Exploring Partisan Divides on Climate and Energy Policy, with David Spence

Notable Quotes

• Increased partisanship has made passing legislation more difficult: “If a majority of people want to see stronger climate policy, why aren’t we seeing it now? The answer is that the partisan environment in Congress has changed. When the electorate has changed in ways that make it harder for those … groundswells of support leading to legislation, it’s harder for those things to happen these days than in the past.” (6:22)
• Large campaign donations tend not to influence the results of elections: “We do not find, certainly in voting behavior, that members of Congress tend to do what their biggest campaign donors would want. In the elections that rich people try to win with massive campaign donations, we find that they often fail in those efforts. The empirical literature doesn’t match the folk wisdom, which generally supports the idea that the system is rigged.” (13:50)
• Conversations across party lines could help boost support for climate policy: “If we can have more conversations across ideological and partisan boundaries, not just about climate, but about anything, we can start to burst these caricatures that we seem to have of one another in our mind’s eye … All it takes is influencing a relatively small number of people to make a difference politically. Of course, there are a lot of people who aren’t going to change their partisan affiliation, but even if they don’t change their affiliation, if some of them could speak to their Republican representative and make it clear to them that these issues are important to them, perhaps it could make a difference in the effort to cobble together majorities in favor of strong climate policy in Congress.” (18:51)

Top of the Stack

• Climate of Contempt: How to Rescue the US Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship by David B. Spence
• Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe
• Deep canvassing idea from Joshua Kalla and David Broockman
• The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea by Jack E. Davis

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi.

Today, we are talking with David Spence, the Rex G. Baker Centennial Chair in Natural Resources Law at the University of Texas at Austin. David is the author of a new book called Climate of Contempt: How to Rescue the US Energy Transition from Voter Partisanship.

In today's conversation, I'll ask David to help us understand how and why climate and energy have become such divisive topics in US politics and what strategies advocates might use in trying to build support for climate action. We'll also talk about public opinion surveys on climate and energy and assess whether the political divisions on climate are symptoms of a larger problem. Stay with us.

David Spence from the University of Texas at Austin, welcome to Resources Radio.

David Spence: Thanks very much, Daniel. Great to be here.

Daniel Raimi: I'm thrilled to have you on the show. You actually hosted me on your podcast like five, six, seven years ago when my book came out. Now, I have the privilege of hosting you on our podcast when your book comes out. Congratulations on the book.

David Spence: Thanks very much.

Daniel Raimi: David, we ask all of our guests when they come on the show how they got interested in energy and environmental topics, whether that interest started as a kid or whether it emerged later in life. How did that happen for you?

David Spence: This will give away my age, but I came of age in the 1970s, sort of during the heyday of environmentalism as a social movement. Back then, it was a bipartisan one. I was old enough to be aware of the passage of a whole bunch of important environmental statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other environmental laws that we rely upon today. Then, in college, I was living about 30 miles away from Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant, when it melted down. That sort of piqued my interest in energy and the relationship between energy and the environment, and that interest just never went away.

Daniel Raimi: That's super interesting. We have actually had several guests on the show who are similar in age to you who were sort of galvanized by nuclear energy issues, like Three Mile Island and other ones in that era. That's fascinating.

I'd love to ask you a question about a high-level background on the book, and the book, of course, is called Climate of Contempt. Why did you want to write a book like this? What are some of the goals that you're hoping to accomplish with a book on such a challenging and divisive topic?

David Spence: The “why” really relates to my sense, which a lot of people have, that climate change is an important, complicated problem, and that transitioning to a lower-carbon economy is important to do; and frankly, this is an auspicious time to do it, because technological change has made a lot of alternatives affordable that didn't use to be affordable.

Among the community of people that share those views, I had this sense that the modern media environment was distorting some people's understanding of the energy transition as a political challenge; there was a whole lot of cynicism and a sort of populist understanding of this political challenge that either ignored or undervalued the role that angry, tribally partisan voters play in determining what members of Congress do. I was seeing both in the popular debate and in the scholarly debates, or at least some of the scholarly debates, an undervaluing of or an underappreciation of that point.

That is why I decided to write the book. In terms of what I hope to accomplish, it's to inject that diagnosis and that perspective into those discussions, and in particular, to bring a lot of political science and social science research that I think deserves more attention into the scholarly debate.

Daniel Raimi: That makes a lot of sense, and I certainly agree with your diagnosis. It's a huge challenge. Can you give us a little bit of history, as you do in the book? How did we get here? What do you think are some of the main culprits for divisions on energy and climate? You mentioned the media environment, if you'd like to go into more detail on that or any other causal factors that are contributing to the polarization that we see on climate and energy.

