A Run of Bad Luck

A Brookings report, The Year that Shook the Rich: A Review of Natural Disasters in 2011, points out that 2011 was the worst year in history in terms of costly natural disasters:

2011 was the most expensive year in terms of disaster losses in history, mostly because of a spate of disasters affecting developed countries. Globally, the economic cost of disasters in 2011 was $380 billion, of which $210 billion were the result of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. This was 72 percent higher than the losses in 2005, the second costliest year in history of disaster-related losses.

The report also draws an interesting connection with demographic trends.  In most developed countries, the population is rapidly graying due to declining birthrates and longer life expectancies.  This means that a greater percentage are elderly.  The elderly are particularly vulnerable to disasters.  This fact has been clear for years. In the 1995 Chicago heat wave, almost three-quarters of the victims were over sixty-five. In Hurricane Katrina, over forty percent of the dead were over seventy.  Thus, it is hard to take issue with the view that, in developed countries especially, disaster management needs to attend to the special needs of the older population.

Brookings has made disasters an ongoing research focus.  These papers should be an important resource for anyone with an interest in disaster issues.

 

The filibuster and environmental law

The filibuster in the U.S. Senate has been (rightfully) in the news quite a bit over the past few years.  The use of the filibuster has dramatically increased in those years, to the point where there is currently a de facto 60-vote supermajority requirement to pass legislation in the Congress.  That has led to a number of commentators (not all of them on the left) arguing that the filibuster has led to dysfunctionality in Washington, and that filibuster reform is one of the most important elements of any effort to fix what might (or might not) be broken in Washington.  The group Common Cause recently even filed a lawsuit challenging the filibuster as unconstitutional.

From the perspective of environmental law, is the filibuster a bad thing?  Dave Roberts at Grist claims that it is, because it more or less stopped the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill that would have regulated carbon emissions.  I think that Roberts is probably right that Waxman-Markey would likely have passed in some form that could have been reconciled with the House bill if it had only needed 50 votes to pass.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the existence of the filibuster is all bad from the perspective of environmental law.  A quick comparison with Canada makes this clear.  Canada’s political system, as a parliamentary one, provides much fewer obstacles to the enactment of legislation: The majority party in Parliament can pretty much enact what it wants; the legislature is effectively unicameral (the Canadian Senate rarely obstructs lower house legislation); there is no independently elected executive who can veto legislation.  That makes it relatively easy to enact legislation – say, a hypothetical carbon tax.  But it also makes it relatively easy to repeal legislation – as recent efforts by the Tories to amend Canadian environmental laws show.  (Our readers in Canada should correct me in the comments if I am wrong about any of this.)

So which is better?  A system with high legislative inertia, such as the United States, where legislation is hard to enact but hard to repeal?  Or a system like Canada’s, where legislation is easy to enact and repeal?  One possible answer is that, for environmental law, high inertia is a good thing.  If you think that certain kinds of environmental harm are irreversible or at least extremely costly to remedy (think of species extinction), then short-lived environmental protections are pretty much the same thing as no environmental protection at all.  Once the environmentally protective law is repealed and development occurs, reinstating the environmentally protective law later won’t do much good (you can’t bring back an extinct species).  In fact, if you think that having laws on the books that look environmentally protective, but in fact don’t do much at all, is problematic (perhaps because it deceives voters and the public), then environmentally protective laws that come and go might be worse than having no environmentally protective laws at all.  In the former case, you have the same level of environmental harm, but the public may not understand what is occurring because at least some of the time there are protective laws on the books; in the latter case, at least we’re clear about what kinds of protection are or are not occurring.

Now, whether this kind of “truth in legislation” principle in environmental law outweighs the costs that high inertia imposes on the ability of a political system to respond to new environmental harms (e.g., climate change!) is a hard question.  But I do think it means that from an environmental protection perspective, whether a supermajority requirement is a bad thing isn’t obvious.  Certainly, if we have President Romney in January 2013 and Republicans hold majorities (but not supermajorities) in both the Senate and the House, the filibuster might be seen as very environmentally friendly.  Without that supermajority requirement, a bunch of environmental laws might get repealed or gutted in a short amount of time; and even if President Hilary Clinton storms to power in 2016 with massive Democratic majorities and reenacts all those laws, the interim environmental damage that might occur could be irreversible.

