes and at such speed that the tendency is to not want to read to the last paragraph where all of that interesting nuance is and to lose the habit of thinking critically about the news you’re consuming as you consume it.
And when you process the information by talking with others, you don’t have to talk to people in person anymore. You can talk to them online in your social media community, which tends to be very ideologically homogenous. It’s people who think like you do. And so all of this has the effect of distorting the picture of complex regulatory issues and of politics generally that people are seeing.
Bill Loveless: So when you go into a classroom at UT Austin and you describe that aspect of your book, that aspect of your studies, I think it’s common, it’s one that’s held by many, but how are your students responding to that? What sort of discussion do you have with them about that?
David Spence: Yeah, we do talk about that because energy law and energy regulation is a subject about which reasonable people disagree, sometimes have very intense feelings about it. And so we try to set the tone that everybody is coming at this from a place of goodwill, and all of the students and others should feel like they should be able to express themselves without fear of social sanction, that sort of thing. But mostly my reaction is that I think students love to get this deeper understanding because it’s so hard to get outside of the classroom these days. I think they’re thrilled to learn about the difficulties associated with the positions or the policies that they think they loved or hated before they came into the class. I think most people are happy to get that deeper understanding, recognizing that it’s not all that common to be able to find that on your own these days. And so I cherish the time in the classroom for that reason. I am really enjoying teaching these subjects more than ever.
Bill Loveless: You speak of moderation in relying on the internet for information. And I found this interesting in your book, you compare it of that moderation. You compare it to people at Yellowstone National Park walking from place to place on boardwalks to avoid falling into deadly geysers.
David Spence: Yeah, that’s part of the advice chapter of the book, which is we have to be more careful and cautious about how we use the internet. And this is not news. Most people who study social media and the media environment are already giving this advice, but it is not something you see all that often in the energy and energy transition debate. And I think people when they go on the internet need to understand that a lot of what’s there is not good for them. It’s not designed to educate them, it’s designed to get them to think a certain way about an issue. And that often entails leaving out important parts of the story and exaggerating and hyperbole and sometimes outright lies. So I think we need to become better consumers of the internet in addition to getting off the internet more often, trying to read fewer stories and reading the ones we choose more fully and more thoroughly, and most of all, exposing ourselves to people who think differently than we do about some of these issues.
Bill Loveless: Yeah, that’s interesting. I recall as a young journalist being advised when I was in school and by editors when I was new in the newsroom, it was important to read and to talk to, especially to read. I think it was important to read views that perhaps are different from your own and certainly different from what you’re hearing in your routines every day. It seems as though that would be easier today with the flood of information that’s available, but the flood just simply complicates people’s ability to grasp so much information and make sense of it.
David Spence: You may have to work harder than we used to have to work to get exposed to those other points of view and those other people. And there’s a summary of some of the empirical literature on this question in that last chapter as well. Certain people just don’t encounter in their daily lives, people who hold differing political views than they do. And so if that’s you, you have to go out there and find a way to get exposed to those points of view, ideally from someone you know because that’s sort of the most complete picture of that opposing point of view that you’re going to get is when you talk to somebody having a back and forth conversation about it. And I think that’s increasingly hard to do as we sort ourselves into different communities. I mean, I just moved downtown into Austin. I like the urban life. It’s a very liberal city. Fortunately, I run into people with differing points of view on campus, and I’m going to have to work to make sure I keep that sort of ideological diversity in my life.
Bill Loveless: How does living in Texas, state proud of its soil and gas reputation, but also replete with solar and wind resources influence your thinking?
David Spence: It definitely does. One of the reasons I love teaching here is that I run into people on all sides of the energy industry and on all sides of the political spectrum. And as you know, Texas is a big player in all of the parts of the energy industry, not just oil and gas. And so I have relatively easy access to people who work in wind and solar as well as oil and gas and other industries and one of the new hydrogen hubs. And there’s lots and lots of people around that I have access to that can keep me grounded. There’s not much tendency to want to demonize those people when they’re sitting right in front of you. And so I consider that a blessing here. And so it’s important, and I talk about that as part of my journey in the last chapter of the book.
Bill Loveless: Getting back to communicating effectively, you say the solution when it comes to things like climate change is from the bottom up, not the top down. What do you mean by that?
David Spence: I think a lot of the dominant narratives we see these days are about a rigged system in which elites are controlling policy outcomes. We see it on both sides of the partisan aisle. They just disagree about who’s doing the rigging of the system. And particularly in the climate coalition, there’s a lot of cynicism about rich people and companies controlling outcomes. That’s not really what the political science literature says about how the policy process works. We infer that these elites have captured the system much more easily and often than they actually do. And what we really need to get a stronger appreciation of, I think particularly in the dominant public debate and also in some of the academic debate, is the degree to which members of Congress and elected politicians generally worry about voters, worry about what voters are thinking, and worry about losing elections.