David Spence: That's a big question, so it's probably going to require a bigger answer. Historically, members of Congress have managed to pass major regulatory legislation when there has been bottom up pressure from voters to do so, and when the partisan environment in Congress is receptive to that pressure. Those conditions haven't been simultaneously present all that frequently in American history, and as you noted, the first part of my book runs through the history of the creation and evolution of the regulatory state—the energy regulatory state.

When we look at that history, we see that it's really this voter pressure and Congress responding to voter pressure that's really necessary. In situations where the partisan alignment is right, they can do things. They can pass major regulatory legislation. The question becomes, if a majority of people want to see stronger climate policy, why aren't we seeing it now? The answer is that the partisan environment in Congress has changed. When the electorate has changed in ways that make it harder for those—what we call “republican moments”—groundswells of support leading to legislation, it's harder for those things to happen these days than in the past.

There's really three things at work here, and two of them, I think, are widely understood and accepted. The first one you mentioned in your question, which is that the parties have moved apart ideologically both in Congress and in the electorates. This began in the late twentieth century after the Reagan administration, when the Republican Party started to move to the ideological right, and more Republicans moved away from what historians had called a “New Deal consensus,” bipartisan support for certain kinds of regulation and provision of public goods like highways and things like that, done by the federal government. The Republicans embraced a more antigovernment, pro-market philosophy after the Reagan years. That embrace got tighter and tighter over time.

The second phenomenon is that voters within congressional districts sorted themselves into much more ideologically homogeneous congressional districts. When I say voters sorted themselves, they had some help from state legislatures, as well. There's a combination of gerrymandering going on and left-leaning voters congregating in cities and conservative voters in rural areas. The combination of these two factors have created a sort of urban-rural divide between the parties.

There's also, I think, an education-level divide, what the Cook Political Report calls the “diploma divide.” This means that Democrats and Republicans really don't encounter each other as often as they used to. The fact that the congressional districts are so ideologically homogeneous means that more districts are "safe" for one party or the other, which tends to produce more ideologically extreme representatives in those kinds of districts.

We don't see much ideological overlap between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. In fact, we see none by official measures of ideology. That leads into the third factor, and this is where the modern media environment comes into play in a bigger way, and that's the rise of a kind of populism and sort of tribal partisanship. I'm using the word tribal as shorthand for what political scientists would call “affective negative” partisanship. It's affective in the sense that belonging to the party is part of your identity. You belong to the party because that's who you are more than because they have a set of policy preferences that you prefer. It's negative in the sense that, as we measure it, more people are concerned about stopping the other party, opposing what the other party is and wants, than they are attracted to their own party.

That kind of partisan tribalism means that politicians and others who would lobby us can appeal to those fears of the other party as a way to promote their objectives, to influence us, to lobby us, and to turn us against one another. It's this new media environment that has made that much easier to do.

In the old days, we would get our news from a nightly newscast that was 30 minutes in length or a daily paper; maybe we had a weekly or monthly news magazine. We had all kinds of time to digest the news, to talk about it with our friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors in-person with all of the sort of cues and context that in-person conversation entails. Now, the news comes at us like a fire hose, and we are afraid to miss out on some piece of news, so we skim; we look at headlines. A lot of the news that comes at us is not curated very well. It's not produced by professional journalists. It's designed to persuade us more than it's designed to educate us. This is driving us into these negative partisan attitudes whereby we misunderstand some of the complexity and nuance of complicated issues like the energy transition and climate policy. Just as importantly, we misunderstand each other. We start to get these jaundiced views of the other party and what they want.

Daniel Raimi: That's a helpful background and context. I'm happy you defined that term, “tribalism,” a little bit more. I often find it funny that people use that term to describe the division between Democrats and Republicans. As someone who has gotten to know a decent number of Native American Tribes over the last few years in some of the work that I do, these Tribes get along with each other much better than Democrats and Republicans often do. So, I always giggle a little bit.

David Spence: I have a lengthy explanatory footnote about how the choice to use that word really references historians' use of it to apply to all sorts of tribal societies that are not necessarily Native American or even from the developing world, but include Slavs, Picts, Celts, and Normans. I try to be conscious of that issue.

Daniel Raimi: You mentioned a moment ago this bottom-up-versus-top-down problem. One of the arguments in the book is that the misinformation among voters and the lack of drive among voters for climate action may actually be a bigger problem to taking climate action than the views of political elites in Washington, or elsewhere. I think that might be surprising to some listeners. Can you talk a little bit about the body of evidence that leads you to the conclusion that it's the voters and their lack of will on climate that's a bigger impediment than the elites?

