PODCAST | ep11 | with Dustin Tingley, Jeff Colgan, and Aleksandra Conevska
Green technology has come a long way, to the extent that it can, in theory, be scaled up to solve the world’s energy problems. If this is true, then why does the US lag so far behind in transitioning away from fossil fuels? This episode addresses the politics of climate change by looking at the sources of public distrust. To frame the discussion, three scholars investigate the nature of major economic transformations, the youth movement, and what we can learn from other countries.
Listen to episode #11 (52:08) by clicking the play button below:
Traveling into the heart of US fossil fuel communities, Dustin Tingley reports on the work of his team to uncover the sentiments of the citizens who will be most affected when fossil fuel plants are closed. The common theme is a lack of belief that the government will offer a social safety net when workers lose their jobs and when towns lose their revenue.
Jeff Colgan takes us through some major energy transitions of the past and explains why green energy is different. He also points to strategies citizens in other countries have leveraged to move their governments forward.
Drawing on original research, Aleksandra Conevska explores differences between youth and adult political behavior regarding climate action, and separately on the unintended consequences of green party politics. Ending on a hopeful note, the group explains there are definitely new green jobs on the horizon, especially in the trades, and it’s time to give vocational education more attention.
Host:
Erin Goodman, Director, Weatherhead Scholars Program.
Guests:
Dustin Tingley, Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Climate Change. Professor of Government, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs, Brown University.
Aleksandra Conevska, Graduate Affiliate, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Climate Change. PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Producer/Director:
Michelle Nicholasen, Editor and Content Producer, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Related Links:
- Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University
- “International Cooperation and Natural Disasters: Evidence from Trade Agreements” by Aleksandra Conevska (International Studies Quarterly, 2021).
- “Weathering Electricity Demand? Seasonal Variation in Electricity Consumption among Off-Grid Households in Rural India” by Aleksandra Conevska et al. (Energy Research & Social Science, 2020).
- Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse by Dustin Tingley and Alexander F. Gazmararian, forthcoming, Cambridge University Press.
- Sailing the Water's Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy by Dustin Tingley and Helen Milner, (Princeton University Press, 2016)
- Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order by Jeff D. Colgan (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Transcript
ERIN GOODMAN: Welcome to the Epicenter podcast from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I'm your host, Erin Goodman, Director of the Weatherhead Scholars Program.
Today we're talking about the politics of climate change and what is delaying our transition to cleaner energy.
There's good news and bad news about climate change. The good news is that most of us can agree on one thing-- the energy transition must happen. We have the technology to transition away from fossil fuels, and it can be scaled up. The bad news is that there are barriers, and those barriers come from people, industry, and government. You could say that saving our planet is not so much about the technology anymore. It's about politics and policies.
We've heard about conservative interest groups that stall new energy projects, but that's not the only resistance. When fossil fuel plants close, jobs will be lost and whole communities will be affected. And this process has already begun to some extent. How governments respond to the economic and social impacts will be the linchpin of a durable energy transition both in the US and across the globe.
Today we'll be talking about these questions with our three scholars. Dustin Tingley is Professor of Government in the Government Department at Harvard University. He is chair of the Weatherhead Center's Research Cluster on climate change and he's co-authored a book that comes out later this year, Uncertain Futures-- How to Unlock the Climate Impasse.
Jeff Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. His research focuses on international order, especially as related to energy and the environment. His latest book, published in September 2021, is Partial Hegemony-- Oil, Politics, and International Order.
Aleksandra Conevska is a graduate affiliate in the Weatherhead's Research Cluster on climate change and a third year PhD student in the Department of Government. Her work focuses broadly on the political economy of climate change, energy, and environmental degradation.
Saving the planet requires a massive economic upheaval. Our society has weathered other economic transitions. For example, going from wood to coal to oil, or the abolishment of slavery, automation, globalization.
Jeff, to start with you, have we learned anything from these historical transitions?
JEFF COLGAN: Yes. Well, one thing we've learned is that not all economic transitions are the same. Some of them happen in a very sweeping way. So if you think about the change from cars or horse buggies to cars and imagine photos of New York City in about 1905 to, say about 1925, you would see massive change between those 20 years. The photos would look completely different with cars completely replacing the old technology.
But with most energy transitions, they don't look like that, where one technology comes in and just sweeps away the stuff that came before. And so if you think back to, say the beginning of the Industrial Revolution when humanity first started to transition away from wood and other biomass for its primary energy source to coal as the kind of key driver of industry and transportation, what happened is that we used a lot more coal, but we didn't stop using the wood and the biomass.
