Book Review: Short Circuiting Policy (2020)
Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States
Post-publication review from February 2022
Leah C. Stokes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and is affiliated with the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Professor Stokes works on energy, climate and environmental politics. Within American politics, her work focuses on representation and public opinion; voting behavior; and public policy. Within environmental politics, she researches climate change, renewable energy, water, and chemicals policy.
Stokes’ book Short Circuiting Policy, published by Oxford University Press, examines the role that utilities have played in promoting climate denial and rolling back clean energy laws. Of note, it was named the Best Energy Book of 2020 by the American Energy Society, listed as a top 5 climate book from 2020 by The New York Times, and won 3 awards from the American Political Science Association. Stokes has contributed to the NYT-bestselling anthology All We Can Save which is a collection of essays written by influential women in the climate space. She’s also the co-host of the podcast “A Matter of Degrees”.
Besides poring through thousands of pages of public utility commission hearings, Stokes interviewed 108 interested parties. The first interview was conducted in 2013 and the last in 2019. The book was published in 2020. Oh, and I paid $43 for the book at Powell’s, so yes, I wrote in it.
The research is going on three years old. I say that because I hope everyone will look through the book’s reference list. Head to the most convenient source of that info, maybe Amazon since the preview’s free, and see if there’s anything that can help you in your field. The reference list starts on p. 289. Just know that it doesn’t account for anything that’s happened since early 2020.
The Fog of Enactment
Stokes argues for “placing interest group conflict at the center of policy change”, declaring that “organized combat between interest groups is at the heart of American politics.” You can hear sabers rattle when she writes that “with sufficient relative influence over their adversaries, groups can capture the spoils from policy change.”
Stokes has detailed how to improve the energy-society relationship, and it’s a pretty clear-eyed vision. For instance, she has a section entitled “When New Policies Fail to Create a New Politics”. She also notes the power disparity between incumbents—winners of previous policy battles—versus new interests, and uses that great catch-all “organizing” to describe the work needed to build collective power.
So Stokes give us a brief history of energy policy since 1999, case studies of how incumbents and new entrants campaigned in multiple states, analysis of how gains can be setback, and thoughts on how “clean energy” proponents should fight. Throughout, she uses a variation on the “fog of war” metaphor: The Fog of Enactment. The idea is that even people who work in industry or elected officials’ offices don’t know all the effects of a given policy until implementation and the public responds.
Stokes uses a combination of support for federal funding and support for a 20% National Renewable Portfolio Standard—which I would suggest is now woefully outdated even as a talking point—both as a yardstick for advocacy progress and a reflection of policy outcomes and feedback loops. So if advocates had a policy gain, you could see how the public reacted to its institution. As we’ve noticed, some theories of energy systems change rely too much on traditional technocratic metrics, oblivious to how people might really change their behavior in response to a change in, for example, the rate at which they’re compensated in net metering schemes.
I would also suggest—and this is a problem with a lot of publicly-reported research, especially with “topline findings”—that rollups like “lean Dem” and “lean Rep” obscure the will of independents and erases that of the disenfranchised. The Knight Foundation did a stellar report a few years ago called The 100 Million. That’s about how many eligible voters sit out every election. Most simply feel that their lives don’t materially change regardless of who’s in office.
Texan Tug-of-War
With that context in mind, I’m going to focus on Texas. Stokes covers multiple states, with chapters covering how Koch Industry and allies drove polarization on clean energy in Kansas, how utilities undermined net metering and clean energy targets in Arizona, and how utilities drove retrenchment of renewable energy laws in Ohio.
…but Texas shows the back-and-forth of two decades’ worth of policy battles, so there’s plenty to examine. Also, last year’s outage debacle means all of this is still plenty relevant.
You’re looking at the DSIRE map of state renewable energy incentives. The legend indicates that darker states have more incentives than do lighter states. Texas now has 123. Oregon, for comparison, has 109. Renewable Portfolio Standards in particular have driven a lot of generation from renewables, and have also correlated with clean energy benefits; if you look at a map with the strongest RPSs, they tend to have fewer fossil fuel-related health problems. It’s not provably causal, but the southeastern US has lagged in particular.