It’s All Greek to Me

Via E&E News, here’s a leading climate skeptic’s explanation of his qualifications to pass judgment on climate science:

While he acknowledged he had no scientific credentials that would allow him to speak with authority on climate science, Monckton said he was uniquely qualified to explain the various logical fallacies that supporters of man-made climate change had engaged in to attack their critics “because I was classically trained.”

Yup, a knowledge of Ancient Greek is exactly what you need to understanding thermodynamics, statistics, and dynamic modeling. Next week he’ll explain how Aristotle disproved quantum physics.

Carbon Auctions & Prop 13

California is planning to auction some of the carbon allowances in its new cap-and-trade system.  There’s an interesting question about whether  the auctions should be considered a “tax” under state law, which may turn in part on what the money is used for.  If the auctions are considered a tax, they would run into trouble under California’s famous anti-tax initiative, Prop 13.

Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and Environment has released a new report 0n this issue. In general, we agree with other observers (such as our UCLA colleagues) about the rankings of key spending choices in terms  of their level of legal risk.  In general, the more closely a spending option is tied with climate change, the lower the risk. However, in terms of the absolute level of legal risk, we identify some significant arguments for upholding even the options with a higher level of risk, such as putting the proceeds in the general fund.

Using a Carbon Tax to Decrease the Deficit

A carbon tax would provide an incentive to reduce the use of fossil fuels, fostering the growth of clean energy.  But it would have another benefit as well: providing revenue to help cut the deficit. Much the same effect could be produced by auctioning allowances within a cap-and-trade system.

According to Resources for the Future, a carbon tax of $10 per ton of CO2 could generate annual tax revenues of $60 billion, and a carbon tax of about $25 could raise roughly $125 billion per year.  The amounts are uncertain in part because the tax revenue is sensitive to the price of natural gas — low natural gas prices drive out coal and reduce revenue from the carbon tax. Regardless, the potential for deficit reduction is significant.

The distributive impact of a carbon tax raises some issues.  Because low-income consumers spend more of their income on energy and energy-intensive goods, a carbon tax is regressive.  Also, there are regional disparities, depending primarily on how much electricity is generated by coal.  Thus, it may make sense to use some of the tax proceeds to reduce burdens on the most heavily affected groups, although this would reduce the net revenue from the tax.

In the long run, the carbon tax should produce decreasing revenue as reliance on fossil fuels wanes. But in the shorter-run, the tax could be a significant plus in terms of deficit reduction.

 

What Bonneville Salt Flats can teach us about CEQA exemptions

The Bonneville Salt Flats need to be saved.  The location where many of the world-records for land speed have been set is in danger.  A combination of years of racing, plus the construction of Interstate 80 and alterations in salt mining techniques has meant that the hard salt surface of the flats (similar in hardness to concrete) has worn down and is not being replaced.  There is a risk that in a few years high-speed racing will no longer be feasible at the flats. 

This might not sound like an environmental crisis.  But much of the rhetoric of those involved in the controversy is environmental.  The headline of the New York Times article (in the Automobile section, of course) is Conserving Utah’s Fragile Salt Flats.  There is an organization formed by the racing community called “Save the Salt.”  The area is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the federal land manager (Bureau of Land Management) has designated the site an Area of Critical Environmental Concern.

Probably a lot of people who consider themselves environmentalists wouldn’t think it that important to protect a site for high-speed racing.  But the fight to “save” the Bonneville Salt Flats shows that there is a tremendous diversity of values and goals that people might consider environmental.

Sometimes those goals will be in tension, even when the goals are more widely embraced within the traditional environmental movement.  Much of the controversy over industrial-scale solar power projects in the California desert has been around how to tradeoff one goal (rapidly increasing low- or no-carbon renewable energy production) with other goals (protecting biodiversity such as desert tortoises; protecting what is a relatively wild landscape that is visually inspiring to many people; protecting Native American cultural and spiritual resources).

In an earlier post, I discussed the dangers of creating exemptions from general environmental laws (such as CEQA) where there might be significant asymmetry in political power.  But even if that asymmetry does not exist, even where the only interest groups involved are environmental groups or other citizen groups, these kinds of exemptions have a risk.  They identify some environmental goals as “better” or “more important” than others.  That might well be true – I can very much understand the argument that some local environmental harms in the California desert are worth massively increasing renewable energy to help deal with the problem of climate change.  But it carries a political risk.

Those whose goals and values are identified as “less important” through statutory exemptions are surely going to be frustrated and angry.  They may question why the general environmental law deserves support, if their preferences are not going to be considered.