In fact, today, the planet as a whole, we're still using more wood and biomass today than we were back then. And the exact same thing happened when we made the switch from coal to oil as the primary energy source for especially transportation, where we are today using way more coal than we ever were in the 19th century.
And so what's happened typically is that one new energy source comes in, but we don't get rid of the old ones. And that's the challenge that we face with renewables is that we are looking for a historically unprecedented energy transition where we want to switch to renewables, but not just to grow the renewables themselves. We want to get rid of the fossil fuels. We want to stop consuming fossil fuels. And that's something that markets are not likely to do on their own. That's not been the pattern of energy transitions in the past.
ERIN GOODMAN: So if we stop consuming fossil fuels and rely on renewables, according to one report, in the US at least, 1.7 million people in the fossil fuel and energy industries would lose jobs. Dustin, when you were researching your upcoming book, you and colleagues went into fossil fuel communities that will be affected by the energy transition. Can you tell us who you spoke to and what themes emerged from these conversations?
DUSTIN TINGLEY: I think it's really important to understand the transitions that are going to happen from the perspective of local communities that are on the front lines of them. And that was part of the reason why we wanted to go and listen to those perspectives in some of the regions, because it can be very tempting to kind of see this all from a very top down perspective. And when you have a very top down perspective, you're not necessarily going to identify the problems as they are seen by the people that are in communities that are going to need to transition into new industries, new areas. And so that listening was very important to us.
We went all over the place in the United States, from Powder River Basin, which is the largest coal producer in the country now out West, to areas of Appalachia. We would go to county fairs, which are really the sort of heartbeat of a lot of these communities, and spoke to local economic development people, spoke to superintendents of middle schools and high schools, listened to people that were still employed in the fossil sector, or, quite frankly, have been laid off from working in the fossil fuel sector because that is an industry, especially coal, that has been in decline for quite a while. The mechanization of coal, for example, is the main source of most lost jobs. It's not renewable energy. Right?
And so the stories that they tell are really important and fascinating. One of the themes, just building off of Jeff's comments, was that a fast transition is scary. It is just scary. And it's scary for lots of reasons.
One example is that people would oftentimes want to show us pictures of their local football stadium. And we're sitting there, why are you showing, why are you showing us pictures of your local football stadium? Well, that local football stadium and the libraries have been paid for by revenue from fossil fuel extraction. And so when you say you're going to take away these industries, people then think, well, wait, that's also going to take away this economic foundation that these communities are based upon.
And doing that quickly, that is something that is really hard to stomach. And I think that's something that people need to understand, that the multifaceted ways that this transition will impact things, this isn't just about buying an EV. This is about transforming an entire economic system that extends well beyond the direct use of energy itself.
And so some of the themes that came out were, how are we going to manage that? How are we going to manage that transition? Where is the revenue going to come from? Our jobs from renewable energy, are they viable? Are they done by local workers? Do they pay as well?
I mean, these are all very reasonable questions for people to ask. And that is something that was top of mind.
It was also something that they had real concerns about the credibility of promises made by governments in order to support them in that transition. Right? The history has not always been one of governments being able to effectively manage these transitions. Take globalization, for example.
So globalization and free trade, the deal was always that you're going to have this expanding free trade and that's going to bring lots of efficiencies and rising tides, lifts all boats and all of this. And the people who would be displaced, the sort of losers if you will, the people that are going to be displaced, that we're going to be able to compensate them, we're going to be able to help them reinvest in new careers, things like this.
And so we had programs like Trade Adjustment Assistance. But many of those programs have been a total failure. Their budgets were cut. The Trade Adjustment Assistance almost just ended, but it was revitalized in an omnibus spending bill just recently.
So these communities has real concerns about the credibility of government commitments to make them whole in this transition. And that's something that they're going to struggle with.
And at the same time, they have fossil fuel companies who are perpetuating myths and disinformation that further complicates this. And so these are very wise people, these are very rational people who are asking lots of great questions about where are they on the other side of this transition.
ERIN GOODMAN: So these questions make me wonder if this is an issue that could only be solved through generational change. Is it realistic to think that there will be enough green energy jobs based on wind and solar energy, for example, for all these displaced workers to transition to? So let's start with you, Aleksandra, and others, please feel free to jump in.