Stokes traces Texas’ early RPS wins from the mid to late 90s through 2010 in one chapter, then describes how incumbents retrenched. Texan renewable energy advocates worked with a cross-country network to develop the idea of renewable energy target in the mid-90s, and Texas passed environmental policies along with an electricity restructuring law in 1999. Its initial RPS was 3% RE by 2005.
Stokes suggests that foundation funding helped create the strong networks that created and backed the law; they saw the future and potential while incumbents were still catching up. Texas wind became a big success story; when I was at Clean Edge, one of the big narratives was that midwest wind proved that even conservative states were savvy to RE’s benefits; the story had staying power nationally even after the local dynamic had changed. The narrative had been popularized nationally as a version of “we’re all gonna get rich”, with Van Jones’s THE GREEN COLLAR ECONOMY, published in 2008, leaning into the economics-first view of the clean energy transition.
So Texas wind was, at the time, on a roll. Nearly a thousand megawatts (about 750 wind turbines at the time) were installed in 2000 alone, and the state was ahead of schedule as of 2001. Texas wind took off, and in 2005 the wind industry helped back an expansion of the RPS. Texas reached its 2025 goal in 2009 and had 26,045 MW of additional renewable energy capacity (all but ~3,000 MW of it wind) in 2017 compared with 1999. Texas has been the leader in generating electricity from the wind pretty much ever since, ahead of even California.
The success drove policy feedback, with a Republican state senator whose district’s economy had benefited from wind backing the 2005 RPS expansion.
Incumbents saw the rise of clean energy companies as a threat. Fossil fuel-heavy utilities started seeing decades of stranded assets ahead. By 2006, renewables hit a lull. Wind in particular was getting a 1.5c/kWh federal production tax credit to spur development, and negative market prices occurred where there was lots of wind generation. Stokes chalks that up to clashing state and federal policies, and says it’s a common cause of poor policy forecasting.
This is about the time the “intermittency” talking points started showing up, along with the idea that the government shouldn’t pick “winners” and “losers” in the economy. People learned how to say “Solyndra”.
The Atlantic article title: “Why Is Texas Terrible at Producing Solar Power?”
Opponents to the rising renewables industry targeted solar to slow the shift. Texas doesn’t have a net metering law, which is part of why headlines like this have appeared over time. Another from the Dallas Observer was titled “Texas Sucks at Solar”.
In a sign of how dynamics shift, the same Republican state senator who had championed the expansion of the RPS had anti-solar lobbyists working out of his office in 2006. Stokes says the solar opponents used the fog of enactment to conceal their intentions, using weasel words like “non-binding”, “soft target”, and “stretch goal” to water down legislation that would have diversified the RE mix. Had wind energy companies stood up for solar during this time, Stokes suggests, might have resulted in a different outcome.
Stokes touches briefly on corruption as a factor in policy battles, noting that Rick Perry received more money from energy companies from 2003-2007 than any other state politician, totaling about half a million dollars.
Among other clawbacks, opponents passed legislation that let large energy consumers—often the type with onsite generation to cope with outages—to opt-out of the RPS requirement, weakening the state’s RE laws.
As one advocate put it: In a deregulated market, companies make all their money during extreme weather. Solar was a direct threat to profits on hot days.
So in February of last year, more than 4 million Texans lost power for several days. Extreme weather required more power than ERCOT had forecasted. Lives were lost and galaxy-brain takes about “intermittency” were in abundance. A post-mortem from the University of Texas Austin found no shortage of causes, finding that all types of generation technologies failed, power generators were insufficiently weatherized, and that natural gas system failures made the electricity problems worse.