This is important because environmental law is statutory law in the United States, always subject to revision and repeal.  Those laws are more likely to be sustainable if they have more allies – whether they be proponents and opponents of solar power projects, or even racing enthusiasts.  Some environmentalists might question whether the Salt Flats should be identified as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, arguing that this diminishes what it means to be an environmental problem.  But a big tent might mean all the more support for BLM’s ability to protect environmental values – of a wide range – on its lands.  The same may be true for CEQA.

Adapting to Increased Flood Risk in the Midwest

Here is a blog post about adapting to increased flood risk.  I wrote it after reading this news release.    This is the “classic adaptation two-step”.    In the first step of the dance, climate scientists identify location specific climate trends.  In this case, the RMCO research documents 50 year trends in increased flood risk in states such as Illinois and Ohio.  In the second step of the dance, self interested households, firms and local governments respond to this information and the aggregate consequence of these small investment decisions is increased adaptability in response to climate change.

In a nutshell,  individuals have a variety of coping strategies including (but not limited to) moving within the city, fortifying their home against flood risk or simply moving valuable stuff out of their basement.  Firms will  have increased incentives to dream up new products that help households to cope with flooding (i.e the cheap sand bag?).   Insurance firms through differential pricing of flood insurance can affect the spatial distribution of where households live and what materials their homes are made out of and this will reduce flood damage. Local governments will have incentives to invest in storm drains and engineering approaches to redirect water away from the central population.   Local governments will also using zoning regulation to reduce density in the flood zones.

Together these efforts will sharply reduce the flood damage.  Why am I so sure?   The land owners in these cities know that if flood risk sharply reduces the area’s quality of life then the footloose skilled will move and the city will enter a death spiral.   This anticipated loss of real estate value for hundreds of thousands of people in a city creates a strong interest group looking for adaptation solutions.  The mayor of the city will also recognize this dynamic logic and will seek out solutions to protect the “golden goose” and keep attracting and retaining the skilled to live in the flood prone city.

 

 

Why We Need Administrative Agencies like EPA

Bureaucrats aren’t very popular.  But consider the alternatives when it comes to dealing with environmental problems.  Basically, bureaucrats are part of the executive branch of government.  For instance, the head of EPA is appointed by the President and can be removed by the President at any time.  (A few agencies such as the SEC enjoy some protection from presidential removal power, but that’s not true for any of the environmental agencies.)  I explained in my last post why the free market won’t generally solve environmental problems.  So that leaves the three branches of government: the courts, the executive branch, and Congress.

Most people who don’t like regulations also don’t like the idea of using courts to solve social problems.  In the case of environmental problems, the reluctance is well-founded.  Major pollution problems involve very technical scientific and engineering issues, complex economics, and hard tradeoffs.  Courts don’t have great expertise in any of those areas.  In addition, the practicalities of mega-cases involving millions of plaintiffs and dozens or hundreds of pollution sources are more than a little daunting.

If not the courts, how about Congress?  There is a school of thought that Congress should set more specific standards rather than giving EPA the authority to translate general policies into specific numbers.  That would reduce EPA’s policy role, but would leave EPA with a big enforcement role much like the IRS’s.  How many people who hate EPA love the IRS?

It’s also doubtful that Congress could work out the specific numbers — unless, that is, it developed a staff with just as many engineers, scientists, economists, and other experts as EPA has.  In that case, Congress would essentially have its own in-house EPA.  The only difference would be that essentially the same people would report to Congress rather than the President.  Given that both Congress and the President are elected by the same voters, it’s hard to see any big advantage to the shift.

People think of EPA as composed of unaccountable bureaucrats.  But in fact they’re accountable in many dimensions for their decisions.  The ultimate authority over the decision is held by the President or a presidential appointee.  Even then, a court will review the decision to be sure that it has factual support and does not violate the congressional mandate.  And in the end, Congress can pass a new law and change the rules, or put pressure on the executive branch through funding decisions or hearings.

There are undoubtedly many ways we could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our environmental laws.  But in the end, if we want to limit pollution or protect some areas from unrestricted development, we’re going to need administrative agencies to get the work done.

Why the Environment Requires Government Protection: Some Simple Economics

The key to understanding the economics of environmental protection is the concept of externalities.  An externality is simply a cost that one person or firm imposes on another. In general, an externality means that an activity is causing more harm than it should.

