The exasperations of US climate policy
American climate policy is a rather maddening thing. There is likely no other country on earth that has such a diverse range of prohibitive factors influencing its climate politics. In addition to being the second largest net fossil fuel consumer in the world and maintaining close to a quarter of the worldâs known coal reserves,1 the United States also has to contend with a range of secondary impediments that have made formal climate action yet impossible. Among them, the country features one of the most open systems of political lobbying in the developed world (where fossil energy interests can exert immense influence on policy); it has a highly disaggregated political system that is generally incapable of passing large-scale regulatory programs; it features a non-proportionally represented Senate where fossil fuel producing states can leverage lopsided power over climate and energy policy; it possesses an odd cultural dynamic that has bred the most powerful âclimate denialâ movement in the developed world; and it maintains a two-party political system in which one party has built its entire economic philosophy around anti-regulationism.
The result is that, despite having one of the most powerful and tenacious climate movements anywhere in the world, US climate policy has, on the face of it, been a wretched failure. Over the past quarter century, literally hundreds of climate bills have been defeated in Congress, and the US has developed a villainous reputation for obstructing and dramatically weakening global climate governance. Indeed, ask anyone who has been involved in the climate policy process in the US over the past quarter century (as a policymaker, activist, academic, or even passive observer), and they will tell you, almost without fail, that it is one of the most discouraging pursuits imaginable.
At the root of these frustrations is a concept commonly known as âneoliberalismâ. Though the concept will be further developed and articulated at length in Chapters 2 and 4, it will suffice here to note a few key points. Neoliberalism is, if nothing else, an idea â one that has come to dramatically reshape American political life since the late 1970s, along with many of the countryâs dominant institutions and governance practices. As an anti-regulationist and pro-business ideology, neoliberalism has reserved a special ire for environmental regulation, generally viewing it as costly, wasteful, and unnecessary, and in need of dramatic rollback in order to allow US business to remain profitable (Layzer 2014). Given that climate change arose as a relevant political issue at exactly the time of neoliberalismâs ideological ascendency in the US, it has struggled in a profound way to establish itself as an issue worthy of legislative action in Washington. Indeed, while many of the impediments noted above existed long before the 1980s (and would undoubtedly have proved vexing in the absence of neoliberalismâs ascendency), neoliberalism has interacted with these obstructions in a way that has enhanced their disruptive capacities, thus making congressional climate action impossible.
While there is certainly no denying these failures and frustrations, one of the central premises of this book is that there is actually considerably more to American climate policy than initially meets the eye. Indeed, as will be noted in the following chapters, climate policy in the US is substantially more dynamic, robust, and interventionist than one would expect of a neoliberal state trying to deal with a forbidding array of structural obstacles. But far from being at odds with Washingtonâs common depiction as a neoliberal state, much of this dynamism has arisen from the very tensions that neoliberal states face when attempting to create stable frameworks for accumulation and to address problems like climate change, energy security, and economic growth under neoliberal conditions. Seen through this lens, this book uses the case of climate change to help understand the range of reflexive strategies that neoliberal states have undertaken to deal with a wide array of basic contradictions within capitalism â for example, its under-consumptionist tendencies, class conflict, job creation, labour supply, environmental integrity, security, global competitiveness, etc. â under an ideology bent on dismantling the Keynesian mechanisms used to address these issues throughout the 20th century.
Rationale of the book
This book was animated in its earliest days by a seemingly simple question. I wanted to know what neoliberalism was âdoingâ to US climate policy. That is to say, what specifically has this ideological creed done to Washingtonâs capacity to govern perhaps the greatest public policy challenge in history? This seemed a worthwhile endeavour given that, while several existing analyses have already described the broader relationship between neoliberalism and climate policy (and have made undeniably brilliant contributions in so doing), they have, in my judgment, generally failed to capture the dynamics occurring in the worldâs archetypal neoliberal state â the US. By any measure, this appeared to be an odd oversight, and tended to suggest that these analyses might be missing something rather important about neoliberalismâs tangible impact.