And so almost all of the statutes that make up the energy regulatory state were what we call in the book Republican moments, meaning bottom-up sort of groundswells of public concern that politicians responded to, either because voters demanded it of them or because they saw political benefits for themselves in championing the issue. And so most regulation happens that way. It’s not the product of some sort of corrupted self-interest, it’s typically a bottom-up political movement that creates change. And it just so happens that today the partisan environment in Congress is particularly unreceptive to that. And so we have to change. It’s a long game, but we have to change that partisan environment if we’re going to get strong regulatory legislation governing climate.
Bill Loveless: Yeah, because the appearance is that, and so often what’s written about is the huge amounts of money that big interest, whether they’re big energy companies or other industrial interests or for that matter, political action committees can sink into Capitol Hill these days. And therefore, the assumption is that they in effect are driving the boat, that they are the ones that determine what passes or more likely what doesn’t pass.
David Spence: Yeah, I’m not downplaying the access to politicians that big contributors have. They definitely have more access, and the empirical literature tells us that that’s the case. It doesn’t tell us however that they control all policy outcomes or even most policy outcomes that way. What we find is that when members of Congress vote on legislation, especially if the legislation sort of piques the broader public interest against the industry interest is that the public interest tends to win out. And so there are people defending the status quo and using money to do so, trying to defend the status quo and using money to do so. But that doesn’t mean that because they’re trying to do that, that that’s the determinative factor in policy outcomes.
A lot of what’s going on now is the negative partisanship and the Republican parties turn against the energy transition and clean energy, especially in very recent years, is making it difficult for Republicans who would otherwise support stronger climate policy to do so because they’re going to lose the next primary if they do so. We’ve had strong Republican champions of the climate. Bob Inglis, I think he was from Indiana. That was his signature issue. Carlos Curbelo in Florida, that was one of his signature issues. Those people have a tremendous amount of electoral risk in championing that issue, and they ended up either losing a primary or retiring because they were going to lose a primary. And so it’s hard for members of the ideological right or places where Republicans are dominant to be part of the solution on this issue.
Bill Loveless: Yeah. Well, of course, your book is coming out at a timely moment. We’re approaching a national election in the United States. I was reading over some recent reporting from Yale’s Climate Change Communication program. Tony Leiserowitz, of course heads that up. He’s been on the program before. And the report they put out in the spring said that most Democrats but few Republicans say global warming will be a very important issue when deciding who they will vote for in the 2024 presidential election. I think that’s consistent with the sort of things you’ve been discussing, David, but what’s on your mind these days as you consider climate change and you consider this important election?
David Spence: That is consistent with polling going way back, showing environmental issues falling down the list of priorities when we in an open-ended way, ask voters to sort of list the things that are most important to them. That doesn’t mean I think that it’s necessarily unimportant. So a vote is a binary choice. I can only get to choose between two candidates typically, at least if I’m focused on supporting somebody who has a chance to win, and everybody brings a different set of values to that choice, some of them may very well be prioritizing environment. We know that young Republicans care much more about climate than older Republicans do, and we also know that control of Congress and control of the presidency turns on a knife edge lately. These are very close questions, and so it only takes a few people in the right competitive jurisdictions to make a difference.
And so I think the prescription in the book about dialogue across political boundaries and ideological boundaries is worth pursuing even if as a national average climate issues fall down the list of priorities for a lot of voters. That doesn’t mean that talking about it can’t make a difference. And more importantly, I think talking across these boundaries is important to help preserve some of the fundamental democratic values that seem to be under threat these days. Things like rule of law, respect for the truth, fair competition, things like that.
Bill Loveless: One would think with the weather difficulties, disasters we’re seeing, we continue to see in this what has been the hottest summer on record, that people might relate more to the issue when they see the wildfires or the flooding or simply the extended severe high temperatures. It might make a difference in terms of their attention to things like climate change and therefore what they might think about when they go to vote. Of course, there’s other issues that are pretty important too, like the economy and the impact on their pocketbook, and we’ve seen that play out in this election. But I don’t know, does this provide perhaps more of an atmosphere for the kind of bottom-up discussion that you think is so important?