Of course, a company or individual could decide to voluntarily correct the problem to eliminate the externality.  But if the cost is significant, many people will not be altruistic enough to bear a heavy cost in order to help someone else.  And corporations, which have a fiduciary duty to protect their own shareholders, are not in the business of being altruistic toward outsider.

If only a few people are on the receiving side of the externality, they might be able to enter a contract with the creator of the externality to take care of the problem. But that’s obviously not going to be practical in complicated situations with multiple victims (and perhaps multiple sources), like urban air pollution.   For instance, a negotiation involving all the major polluters and residents of Houston would be a nightmare.

Another solution, favored by some libertarians, is for the recipients to sue.  But this is also problematic except in very simple situations. Imagine a lawsuit by all the residents of Houston against all the pollution sources in the city.  This would be immensely complicated and expensive litigation, and in the end the decision would fall on a judge or jurors with no expertise in the problem.

So if the problem can’t be settled by the private sector alone or by the courts, the remaining alternatives are legislative or administrative.  There are basically only three options:

1. Subsidies. The government can pay the source of the externality to stop.
2. Taxes. The government can tax the source, so that the cost is internalized by the source rather than just imposed on others.
3. Regulations. The government can tell the source or sources to reduce the level of the externality, perhaps using a market mechanism like an emissions trading system to make the regulation more effective.

That’s pretty much the range of options.  They all involve government coercion — either to impose the tax or regulation on the externality, or to fund the subsidy by raising taxes. Free markets are great, but they won’t solve externality problems on their own.

Put simply: significant externalities call for significant government intervention.

Next up: why we need administrative agencies like EPA.

 

The Climate Misinformation Nation

Scientists are more confident than ever that climate change is happening and is largely caused by human activities.  Yet, according to a recent poll, the American public is less likely to believe that climate change is caused by humans than they were even last year. When it comes to climate science, are we a misinformation nation?

A new report from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication finds that since November 2011, public belief that global warming is happening increased by 3 percentage points, to 66 percent overall.  However, public belief that global warming is caused mostly by human activities decreased four percentage points, to 46 percent.

Even more striking:  Since November, there has been a 6 point decrease (to 35%) in the proportion of Americans who believe that most scientists think global warming is happening, with a 2 point increase (to 41%) in those who believe there is substantial disagreement among scientists.

What the Science Says

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made pronouncements on anthropogenic climate change dating back to 2001 and further strengthened in its Fourth Assessment report.   The IPCC stated in 2007: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20^th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.”  This statement is worth far more weight than a single dissenting view; more than 800 scientists and experts from all over the world contribute to the preparation of IPCC reports as authors, contributors, and expert reviewers.

A 2009 survey of 3,146 earth scientists posed the question “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” (Doran 2009).  The study found that 97.5% of climatologists who actively publish research on climate change responded “yes.”

Clouding the Air

Why then does the climate change “debate” continue?  There seem to be a few factors at play: 

Debunking Myths About Energy Security and Independence

The phrases “energy security” and “energy independence” get thrown around a lot in debates about clean energy, climate change, oil drilling and any policy having to do with our energy supply.  And they get used in at least two highly misleading ways by groups that are often diametrically opposed to each other. First,  supporters of aggressive alternative energy policies frequently argue that policies like renewable portfolio standards will “promote energy independence.”  The California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Washington Renewable Portfolio standards, for example, all highlight energy independence as one of the standard’s goals.  Second, supporters of aggressive domestic energy production, including deep water and arctic oil drilling, claim that increasing domestic supply will strengthen national security by reducing our dependence on foreign oil.  President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Romney have each made this claim in supporting more domestic oil drilling.   Both arguments are flawed.

Renewable portfolio standards and other policies to reduce our consumption of energy to fuel homes and businesses may be laudable for many reasons, including for emitting far fewer greenhouse gas emissions than conventional sources like coal and natural gas.  But these policies do not increase energy independence if by energy independence proponents mean weaning ourselves from foreign sources of energy.

Rand Paul, Constitutional Pervert

..and he’s not the only one.

You can be forgiven for not knowing the name of Arunava Majumdar: he is a distinguished energy engineer who currently runs the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA – E), and who until a few days ago was President Obama’s nominee (since last November) to become DOE’s new Undersecretary.  It was a great appointment.  By all accounts, Majumdar did a terrific job at ARPA – E.  He even received the support of a few Republicans.