These analyses can be grouped very crudely into two clusters. The first is a large body of critical political economy literature focused on the relationship between neoliberalism and environmental governance (e.g., Castree 2003; Heynen et al. 2007; Mansfield 2004). This work broadly argues that neoliberalism has produced responses to environmental problems that diverge from traditional forms of state regulation (so-called âcommand-and-controlâ mechanisms) and instead promotes interlinked processes of privatization of resource management systems and novel commodifications of nature. These processes are seen as leading to policies that are increasingly market-based and outside the scope of state management (beyond, of course, the stateâs massive role in constructing the markets in question) (Lohmann 2005). As an extension of this, a growing body of literature has focused specifically on neoliberalismâs impact on climate policy, and broadly argued that it is producing responses focused mainly on a progressive commodification of the earthâs atmosphere (e.g., Liverman 2004; Newell and Paterson 2010; Lohmann 2005). These processes are seen as occurring through the creation of emissions trading schemes and offset markets around carbon emissions â a claim which is validated by both the immense growth of these markets and their central place in international treaties and domestic policies.
The second body of thought is that which focuses on the concept of âecological modernizationâ. This work broadly aims to identify the means by which economies might undergo major socio-technical shifts in the way that they âmetabolizeâ nature, and thereby create a âvirtuous fusionâ of economic growth and environmental recovery (Mol et al. 2009). For most authors in this tradition, these shifts are generally achieved through active state planning and regulation (Christoff 1996; Hajer 1995). Authors in this tradition have generally suggested that it is considerably more plausible to pursue ecological modernization in âsocial democratic welfare statesâ than in âneoliberalâ ones like the US because of the latterâs market fundamentalist idealism, its notoriously combative relationship between states and markets (which tends to breed a stand-off between the environment and economy), and, in the specific case of the US, its non-conducive legislative system (Dryzek et al. 2002; Mol and Sonnenfeld 2000).
With these literatures shaping much of the conventional wisdom, debates about US climate policy have generally gone in two directions. First, it is generally expected that, as a neoliberal state, Washingtonâs policy options are fairly limited to market-based commodification schemes, and are unlikely to include other forms of progressive ecological modernization strategies (Schreurs 2002; Cass 2006; Driesen 2010).2 And second, in light of its failure to pass any significant climate legislation at the federal level over the past quarter century (market-based or otherwise), the dominant tendency has been to largely dismiss Washington as a âdo-nothing laggardâ on climate, one that is structurally and ideologically incapable of addressing the issue in any serious or systematic manner (Selin and VanDeveer 2009; Driesen 2010).
Yet as the following chapters will underscore, these assumptions have largely failed to correctly depict contemporary US climate policy. Indeed, despite its commonly accepted title as the âarchetypalâ neoliberal state, we see in American climate policy neither the types of system-wide commodification schemes suggested by the literature, nor an inability to pursue ecological modernization strategies. At a theoretical level, this book aims to understand why this has been the case, and what insights it might provide about the nature of neoliberalism, capitalist states, and the policy process within them. At a practical level, its goal is to determine how (and to what extent) environmental advocates can use and exploit certain tendencies within neoliberal states to achieve more effective forms of climate policy, and to consider the potential hazards associated with doing so.
The argument
There is no denying that the United States does not have a very impressive formal federal climate policy. Indeed, compared to other states across the developed world, American climate policy is most striking for all the basic components that it lacks. For example, it does not have: a federal renewable energy standard, formal national emissions targets, a system-wide price on carbon, a national feed-in tariff or net metering program, a dedicated and secure pool of federal funds for aggressively deploying clean energy infrastructure, a national transportation strategy focused on cleaner technologies, etc. The list goes on and on. Yet in place of that, there is nevertheless something else going on â something that is not at all inconsequential.
As Chapters 5 and 6 will explore at length, behind all of the well-publicized congressional failure on climate, Washington has deployed an impressively large and sophisticated developmental state apparatus aimed at developing, commercializing, and deploying a massive array of novel clean energy technologies. This apparatus has been supported and buttressed by a complicated patchwork of subsidies, tax incentives, sub-national regulatory efforts, federal litigation, and executive action aimed at creating a base level of economic demand for these clean technologies â none of which have ever been formally legislated in Washington.
While the overall success and efficacy of this project remains a far cry from what it could be, its very existence within the worldâs archetypal neoliberal state would appear to provide cause for confusion. Yet the argument put forth in this book is that these forms of intervention are not at all antithetical to the depiction of the US as a neoliberal state. Rather, they are precisely the types of odd arrangements we should expect of states trying to deal with problems like climate change under conditions of neoliberalism. To understand why these types of responses emerge, this book argues that we need to start from a more nuanced conception of (a) the historic role of the state in capitalist economies, (b) how neoliberalism functions as a pragmatic governing philosophy, and (c) the historic nature of policy development in the US.