David Spence: Yeah, I mean, I think what we’ve seen up to now is that issues that might in the past have generated more of a change of heart on the part of voters are mediated through their ideological media that they consume each day. And that media works pretty hard to solidify their affection for and opposition to, let’s be honest, hatred of the other party. And so it’s harder than it used to be for those kinds of real-world issues to change someone’s boat. However, I think if wildfires are becoming more common and heat problems are becoming more common and storms are becoming more severe, and as people encounter these difficulties not only mediated through some ideological media outlet like Fox News or whatever, but also talking to their friends and family who might think differently about these issues, perhaps we can start to change votes that way over the long run. And I don’t see a quick fix to this other than talking to each other and trying to understand one another and ultimately find some common ground.
Bill Loveless: Yeah. Yeah, change doesn’t occur quickly, especially on profound issues such as this one. Aside from dissecting the difficulties of communication, you make it clear in the book that you favor a strong policy response to climate change, one that goes well beyond the Inflation Reduction Act, and it’s the hundreds of billions of dollars that bill provides to curb emissions. Right? I mean, it’s not only about communication for you, you think a lot about what would be effective policy, right?
David Spence: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s pretty clear that climate change is human driven, and it’s associated with adding carbon to the atmosphere. And we need to get to a place where we no longer on net adding carbon to the atmosphere in order to slow or stop what will be ever-increasing types of harm that we’re already experiencing. This is not some sort of threshold where we can say to ourselves, oh, it’s already happening, why do anything? Everything is going to get more severe, more intense as we keep increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon. And so yes, I believe that we need national legislation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think it’s going to happen through state action, and I don’t think subsidies are going to get us all the way there. And I think we have plenty of studies projecting that subsidies don’t get us all the way there.
And so I do favor regulatory legislation. The caveat to that is I think that’s a transition that entails a lot of tough calls, a lot of trade-offs that those of us who favor the transition ought to be completely transparent about and not soft sell them because we do not exist in a time of high cross-party trust. And if you start spinning these issues, you play into that distrust. And so I think I’d like to see experts on my side of the aisle be completely transparent and open about the difficult parts of the transition, and I think we are becoming increasingly transparent much more so than say five years ago.
Bill Loveless: Yeah. You also observed that the economic benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act seem unlikely to change many votes this year.
David Spence: Well, that’s my best guess, but I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball on that. I know a lot of people are putting faith in the creation of a domestic clean energy industry to change votes based on people voting their pocketbook. That doesn’t seem likely when members of the Republican Party whose districts are benefiting from that statute can come and take credit for those benefits without losing an election, even though they voted against the law. So I’m a little skeptical about pocketbook issues dominating in these overwhelming number of safe seats, but perhaps they will have an effect in those other competitive districts, which unfortunately for now are only 10 to 15% of the country.
Bill Loveless: Before we go, I wanted to get back to your students. I always find it interesting to talk to professors like yourself about what they learn in the classroom. So what do you learn from your students and what questions do you often hear from them?
David Spence: Well, I learn from them all the time about lots of little aspects of energy policy and energy regulation. I teach grad students, so many of them come to me having worked in the industry already, and so I can learn particular specific things that way. But the thing that strikes me the most lately has to do with this sense that they don’t feel comfortable necessarily speaking freely in class. And that bothers me a lot. There’s a survey came out a couple of years ago, maybe it was last year, in which students reported being uncomfortable speaking their mind in class. And it bothered me enough that I raised it in class, and a student who I think was a conservative student, raised his hand and said, do you mean to tell me that in constitutional law class you felt free to speak your mind?
And I said, yes, of course I did. That was the fun of constitutional law. We got to have all these great disagreements, and he was dumbfounded by that. And that bothered me a lot, and that was also part of the impetus for writing this book. I want people to respect one another and exchange of views. It’s hard when they go online and see themselves or others characterized as murderers or sociopaths or enablers of genocide or whatever. And I’m not talking about the Israel-Palestine debate. I’m talking about environmental and climate law and climate policy. We see those kind of epithets tossed around online. And so I think I learned from them that they are craving a more civil and open dialogue, and the classroom is one of the places that they can get it.
Bill Loveless: And contribute to that change that you say is so important. One that might not occur quickly, but nevertheless is urgent for the country as a whole. David Spence, thank you for joining us on the Columbia Energy Exchange and discussing this new book, Climate of Contempt. I really enjoyed it.
David Spence: Bill, it was a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Bill Loveless: That’s it for this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. Thank you again, David Spence, and thank you for listening. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. The show is hosted by Jason Bordoff and me, Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Tim Peterson from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Lily Lee, Caroline Pittman and Q Lee, Sean Marquand is the Sound Engineer. For more information about the show or the Center on Global Energy policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media at ColumbiaUEnergy. If you like this episode, leave us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also share it with a friend or a colleague to help us reach more listeners. Either way, we appreciate your support. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.