Aleksandra, you study the youth movement. How are young people feeling about jobs? Are they optimistic about getting jobs in this sector, or do they feel disillusioned as previous generations might?
ALEKSANDRA CONEVSKA: Yes, this is an important question. And I think to start to think about this, you have to think about the fact that young people are, unfortunately, pessimistic about receiving or getting jobs at all in this economy. And I think that on average, a lot of young people would love to work in green energy, but it's not at all obvious to them that the political momentum is there and can be sustained. And so the long-term career options do not seem stable. They don't seem steady. And as Dustin's book argues, it's not credible. And that includes youth.
And so for young people, like my surveys indicate this as well, not only is the planet burning and the physical world feels completely unstable, but it also doesn't feel like there's necessarily a place for them to strive in the economy. And only like one in three young people in my work feel that their education has prepared them for work addressing the impacts of climate change or working in the green sector. And so our education systems also need to be revitalized to show young people that there are integrative ways, there are-- every field has an opportunity to work in the climate change arena.
ERIN GOODMAN: Let's stay with jobs for a moment. If the sector is going to lose, say 1.7 million jobs, but we hear that the US will need 1 million more electricians to get everybody on the grid, doesn't this seem like a solvable problem? Doesn't it open the door for retraining?
DUSTIN TINGLEY: So I think it's more than training. And I'll tell you a story. I used to teach at a high school, and it was a high school that wanted their students to go to college. It makes the high school look better. And I had several students, one wanted to become a mechanic, another an electrician or something. And they full stop told me that if I were to become an electrician, my parents would have a heart attack.
I think in this country we need to-- and maybe in other places-- we need to get beyond the fact that maybe it's completely great if our students and our kids select into careers that they actually want to join rather than our forcing upon them the need to get a four-year degree in political science, which is what I teach, right?
Why is that? That seems so arrogant of higher education in our society these days. And I'm saying this as a college professor teaching at Harvard. But you know I think that the acceptance of that at one level is important.
I think the second thing is to highlight, really unpack the nature of some of those electrician jobs. Are they jobs that someone can work in their local area? Or are they the types of jobs that are dislocating and you're in a traveling crew going around and installing transmission wires, for example?
So I think there's lots of-- and I know the reports that you've read. And Bill McKibben has this great line about if you want your kid to save the future, tell them to become an electrician. But I think it's really important to unpack what those jobs actually are because not every electrician job is the same, and quite frankly, some are going to be better than others.
JEFF COLGAN: I'm optimistic about this problem. My brother is an electrician, and I would point out that, I don't know about what Dustin makes, but in terms of my lifetime earnings, you stack that up against my brother's as an electrician, who started at 17 as an electrician, he's going to make way more money than I did lifetime.
And so this is an attractive job, and we just have to encourage people to get into it. I think there's real potential for us to do this and this part of the problem is not that hard.
DUSTIN TINGLEY: Yep. I think that's right. I mean, when you look at-- I've looked a lot at the earnings data on the electrician side. There's a lot of opportunity. But instead, I think there's been a lot of focus on, oh, you're going to be the person who installs solar panels. Those are not well-paying jobs. Right? And so we're kind of missing where the focus is. Like, hey, this is a huge sector. Right? This isn't just one tiny piece here and one tiny piece there.
And yeah, I mean, given what I have to pay electricians at my house to do, it's no wonder Jeff's brother is making a killing.
ERIN GOODMAN: It says a lot about what we could learn from other countries like Germany, for instance, who put an emphasis on vocational education and--
DUSTIN TINGLEY: And apprenticeships.
ERIN GOODMAN: Absolutely. Yes.
JEFF COLGAN: Can I just pick up on something Dustin said about the fast transitions are scary, and they are scary economically. But from an environmental perspective, of course, a transition that's slow is scary. And so that really doesn't capture the sort of crux of the matter of how fast do we want this transition to go.
And to Aleksandra's point about the education system, if the education system isn't providing, isn't transitioning fast enough and providing the right kind of climate education to its students, then it's not doing its part in the transition and keeping that speed up.
So getting the speed right of the transition I think is really difficult, and it's going to probably require some serious compromises from both sides of that tension.
DUSTIN TINGLEY: Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Jeff. And my colleague Steve Ansolabehere likes this analogy of a-- it's a bad-- of the gas pedal. Like the energy pedal on your EV, whatever people call that, how fast do you push that down? Right? I think that's the key because the economic consequences of moving too slow, as Jeff's pointing out, are tremendous.