David Spence: There's sort of two parts to that. One is the political science literature and other social science empirical literature that has struggled to document or provide evidence for the idea that economic elites control the policy process. I go through this literature in Chapters 1 and 2 of the book. We do not find, certainly in voting behavior, that members of Congress tend to do what their biggest campaign donors would want. In the elections rich people try to win with massive campaign donations, we find that they often fail in those efforts. The empirical literature doesn't match the folk wisdom, which generally supports the idea that the system is rigged.

For people on the left, it looks like it's rigged in favor of economic elites. For people on the right, or at least the populist sort of MAGA right, it looks like it's rigged by political and intellectual elites. We don't find much evidence in the social science literature to support either generalization. Members of Congress care about what voters want. Now that many of them are in safe seats, the voters they care about are the members of their party, not their average constituent. That makes them worried about losing a primary.

In the 85 percent of congressional districts that are safe in that way, the representative is more concerned about avoiding that result than they are about representing the average constituent and winning the general election. They don't have any risk of losing that general election because of the overwhelming partisan advantage they have at the start.

In terms of angry partisan voters, the evidence there is quite a massive body of some political science, some communications scholars, some psychology and cultural anthropology scholars. I go through a lot of that literature in chapter four of the book.

Basically, we are learning that the online environment mixes with well-established cognitive biases we already knew about, and the efforts of lobbyists to scare us and appeal to our lesser angels in ways are affecting political behavior in pretty profound ways. They always tried to do these things, but never until the existence of the internet and social media could they do so instantly, constantly, and at a massive scale the way they can now.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. Changing the subject a little bit to the issue of popular support for climate action or energy transition, you note in the book that a majority of Americans in polls accept the view that climate change is real; it's a real problem, it's caused by humans. But when you look at how people prioritize energy and climate issues, it's often pretty low on their priority list.

In 2024 polling from Pew that I looked up, only 36 percent of Americans said that addressing climate should be a top priority for the federal government, and that was 18th on the list of 20 issues. We had some survey work that RFF recently released which found that only 21 percent of Americans consider climate change to be extremely important and something that would motivate them to go out and vote for or against their candidate. I'm curious how you think about that issue and what strategies you think might be effective in helping climate become a voting issue for voters.

David Spence: Those data are consistent with the way the public has ranked environmental issues for a long, long time. It tends to fall down the ranking when people report on what they care about.

There's a couple rejoinders to this. One is that those are averages. Of course, there are people who prioritize climate. The prescription we offer in the book is really borrowing from other people and summarizing another large body of research that recommends people talk to each other across ideological boundaries about climate and energy to try and dispel these misimpressions I mentioned in the previous answer.

It only takes a relatively small percentage of votes to make a difference in our evenly divided political world. In those 15 percent of districts that are competitive, a lot of people in those districts are sort of in the ideological middle. If you look at the way Pew Research or the Yale climate group categorize voters in both of those taxonomies, you see about a third of voters that we could infer are persuadable on these issues. If we can have more conversations across ideological and partisan boundaries, not just about climate, but about anything, we can start to burst these caricatures that we seem to have of one another in our mind's eye.

Among the most disturbing data in the book are the way people in the two parties talk about one another and how that's changed over time. How much more they—and I don't choose this word lightly—hate each other, or hate the other party and the people in it. We need to burst those perceptions of one another. All it takes is influencing a relatively small number of people to make a difference politically.

Of course, there are a lot of people who aren't going to change their partisan affiliation, but even if they don't change their affiliation, if some of them could speak to their Republican representative and make it clear to them that these issues are important to them, perhaps it could make a difference in the effort to cobble together majorities in favor of strong climate policy in Congress.

Daniel Raimi: I'm so glad you mentioned that last example of reaching out to your congressperson, because as you say, this face-to-face, one-on-one engagement you prescribe as the most effective route to making progress here. I'm just hoping you can put some meat on those bones. Realistically, how does that happen in the real world? I was in Ohio last week, and I happened to be in a conversation with someone from a coal community in Indiana, and we had this conversation about climate change. It did not go well despite my best efforts. So, I'm curious: How does this happen at scale?

David Spence: I go through some hypothetical examples, even sort of scripts, in the last chapter of the book. Again, these are approaches that I am citing as recommendations from a lot of other scholars from several different disciplines. I'll mention a few.

Many people have heard of Katharine Hayhoe. She's a climate scientist who specializes in climate communication and has written an entire book on this subject. Her prescription is remarkably similar to the advice we get from a couple of political scientists, Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, who have done what they call deep canvassing; which is remarkably similar to the advice from Kwame Appiah, a philosopher at New York University, which is remarkably similar to a whole bunch of other people who have studied these questions.