The state passed reform legislation last year, requiring:
—Power plants required to weatherize
—Proposal to help fund backup power at health care facilities stripped
—Lawmakers approve plan for electric, power and gas companies to seek billions in rate-payer backed bonds, loans
—Texans could be notified of future outages with emergency alerts
—ERCOT board to be appointed by politicians
—Renewables avoid attack from lawmakers
Governor Abbott guaranteed that the lights would stay on this winter. Critics pounced. Southern Methodist University scholar Stephanie Martin told the Texas Tribune: “If it were truly about executive leadership and government transparency, then you wouldn’t get what almost amounts to a slogan: “I guarantee.” You’d get a meaningful articulation of what’s behind the guarantee.”
Three weeks after the “guarantee”, Abbott met with large energy companies Calpine, Kinder Morgan, NRG, Vistra and Energy Transfer Partners — whose CEO, Kelcy Warren, gave $1.1 million to Abbott immediately after this year’s regular legislative session.
Every State Has Battles Ahead
Texas isn’t the only energy-rich state to have fumbled its clean energy plans. My home state of Florida—the “sunshine” state—is currently fighting over whether to do away with net metering altogether. That’s mainly being pushed by the state’s largest utility, FP&L. It’s worth noting that there are other types of utilities in the state; Jacksonville, which could safely be described as conservative overall, has a New Deal-era electric cooperative, the Jacksonville Electric Authority, which by comparison is playing wait-and-see.
Stokes notes the amount of work ahead, saying that 100% clean energy by 2050 will require at least an eight-fold increase in deployments. If we want to make it happen by 2035, if we keep existing nuclear generation online, it’s a twelve-fold increase. We have to pick up the pace.
My biggest takeaway from the book was that energy policy and its effects on society are ever-changing: Cheering RPS goals is fine, but those with vested interests in foot-dragging (or who may just be concerned about hitting their quarterly numbers) will try to claw back all gains. People without a real say in how policy is developed usually pay the costs. The other takeaway is that money drives development, but not across the board; as Dr. Stokes notes about Texas, “We might expect a renewable energy law to broadly catalyze new industries, but in practice, it only catalyzed the least expensive technology.”
Stokes closes with advice on how clean energy advocates can design policies to be more durable and to withstand attacks and clawback attempts, including:
—Reform on institutions
—Focus less on ownership (“it’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets credit”)
—Strengthen advocate networks; concentrate opponent networks
—Expand the scope of conflict through political parties, the public, and the courts
Stokes’ language is all tactics and strategy. It’s engaging, and she backs up her arguments six ways to Sunday. I agreed with most of her perspective.
Politics and Policy
These types of massive systemic challenges will require solving similarly wicked problems like reducing polarization. How? By restoring faith in institutions like representative democracy so that people could can count on their reps to focus on serving the public first and foremost.
Well-intended ideas about compromise and centrism in the U.S. might normally have us negotiate against ourselves about what’s practical or possible at the outset. “That would never pass” ends too many conversations. And the stakes couldn’t be higher: The midpoint between mission critical and muddling through might not accomplish our energy goals. But consider how competently managing the transition to 100% renewables might restore faith in the government. Moving at the pace and scale required would be transformative. It would produce visible evidence of a government that does good things for its people.
Stokes notes that to lock in wins, advocates need ongoing support—a base of people who will defend the policy and fight for expansion and improvement—in other words, a constituency.
I think we can expand on that. Advocacy groups need to strengthen connections sufficiently to gain national political influence. I would argue that coalition-led vote withholding campaigns (e.g.) could change the power dynamic in ways that our current polarized landscape make solely theoretical. Intersectional solidarity among groups could unlock systemic change; imagine, for instance, The Debt Collective leading a debt strike starting this May Day (which it is). Combine that with growing union influence and strike activity, along with the climate strikes that are now a global mainstay. When millions of people mobilize for a common cause, the status quo seems less immutable. We could go one further and build alternatives to the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans, to make all parties compete for votes on the basis of real policy that helps everyone, rather than considering large donors first and foremost. The common goal of a clean energy future could help do away with some of this enormous waste of time and energy between groups.
And honestly, fossil fuel industry lobbyists could find other work.
Of possible interest: The Future of Energy Depends on Who’s Paying