And in some of these communities, like coastal Louisiana where we did some of our work, they're going to be on the front line of some of those damages. And so in some senses they're cross-pressured, right? They are relying on fossil fuels on the one hand for economy, but the continued use globally could flood them out of their homes. And so that's the real-- I'd say if there is one characterization that I could give about this transition is getting that pace right, and then putting things around that pacing that are supportive and scaffolding institutions. And educational ones are one of those.
There is an interesting story that we talk a little bit in our book. We got access to a survey that a middle school had done about what careers their students were interested in. And this was a middle school in Appalachia in coal country.
And it was very revealing that on the one hand, energy efficiency jobs, which they listed as examples, including things like electricians, was the last, and things that were much more germane to the fossil industry were ranked first looking at the survey data.
But at the same time, and this was a piece of feedback that we got from Matto Mildenberger out at University of California at Santa Barbara, he said, well, it's also revealing that on the list they did not even have a number of these new jobs that students could select from. Right? And so I think that highlights the sort of embedded nature in which people are living and thinking about these economic opportunities. Right?
I also think it's important to emphasize a point that Aleksandra made, which was that not all of these jobs that people will be going into need to necessarily be in the green sector. Right? Not everyone's going to become a wind technician. Not everyone's going to become a solar installer. And oh, by the way, the maintenance on those things don't come close to the maintenance that are needed in coal power plants. Right?
I mean, the fact that coal is so dirty means that you need a lot of jobs to keep the stuff clean and running. But the joke is for a solar installation, the maintenance is a weed whacker and a jar of Windex to wash things down. But you don't need everyone going into those jobs. There need to be other opportunities.
However, what people will say, and this is something that not just that we point out, but others as well, there's a desire to have new jobs that don't require that they move across the country. And I think that's something that's really important. The life of coastal, highly educated-- you know, I'm a professor at Harvard, I've lived in a lot of different places. But mobility is not something that is huge in many parts of the country. People don't want to move more than 30 minutes away from where they grew up.
And so the real question will be, what is that new tranche of jobs that can be developed in these regions that don't have people moving three, four hours away from where they grew up? And I think that's going to be a tricky thing to navigate. There's a strong desire to stay within the community. But when there aren't those jobs within the community, what are you going to do? And that's a huge challenge.
ERIN GOODMAN: Along those lines, I'm looking more globally. Jeff, you've seen the climate struggle is becoming increasingly and literally existential. So beyond the speed of transition and the education system keeping apace, you've insinuated that other kinds of shifts in power will be required. For instance, you predict that the liberal international order will be threatened by energy transition, which is a bold statement. Could you elaborate about that idea?
JEFF COLGAN: Yeah. So on the liberal international order specifically, where we were going with that is showing how climate change creates tensions in, for instance, the international trade system. And we're already seeing some of that where recently the European Union introduced something called CBAM, which is the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and it is in essence a tariff on imports that come from other countries that have lower environmental standards than the EU does.
And the idea here is that they want to kind of level the playing field. The European Union has some of the leading climate regulations and pricing mechanisms in the world, and that's costly. That stuff puts the producers in the European Union at a competitive disadvantage relative to companies or manufacturers outside of the European Union that don't have to pay those costs. And so they want something at the border that levelizes that and make sure that there's a fee imposed on others.
The challenge with that, of course, is that the World Trade Organization was set up to basically prevent exactly those kinds of tariffs, where they're trying not to allow tariffs that are based on production methods and processes. And so you have a real tension here because if we're going to make this shift, the kinds of tariffs and other policies that the European Union are pursuing, I think that it's not a one-off case.
I expect that we're going to likely see other places, like Canada or Japan and eventually maybe even the United States, doing similar things to what the Europeans are doing. And so the tensions between the green policy and the push on environmental policy and the more traditional trade policy or trade institutions that we have, those tensions are going to grow over time. And so that's the concern that we have.
But when you ask specifically about existential politics, and I just want to come back to that because what we really meant by that was on one hand, of course, we do see climate change itself as a potential existential threat for our planet, or more specifically our species. And we are seeing in some parts of the world where the projections are, and these are the best scientific projections we have, we're going to see large chunks of what are currently inhabited or habitable parts of the planet become uninhabitable, where there will be a recurring wet bulb temperature.
