Building winning climate coalitions: Evidence from U.S. states

Abstract

Liberal-leaning U.S. states have been at the forefront of climate policy action, despite continued political power of fossil fuel interests. We argue that two shifts have fundamentally changed the interest group politics of decarbonization in the U.S., and enabled more ambitious state-level climate policy. First, the pro-climate organizational landscape has broadened due to clean energy deployment, greater philanthropic support, the emergence of mass mobilization, and rise of environmental justice groups. Second, falling clean energy costs enhance opportunities to fracture fossil fuel coalitions, as some carbon-intensive interests make investments towards a low-carbon future. We argue that these developments highlight the importance of building and maintaining broad pro-climate coalitions, and fracturing fossil fuel opposition through policy designs that garner support from carbon-intensive interests with decarbonization options. We leverage stakeholder interviews to study climate policymaking in Colorado, Illinois, and New York in the aftermath of Democrats taking unified control of these state governments in 2018. Generally, policy enactment also depended on the formation of broad pro-climate coalitions that included both professionalized and grassroots environmental groups. In addition, designing bills that brought industrial labor unions and electric utilities to positions of support or neutrality was critical to reducing the ability of fossil fuel coalitions to block new policies. Overall, our analysis indicates the emergence of greater opportunities to pass ambitious decarbonization policies, as the interest group politics of climate move from fossil fuel dominance to a more contested landscape.