And Rand Paul decided to hold up the appointment.  I have no idea why: maybe because Majumdar did not suitably genuflect at the shrine of Atlas Shrugged, or endorse Paul’s ridiculous theories about federal jurisdiction, or perhaps — as Dan noted the other day — because confirming any nominee to Energy would undercut the growing conservative effort to kill renewable energy.  Seeing that the nomination was going nowhere, Majumdar withdrew and resigned from his ARPA – E post, saying he wanted to return to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to spend more time with his family (a desire that somehow did not occur six months ago).

It’s possible that this was just a “hold”, which is another way of saying that a senator will gum up the works of the Senate, preventing it for a whole week from acting on anything.  But I doubt it: reports indicate that it was going to be filibustered by Republicans, probably because Majumdar actually did a good job.  This is a real hit: Majumdar’s departure is a “real kick in the stomach,” said former Rep. Bart Gordon, who as Chair of the House Science Committee helped create ARPA – E.

And this is why Paul, and the entire GOP caucus, are really constitutional perverts.  It’s one thing to say that the Senate must give its advice and consent to executive branch appointments: it’s quite another to say that a minority of the Senate can block those appointments after the entire Congress has created a government branch and told the President to execute the laws.  The President has the constitutional obligation to “take care” to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed: allowing filibusters of executive branch nominations subverts that obligation.

This should not be confused with the Republicans’ effort a few years ago to promote the “nuclear option” on judicial appointments.  For judicial appointments, considerations are different.  Judges’ life tenure is obviously one, but more importantly, it does not necessarily impinge on the the President’s constitutional obligations to execute the law for the Senate to block judicial appointments.

It’s premature to say that filibusters of executive branch appointments are unconstitutional: Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution gives each House of Congress the right to make its own rules, and the Senate’s Rule XXII allows for filibusters.  Instead, it is better to use a canon of construction for appointable positions: any statute creating an executive branch appointment should be presumed to call for majority rule on appointments unless it explicitly says otherwise.  If a Senate majority wishes to confirm someone, the Senate Majority Leader should ask the Presiding Officer for an opinion on the governing statute.  Without any explicit language alowing for a filibuster, the statute should be read as calling for an up-or-down vote. 

Over the long haul, this will allow for more Congressional input, because if these types of roadblocks continue, Presidents will simply make greater and greater use of recess appointments and circumvent Congress altogether.

As the nation’s political parties become more polarized — a trend that can almost exclusively be laid at the doorstep of the Republican Party — breaking through the executive branch appointment logjam is necessary.  As Time’s Fareed Zakaria has noted,

This polarization has resulted in paralysis. More than two years into the Obama Administration, hundreds of key positions in government remain vacant for lack of Senate confirmation. The Treasury Department had to handle the global financial crisis, recession, bank stress tests and automaker bailouts, as well as its usual duties, with about a dozen of its senior positions—almost its entire top management—vacant. Senate rules have been used, abused and twisted to allow constant delay and blockage. The filibuster, historically employed about once a decade, is now a routine procedure that allows the minority to thwart the will of the majority. In 2009, Senate Republicans filibustered a stunning 80% of major legislation.

This is no way to run a country. 

Whenever someone proposes reform of Senate procedure, a fair question to ask is: okay, but what if the show were on the other foot?  What if you were in the minority?  Wouldn’t you want a filibuster then?  My answer is unequivocal: no.  If a Republican (really) wins the Presidency, then he has a right to fill his administration without being blocked by an unrepresentative minority. 

As Henry Adams noted in his autobiography, “The true test of a reforming President is to return the Senate to decency.”  More than a hundred years later, that is still the task.

Comparing Canadian and US Environmental Law: Judicial Review

In a prior post, I talked a little about proposed changes to Canadian environmental laws that would roll back significant protections and procedural requirements.  I also talked about some of the differences between Canada and the United States that might be the basis for very different histories of environmental law in the two countries.  But there are two additional differences that I actually think are even more critical.  I’ll tackle one of them here.

US environmental law is much more generous in allowing for judicial review of decisionmaking by government agencies that is alleged to violate relevant environmental laws.  It is also much more generous in allowing private parties to enforce environmental laws against other private parties who are alleged to have committed violations.  The extreme example of this is the US Endangered Species Act which (and I am only slightly exaggerating here) essentially allows any one to sue any one else (including any government agency) for violating the law.  Many of these statutes (again, especially the ESA) have provisions that set tight deadlines for agency decisionmaking and allow private parties to sue agencies to compel them to act within those deadlines.