So a combination wet bulb temperature refers to a combination of high temperatures and high humidity when that's above about 35 degrees Celsius. Humans can't live in those conditions. We can't cool our bodies, even by sweating. And we're seeing now that the potential for that kind of temperature and combination of temperature and humidity is expected to affect parts of the Persian Gulf region, parts of the North China Plain, which is currently home to 400 million people, and various other parts of the world.
And so yes, the threat that we're facing is very significant, and for some people it's going to be existential, the kinds of hazards that we're facing. And that means, I guess coming back to what Dustin was saying about how climate change is affecting communities, it's not just about us as individuals, right? There's a certain kind of politics that we all have about negotiating our salaries and choosing careers that give us good salary opportunities and all of that.
But we're not just talking about a 10% pay cut here or a raise. We're talking about existential politics is really about when someone's way of life or a community's way of life is fully at stake, where it could be, in the worst case, wiped out completely. And that's what we mean by existential politics, where you have communities that are threatened on the one hand by the physical risks of climate change. So say Miami, Florida, is facing, at least on its coastal parts, a real threat to its physical infrastructure, to its buildings.
On the other hand, you have economic threats to other communities. And so here when we talk about West Virginia, or Wyoming, or fracking country in Pennsylvania, these are places where the industries that have provided not only individual jobs, but also much of the community life for years, sometimes decades, those ones are at risk of being ultimately eliminated.
And so we as a society are facing some real choices about that kind of existential politics. It doesn't boil down to this too simply, but if I was really going to be pointed about it, I would say, OK, we can, as a society, have a choice between do we want Miami Beach or do we want ExxonMobil? And that's the choice on some level that we face. And of course, that's too simplified, but that's the kind of essence of how much are we going to do about climate change to prevent the physical effects that the best science that we have expects for our future.
ERIN GOODMAN: And we're just talking about the West.
JEFF COLGAN: Absolutely right. So when countries like say Vanuatu or Bangladesh are saying, look, we're going literally underwater because of climate change, or we expect to in the future, then existential politics takes on a whole new meaning for the life of a country as a whole, that it just might literally slip beneath the waves.
That's a very pointed argument, and of course, it comes with the additional point that the global South has to make, which is, we didn't cause this problem. This is your problem, you global North. You created this with your fossil fuel consumption, or at least the vast majority of it. And so we expect you to be leaders in solving that problem.
DUSTIN TINGLEY: And it's interesting how the different approaches on the table can kind of run into one another a little bit. So think about the loss and damage funds that are now being set up, right, more or less to help some of these countries adapt to climate change that is already happening and will happen.
And then on the flip side, you have some that are like, well, wait, we could be spending that money on reducing emissions. And you know, of course, it's not going to be an either/or, and it shouldn't be an either/or. But it's an interesting sort of tension, and it really forces into the forefront a question not necessarily about the speed, which we've already talked about, but, what are the time horizons?
How far off into the future are we thinking about some of these things? Are we trying to solve for the end goal problem or are we going to need to solve for some of these shorter term problems as communities and countries adapt? And again, it's not an either/or, but there is a certain degree of tension there that I think is helpful to point out.
JEFF COLGAN: Dustin's colleague at Harvard, John Holdren, likes to say there's really just three options with regard to climate change-- there's mitigation, there's adaptation, and there's suffering. And the more we do of one of them, the less we do of, or we need to do of the other ones. But there is some balance between those. That's what we're choosing is the recipe of those three ingredients.
ERIN GOODMAN: So this begs an age-old political question of, what is our social contract? So is the government obliged to help workers displaced by policies that address this crisis, or, for instance, migrants who've been displaced by natural disasters as a result of climate change?
So as you've said already Dustin, some government promises for compensation have failed. So could you give us some examples of countries who may have done a better job adapting or implementing policies right now to help adapt for the future?
DUSTIN TINGLEY: Yeah. So you know, first of all, I think it's important to point out that there have been a variety of reasons that have led to disruption. Technology. Automation. Manufacturing in the United States didn't just get really hit by cheap imports from China, but there was already automation happening, right? And did government have a responsibility to do something then?
Well, how about when government passes policies? And that's what we're really talking about here. When government passes policies that then are disruptive.
So you know, I grew up until about the age of eight in rural North Carolina in tobacco country. Well, we passed some policies. We started taxing cigarettes. I mean, my first trip in middle school to a factory was to a cigarette factory, and at the end of the tour we were allowed to take packets of cigarettes home to our parents. Right? So did government have a role there?