With regard to the first point, the book begins from the basic assumption that all states in market economies maintain the first-principle goal of actively fostering capital accumulation. They do so for the rather simple reason that both the material means (e.g., tax revenue) and social legitimacy (e.g., employment, security, rising living standards, etc.) required to sustain states in capitalist societies is derived from economic growth and capital accumulation (OâConnor 1971; Jessop 1990; Poulantzas 1975). Any state that ignores this duty will not be a state for long. The argument laid out in this book is that, as with an array of other policies, this compulsion to foster accumulation is the primary force informing Washingtonâs response to climate change. While part of this response takes the form of a reactionary effort to bolster conventional US energy production, the sheer size of the multi-trillion dollar 21st century clean energy market has made it impossible for policymakers to ignore.
With regard to neoliberalism, this book argues (against the conventional wisdom) that its primary influence does not reside in its penchant to promote market-based forms of governance â though obviously commodification schemes do stand as a key element of this broader effort to promote capital accumulation. Rather, it argues that the literatures making this claim have tended to operationalize neoliberalism far too much at the level of ideology and rhetoric, and thus have overemphasized its commitment to market fundamentalism. A key claim of this book is that, despite the claims of neoliberal advocates, neoliberalism is not tantamount to âmarket fundamentalismâ. Neoliberalism (and businessesâ embrace of it) has not been premised on a principled belief in the rollback of state power or the creation of a more competitive marketplace. Rather, business has strategically supported the notion of market fundamentalism as a means to resist undesirable regulation and obtain increasingly favourable tax treatment (Steger and Roy 2010; Galbraith 2009; Baker 2006, 2011). To the extent that commodification schemes contradict this preference (because, indeed, they impose new costs on industry), they are notoriously difficult to establish in staunch neoliberal states like the US, Australia, Canada, etc. (MacNeil 2016).
To really get to the heart of neoliberalismâs influence requires us, first and foremost, to reflect on its modern origins. Beginning in the late 1970s, neoliberalism emerged as, in effect, an American-led response to a crisis of over-accumulation in the global economy. The practical objective of neoliberal governance in this context was not purely ideological, but also quite pragmatic. Overcoming the crisis involved a series of restructuring efforts on the part of the state. Included among these are some of the more obvious elements we associate with neoliberalism (intensifying competitive pressures to restructure the economy; liberalizing and deregulating markets; expanding financeâs role in disciplining states, businesses and consumers to the end of prioritizing accumulation; and removing barriers to carrying this out â above all by shifting the balance of class forces against organized labour). But it also reserved a massive role for the state in actively enhancing what we might call the âinfrastructureâ of capitalism (e.g., by taking a bigger role in undertaking basic and applied research, actively building new markets, commercializing new technologies, expanding global capitalism into new corners of the globe, implementing facilitative social and economic policies). A central thesis of this book is that neoliberalism thus encompasses both the âderegulatory stateâ and a more actively interventionist âdevelopmental stateâ â both working toward the same goal of enhanced capital accumulation.
To understand how this dynamic actually plays out requires us to think about the historic nature of policy development within the US state, and determine what arrangements are made to allow the stateâs developmental tendencies to thrive in a situation where Congress prohibits it from doing so. This book argues that, because states are such large entities, and because the US system features so many different points of access to the policy process beyond congressional legislation, it is entirely predictable that these tendencies will find expression somewhere. Chapters 5 and 6 provide a map for understanding how these points of access have been selected and exploited.
Putting this together, this book argues that the odd state of US climate policy (where an interventionist developmental state is masked by a quarter century of formal regulatory failure) is symptomatic of a tension within neoliberalism itself. On the one hand, the developmental state is trying to actively foster capital accumulation by using large amounts of state power to promote innovation and dominance in the burgeoning 21st-century clean energy market â and exploiting numerous points of access to the policy process to achieve this goal. On the other hand, the deregulatory state is creating a condition where fossil energy cannot be systematically regulated â leading to a situation where these novel clean technologies struggle to compete and receive the funding and support required to nurture them. The result is the complex state of US climate policy we see today. Washington remains loaded with potential when it comes to decarbonizing its domestic economy and the global economy more broadly. And y...