Why does this matter?  It means that it is much, much harder for government agencies – whether they are directly implementing the law in terms of management or regulatory decisions, or whether they are making decisions about whether to enforce the law against private parties – to use their discretion to overlook violations, or to interpret the law in ways that exempts their own behavior from the law, or even to simply delay in implementing the law.  In other words, it means substantive standards are much more likely to be met in practice, rather than just exist as words on paper. 

One good example from Canada helps illustrate the point – and here, I’m drawing on an excellent senior thesis that just got completed by an undergraduate political science major (Robert Shaffer) I advised here at Berkeley.  Canada enacted a stringent federal species at risk statute in the late 1990s (more than 20 years after the US enacted the ESA).  The provisions of the statute sound great on paper, but there is little remedy for citizens seeking to sue government agencies to force them to meet deadlines or otherwise act to implement or enforce the statute.  For instance, in the case of listing species, if a governmental advisory body calls for the listing of the species, the minister in charge has to make a decision within a certain time frame, or the species is automatically listed.  Yet when that advisory body called for the polar bear to be listed in 2008, the relevant minister evaded the deadlines by claiming that they did not technically “receive” the report until 2011.  In the US, when the Fish and Wildlife Service missed deadlines to respond to petitions to list the polar bear, environmental groups sued and won to force a timely decision.

That doesn’t mean that stringent judicial review and citizen suit provisions are always a good idea.  There may be good reasons we don’t always want the law enforced to the letter (think of speeding!).  Litigation is costly and time-consuming, and might displace cooperative or collaborative efforts to resolve problems that might be cheaper and quicker.  (Though it appears that in the case of the polar bear, the US process worked as quickly or quicker than Canada’s because litigation prevented administrative and political foot dragging.)  But if you think there is a serious risk of political pressure causing unwarranted underenforcement and weak implementation of environmental laws, then stringent judicial review and citizen suit provisions might well be a good idea.

How To Mobilize Public Support for Environmental Protection

To be politically sustainable, environmental law needs grassroots support.  Joan Blades, one of the founders of Move-On, recently spoke at Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group about her thoughts on political mobilization.  It’s well-worth a look.

 

Why Oil Companies Might Want to Kill Renewable Energy

Dan’s post about the connections among various efforts to decrease renewable energy production raises the question of why fossil fuel interests would want to take those steps.  One obvious answer is the potential for economic competition in the future – though to the extent that renewable energy continues to be more expensive than many fossil fuel options, that depends on (uncertain) predictions about future changes in the relative costs of the two categories.

Another, perhaps less obvious answer has to do with the political implications of a strong and growing renewable energy sector.  As that sector grows, it will create jobs, produce profits for owners and investors, pay taxes, etc.  All of that will give renewable energy not just more economic power, but also political power.  And the renewable energy sector may use that political power to push for a range of policies that could benefit it: subsidies and tax credits, the imposition of regulations that benefit the industry, the relaxation of regulations that hurt the industry.  There is a non-trivial possibility that many of those policies will hurt fossil fuel interests.  For instance, the renewable industry sector might want to push for more stringent renewable portfolio standards (in which regulated utilities are required by a state to produce a certain amount of power from renewable sources), or to get more states to adopt RPSs.  Or they might push for cap-and-trade or carbon tax measures at the state, regional, or national levels.  All of these would be dangerous to fossil fuel interests (much more so for coal and certain forms of oil production like tar sands than for natural gas).  So better to squash the renewable energy sector when it is still small, before it becomes a real political force.

There is some evidence that this political dynamic is important.  I have a draft paper that investigates the political campaign over Proposition 23 in California in the fall of 2010.  Proposition 23 would have effectively repealed the state’s new global warming regulations under AB 32.  That Proposition lost by a wide margin (almost 20 points!), even though California was one of the worst hit states in the recession.  Indeed, the Proposition lost even in some of the conservative counties in California – and California has some very conservative counties!  A key part of the campaign was that the interest group landscape was stacked against the proponents of Proposition 23 from the beginning.  Because of the long history of California’s efforts to encourage energy efficiency and renewable energy, not only was there already a substantial renewable energy industry in the state that could provide financial and political support opposing Proposition 23, but also most of the major corporate players within the state (such as the utilities) did not have an economic interest in supporting Proposition 23, and indeed many contributed to the campaign against.  As a result, almost all of the funding for the Proposition had to come from outside the state, specifically two Texas oil companies – giving opponents of the Proposition a golden campaign slogan: “Stop Texas Oil.”  That was a winning slogan in California.