And now we're talking about fossil fuels due to policies. And this has long been a debate, right? And what is that social contract?
I think what is interesting to do is contrast the US case with some others. And one of the ones that we discuss in our book is Germany. And Germany is an interesting case. So Germany, Germany's rise post-World War II was powered by coal. And there are different types of coal. We don't need to go into the details. But they successfully phased out a lot of the coal production that was in Western Germany.
And there are a couple of things that went into that. It was somewhat of a gradual process, but it was also one that was very local stakeholder-driven and involved the active participation of unions, of companies, and of government all getting together in a very coordinated way-- we have a technical term for this called corporatism-- really getting together and thinking through and planning as a team about how that transition would work.
And on top of this, you had two other kind of macro-level conditions. One was you had a German social welfare net that was dramatically more developed than what we have in the United States. So if you were to lose your job, right, and the goal was not to have people lose jobs, but if you were to, you're not going to be kicked out of your house and finding yourself not being able to feed your family. So there's a background.
Now, that background comes with higher taxes. And Americans aren't always so keen to pay more taxes it seems like.
The other macro condition was that you had a system of electoral rules-- and other scholars have written about this, not myself-- where you have proportional representation, which basically means that you have more political parties, and those political parties have to work together with each other to form coalitions. And Aleksandra's doing really interesting work about green parties, for example, in Europe that I would love for her to be able to speak about.
But anyways, you had these conditions all come together, and you got in place things like advance notice and on-the-job retraining so that if you were going to lose your job, you knew, like, two or three years ahead, A; B, you started to be able to retrain for your next job while you were still on the job.
Now contrast that with some of the approaches we've used in the US, which was, Hey, buddy, here's your pink slip, oh, now here's some money that will pay for you to go through some retraining programs, but we're not going to support you, support your income while you're in that retraining program.
Now, if you're a worker and you're thinking, Geez, like, how do I retrain for a next good job when I've got to work a job to put food on the table for my family? And so you would get workers not going into those programs in the US. Right? In contrast, in the German case, you're able to retrain while still making a wage, and that provided a sort of glide path.
Now I want to be clear, though, the situation is not all roses in Germany. Eastern Germany has struggled quite a bit, and still struggles. And if you look at where the highest density of far-right parties in Germany are, it's in places like Lusatia, which are coal-producing regions. And so there's a lot of struggle there. The process had been less inclusive. There were simply fewer industrial sectors built out. Western Germany, you had automobiles, so on and so forth.
So it's not all roses, but those are some background differences that then cause some pretty different stories to be told between those two countries.
ERIN GOODMAN: So countries could have very different concepts of a social contract, but the youth movement is something that seems to be gaining momentum globally. So let's turn to you, Aleksandra. Could you tell us about your work on youth movements and Green Party politics, and whether you think they've been successful in having a real impact on climate change?
ALEKSANDRA CONEVSKA: Yes. So I think with the youth movement we might think about why the youth movement has been, or why we can imagine that it's more robust. And another way of asking that question is why the adult movement hasn't been robust. And that one is a lot harder.
But youth do respond differently when it comes to thinking about climate change in that, like to connect to Jeff's work, I think for many youth the only politics that they know is existential politics. So they were born into existential politics, or at that's how they experience it. And I think that plays a role. And it seems clear from the media and research as well that they've been able to sustain an international movement.
And so in my work, I try to understand what factors have motivated that pro-climate behavior, which we actually know much less about than you'd think just based on how much is happening. And so in one project I use a set of survey experiments to understand whether the decisions that young people make to participate in climate action is strategic, and whether that differs from older age groups.
ERIN GOODMAN: And you've had some pretty interesting results.
ALEKSANDRA CONEVSKA: As I show in the survey, basically I give two prompts to 50% of the panel, the survey panel. And one of the prompts basically reminds them of what they guessed earlier in the survey to a question where I ask them, What percent of people your age do you believe have written a letter or attended a protest to demand more action from the government? And then so when I get to the experimental component of this survey, I remind them what they told me, and then I update them with the real statistic, like what we know from the large-scale Pew Research, for example.
And so I do this for both informing them about their own age group, and then I also do it for informing them about the US population. And so what I find is that when young people are updated upward in their own age group, even if they think that a lot less people are attending than they initially did, or a lot more people are attending, they're always going to be more likely to state that they will write a letter asking their government to do more after they receive the prompt about their age group.