They're saying that you don't enter into these conversations hoping to convince the other person to come over to your point of view within that same first conversation. They're about building a relationship and listening—what communication scholars would call “active” listening, meaning actually listening, not just waiting for your turn to talk, and avoiding declaratory statements and starting with open questions. "Why do you feel that way? What is it that concerns you about the Inflation Reduction Act? Why don't you think that a wind farm would be a good thing in this county?" Then, you hear what they have to say and you empathize with whatever concern they express, and then you ask more questions.

This is the prescription that seems to be what works in the world of persuasion and influence, but it involves the possibility that you won't convince the other person. Instead, you'll just understand one another a little bit better. Maybe the next time you have a conversation, a little bit more persuasion can happen. It's slow, it is iterative, and it's one on one, but everything is relative. The kind of rhetorical approaches that some people advise that involve shaming, naming, condemnation, anger, and all the things we see on Twitter don't seem to be working. The key is to get voters who insist on stronger climate policy from their members of Congress. That only can happen if voters change.

Daniel Raimi: One of the really interesting things about the book and this conversation about persuasion, influence, and controversial topics is that climate change is one of many controversial topics in our extremely polarized political environment. There's gun control, there's abortion, there's immigration. There's many policies that we could think of that have a similarly deep divide between the parties.

I'm curious how you see climate change fitting in with those other controversial topics where I imagine a prescription for overcoming the barriers would be similar to the one on climate change: a conversation, listening to the other side, being deliberate, and taking time to have conversations with people who we might disagree with. I'm curious how climate fits into those broader sets of controversial issues. Is there something special about climate, something different that makes it more amenable to having some effect in achieving the goals that you describe in the book? Or is it similar to the other controversial topics we have in our society?

David Spence: That's a great question. I used to think that it was different. In some ways, I still do. In other words, if you look at the way people who measure political ideology in Congress measure it, they measure it along two different dimensions. One is what they would call a regulatory or economic-regulation dimension. The other is a social-cultural dimension. Regulatory issues would be in the first dimension and culture-war issues would be in the second dimension.

As you probably know, Daniel, the Republican Party has started to talk about climate change the same way they talk about culture-war issues. They're now folding it into these cultural-identity narratives. They call it woke capitalism or woke capital. That means Democrats have to engage that framing in some way.

In terms of the prescription, regardless of which dimension you put it in, I think the prescription is very similar. What you're trying to do is help people understand what you really are, what your side really is all about. The fact that we are all sort of doing this online in front of a computer screen, usually in very ideological, homogenous social media communities, prevents us from understanding each other and the other side accurately, and helps feed these caricatures that we build up in our mind's eye of the other party. It makes it seem like these conversations are futile when in fact, sometimes they are, but often they are not. Now, I tend to think, at least in terms of the prescription, as being the same as these more volatile culture-war questions.

The other difference with climate change is that a lot of the people in rural communities, if we have these kinds of productive conversations, they're going to be had as the effects of climate change hit them ever more severely. We're going to see crop insurance get more expensive or become unavailable. It's going to be harder to get a mortgage on property and so on. Perhaps, unfortunate events will complement the kind of dialogue that I'm recommending here.

Daniel Raimi: That's a good point. Those climate impacts certainly are mounting, and we're seeing their impacts, right? The challenges of homeowners insurance in Florida and California come to mind as making the point you're making exactly. As those challenges migrate to more rural communities, maybe people will see things in a different light.

David, this has been a fascinating conversation, and the book is fascinating. Again, it's called Climate of Contempt. I'd encourage people to check it out.

I'd love to ask you, aside from your own book, what you would encourage people to read, related to the environment or energy, or it can just be something that you think is really great. David, what's on the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

David Spence: I read a lot of history, although some of it is environmental history. Often, I'm finding books that have already been around for a while. I'm not hitting the New York Times bestseller list at the time that it's on the list, but one book that I just finished that I really enjoy that hits both historical and environmental themes is a book called The Gulf. It's a history of the Gulf of Mexico, both ecologically and then socioeconomically, as well, so the Gulf itself and Gulf Coast communities.

I really enjoyed the book. It includes some energy policy stuff, as you might expect, in terms of what the oil industry has done to parts of the Gulf, particularly in Louisiana and the petrochemical industry. I would recommend that for listeners to the Resources Radio podcast. Some of them probably have already read it because I think it did win a Pulitzer Prize or some big award. I think that's probably the best answer I can come up with to your question.

Daniel Raimi: That sounds fascinating. I just looked it up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's called The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea by Jack Davis, published in 2017. We'll have a link to that book in the show notes and of course, we'll have a link to your book, Climate of Contempt, in the show notes, as well.

I just want to say one more time, thank you so much, David, for coming onto the show, and for sharing some information about this really fascinating, complex book. We really appreciate it.

David Spence: My pleasure, Daniel.

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