But when they receive information about the US population generally, they operate in that way, that strategic, substitutable way. So they see their own engagement as substitutable with another member of the US population. They're no more likely to attend a protest, even if they're being told that a lot less people are attending than otherwise.
ERIN GOODMAN: So what you're saying is that there's no diffusion of responsibility when it comes to young people. They're going to act, whether it's to go to a protest or write a letter, regardless of what they find out about their peer group. And you don't see this in adults.
ALEKSANDRA CONEVSKA: Right. Exactly. So what we would call that is they always see their behavior as complementary when it comes to their own age group. Their additional participation, even if many more people are attending than they thought or many more people are writing letters than they thought, they will still be more likely to state yes and to engage in the action when it's about their own age group because their own participation is a complement, regardless of the level of engagement.
Whereas with adults, when you're talking about their age group or when you're talking about the US population generally, they're always behaving strategically. So they're really thinking about the outcome. They're really thinking about how their own behavior is just a substitute with others. So if enough people are attending the protest or enough people are writing letters, they don't have to. They're not getting an additional utility just from the fact that they're participating in something.
ERIN GOODMAN: So that says a lot about the levels of motivation of young people. Do you want to now go ahead and tell us about your research on electoral dynamics and green parties?
ALEKSANDRA CONEVSKA: Yes. So with the Green Party topic, I started to be interested because there is a huge body of work in the climate change politics space now that kind of documents what we would hope, which is that as individuals experience more severe and more frequent climatic exposures, so like natural disaster events, they are more likely to go and support green parties.
But it's actually not at all clear that by voting for the Green Party, you are helping to secure a better Green outcome. In general, green parties tend to-- they're small parties. They're single issue parties. And so they kind of tend to sit on the fringe of politics and they don't necessarily receive as many votes on average as the kind of pure ideological mainstream parties that we see.
So the question I had was whether actually voting for the green parties does end up influencing climate policy at all, and could it actually be negative.
ERIN GOODMAN: How so?
ALEKSANDRA CONEVSKA: If individuals are voting for the Green Party, it's possible that mainstream parties actually might de-emphasize climate change and the environment in their agendas. And they might do that because green parties are often perceived, at least to the really ardent environmentalists, green parties are perceived as issue owners. And I think some recent work on Australia really shows this, that the individuals really see that the Green Party, when one is present in politics, that party is the most competent on the environmental issue.
And so mainstream parties, they will actually de-emphasize the environment in a lot of cases because they can't compete on that issue. And so they'll spend their time trying to get votes on other issues that matter to voters. And so when this dynamic takes place, you actually might see less of the environment on the agenda, kind of depending on whether greens reach a certain threshold or not.
This relates in part to, I think, what Dustin was saying about proportional representation and how proportional representation, that type of system allows for more parties to exist, and it also offers individuals more meaning to their vote regardless of whether they're voting for the large party or the small party because every vote is going to be counted towards the number of seats the party receives. And so there's no incentive necessarily to vote strategically, which is often why green parties do miss out.
For example, I'm from Canada, and whenever I participate in elections, I kind of am always thinking about if I vote for a smaller party, it feels like I'm throwing away my vote because usually they're not getting enough to actually have enough seats to make a difference in the overall outcome. And so I'm better off voting for the liberals, for example, if I'm climate-oriented because at least that's better than what the Right Party in Canada would put on their agenda for climate change.
And so in PR systems, we might see that green parties have a little bit more of a positive effect. And so this is kind of the indirect effect of electoral systems on climate policy, and so how parties behave strategically in order to collect votes on the green issue or not.
And I think this is really related to youth as well. And so I'm hoping to bridge those research agendas because green parties are historically now seen as youth parties.
ERIN GOODMAN: Those are great questions. I think we could consider other possible pathways as well that go beyond political parties and even policies.
This question could be for any of you. What about the role of industry, or, for instance, public-private partnerships or businesses taking the lead on job training and creation, which could mitigate this eco-anxiety and increase awareness about new types of jobs for young people?
DUSTIN TINGLEY: To the extent that we can start to have some of those who are in the fossil sector start to become allies, all the better. And I'll give you a couple of examples. One is geothermal.
Now, geothermal power, it's going to be expensive, has a lot of potential, but the industries that know how to do a lot of the things that are related to geothermal are in the fossil sector. And that's just one example.
When you want to talk about carbon sequestration, which to me, I think that's a little bit of a pipe dream when you look at the economics, but those who are going to have the sort of facilities and the capital base to do some of that at scale-- and we're talking, like you got to do that at scale. You've got to do that big time. It's going to involve some of that.
How do we get utility companies-- so my friend Leah Stokes has this great line about if you can start to get electric utility companies in on this, then they're kind of a gorilla in the room because they don't then, they don't really care where the energy is coming from. They just want to distribute it. Right? And so there is a sense that if we could get some real commitment from some of those organizations, it could be a different ballgame.
Now, importantly, though, as Jeff and others have pointed out, those same organizations have a tendency to say they want to do those things to engage in greenwashing, right, and they have very sophisticated PR people that work for them. And so we have to be very cautious about that desire for finding allies in those sectors. So one has to be very careful.
But I think that you could potentially use their own future self-interest as a way to guide some of those partnerships. But you've got to be careful and you've got to do so with a really wide set of eyes to make sure that you're not getting the carbon pulled over your eyes.
JEFF COLGAN: Erin, it's a great question and I mean, I agree with what Dustin's saying. And also, I think we have to think about the private sector using the private sector strengths, using what they do well in conjunction with what government does well. And those are different things completely, right?
So governments are good at setting the overall vision and the rules, and then private industry is very good at innovating and figuring out how to do what we want to do in an efficient and productive way once those rules are set. And of course, they feed back between them, but we want to take advantage of that innovative capacity of the private sector.
When we're thinking about what government can do, though, I think today we've almost exclusively talked about the legislative and the executive branch, but we shouldn't ignore the judiciary as well because, particularly when we're thinking about Aleksandra's interests in the youth movement, this is where the youth have had a big impact around the rest of the world, and it's often trying to address the issue that Dustin has focused on, which is credibility, where they're saying, is the government actually going to deliver?
Well, some places in the world have made it possible for young people to sue their government when they don't follow through on the promises that they've made. And that's proven quite effective in places like the Netherlands and Colombia and elsewhere. But you might think, well, as an American, OK, that's not the situation that we have here. Right? Some places have those rights built into their Constitution and the US doesn't.
On the other hand, we might take a page out of the book of, say Great Britain, which designed an institution around climate change that made it legally possible for the government to be held accountable. And what they did was they said, OK, we're going to set up an independent commission that is charged with meeting the climate goals that Parliament sets.
So Parliament says, look, this is the target that we want to make, you, commission, go ahead and figure out how to do that. And if that commission isn't doing enough to meet the goal that Parliament has met, then private citizens can take them to court and to use the legal apparatus to approach the problem. And that's something that you could imagine some version of in the United States.
So there are these lessons that we can take from around the world of institutional adaptations. Some of them just won't fly in the American context. But if we're a little creative, some of them will. And I think we could push on that and use the energy from the youth movement that is frustrated about the insufficient pace of change.
ERIN GOODMAN: I like that idea of using the energy about energy from the youth movement. I also think this seems like a great place to end. Before we do so, does anyone have any final thoughts?
DUSTIN TINGLEY: We really need to stop making this such a partisan issue. And I see fault on both sides of that. I see obstructionism, I see dis- and misinformation coming from Republicans, and I also see messages coming from certain wings of the Democratic Party that convey things like if we were just to convert to renewables, everything's going to work out and everything's-- it's just, I think there needs to be a lot more realism and a lot more practical problem-solving on both sides.
And we're just getting in the way of ourselves on this. And you know who's going to pay the price for that? It's going to be our kids, and it's going to be our grandchildren and their kids.
And I understand why IRA passed in a completely partisan way. But you know what? The infrastructure bill that passed previously was bipartisan and had some really important climate pieces to this. And so you know, I think it's high time for us as a country to get beyond that because you've got places in Kentucky that got flooded out this summer. You know, everyone's going to get hit, red and blue. And so I think it's high time we get past that.
ERIN GOODMAN: Let's end here with a plea for putting solidarity before politics. There's so much to be done, yet, as we've heard, a viable energy transition is within our reach.
I want to thank our scholars Dustin Tingley, Jeff Colgan, and Aleksandra Conevska for bringing such great perspectives on both the challenges and hopes for our transition out of fossil fuels. You can read more about our scholar's work on the epicenter website.
Many thanks to our listeners. If you value our conversation, please take a moment to click the Subscribe button on your favorite listening platform. This is Erin Goodman signing off from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.