Scientists have clearly identified what needs to happen in terms of the energy green transition to address climate change. So, why have countries not adopted more ambitious climate policies? In an interview, Max Bradley, a third-year doctoral researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, addresses this important question.
Based on your research, who are the groups that oppose ambitious climate policies and why do they do so? Can you also explain the way you work on your research topic?
There is a broad global consensus that climate change is a problem. Citizens see the effects of climate change both around them and in the news, as most countries are increasingly facing the physical effects of climate change, including weather related disasters. Consequently, there is also a diffused level of public support for governments to adopt more ambitious climate policies. So, why are progressive climate policies not implemented? I believe that this is a political issue.
The benefits of more progressive climate policies for the wider public are often not immediately clear or concrete. Thus, there is little impetus for the general public to strongly mobilise in favour of more ambitious policies. Simultaneously, the groups bearing the costs of the energy transition – such as workers in industries that face ‘a threat’ if more progressive climate policies are implemented – oppose the energy transition strongly.
In my research, I conceptualise ‘climate risk’ in terms of threats to an individual’s industry of employment and, by extension, their position in the occupational structure. Threats may emerge in the form of policies targeted at addressing climate change directly by reducing the emissions of specific industry sectors (what I call a ‘policy threat’), or directly from the physical impact of extreme weather events (a ‘vulnerability threat’).
My research focuses both on workers within threatened industries and on communities heavily dependent on those industries.
I look at different groups in society - individuals, communities, firms - to understand their exposure to climate policies, i.e., climate policy risk, and how this structures their preferences for more ambitious policies and their political behaviour more broadly. Taking these insights, I then aim to understand if policies can be framed in a way that shifts these groups preferences in a more ambitious direction.
Your first project explores the climate policy preferences of individuals, more specifically of workers within industries facing climate risks. Can you tell us more about this research?
In my first project, I examine the attitudes towards climate change of individuals working in sectors of the economy exposed to climate mitigation policies. I consider, for example, workers in the oil or gas industry, in agriculture, or in the construction sector. As more ambitious climate policies are adopted, these sectors have to make adjustments in their processes and outputs. Using survey data across most of Europe, I find that, in general, individuals working in those fields do show more negative preferences towards progressive climate policies compared, for example, to workers in education or in health care.
I then examine whether the level of education and skills these individuals hold matters for their attitudes. Workers with higher levels of education, or with more transferable skills, can adjust more easily to the effects of new climate policies. For example, if a worker with a high level of skills loses a job – as the sector in which the person works faces a ‘policy threat’ - this skilled individual will be better able to shift to another profession, perhaps in a different sector. On the contrary, a worker with less transferable skills, or with lower levels of education feels the same threat more strongly. The policy implication here is that governments need to invest much more resources in retraining, reskilling, and upskilling people working in sectors which are affected by ambitious climate policies.
Your second project applies a ‘community focused approach’ to climate change policies. For this part of your research, you did fieldwork in Aberdeen. Can you share with us the findings from your fieldwork and the main insights from your second project?
In my second project, I move away from the point of view of individuals, and I apply a ‘community focused approach’. My case study is the United Kingdom, which is an interesting example. Many countries have looked to the UK for inspiration in terms of climate policy, as the UK was one of the earliest Western democracies to undertake the energy transition. In 2008, it approved the pioneering ‘Climate Change Act’ with the aim of kickstarting economy-wide decarbonisation process and shifting the country towards a more sustainable green economy.
In my study, I question the view that progressive climate policies always create challenges for communities that are very reliant on sectors and firms threatened by the policy itself. Let’s take the example of Aberdeen, in Scotland, where I conducted my fieldwork. The region of Aberdeen has been the home of the UK oil and gas industry over the last 50 or 60 years. There is an assumption that such a community would be very much against the energy transition, due to fears about what the transition might mean for the local economy which depends heavily on oil and gas. I went to Aberdeen twice to do fieldwork with the prior belief that everyone in that community would be against the green transition. I interviewed different categories of people to get as many perspectives as possible: from workers on the oil and gas platforms, to those in other specialised industries, but also people in the media, local politicians, representatives of business groups, and local activists.
On the one hand, the results from my fieldwork show that there is uncertainty in the Aberdeen community– as they see changes happening related to the energy transition and fear that they might lose out economically as part of the process. On the other hand, however, there was also a sense of opportunity. What my fieldwork reveals is that, considering the high level of human capital concentration in certain communities within Aberdeen, the approval of the 2008 law provided an opportunity from which the community has reaped economic benefits. More broadly, using administrative data, I show that those communities in the UK with a high level of human capital have benefitted to some degree from the green transition, as the economic performance of local firms increased in the decade after 2008. On the contrary, in areas with a low level of human capital, local firms lost out economically from the transition. These divergent economic effects has created polarization in the attitudes of residents towards the green transition across these different types of community.
Overall, while the energy transition poses a threat to some communities, it also creates benefits and opportunities for other communities. This is the case because in areas with high levels of human capital, firms are more easily able to transition from high emitting activities towards lower emitting ones. This leads to economic benefits and, therefore, the communities living in those regions are in favour of the energy transition. On the contrary, in communities with low level of human capital, the effect is the opposite: those communities face economic losses from the energy transition and, therefore, they oppose it.
The policy implication of my findings is that, when governments design transition policies that will affect entire sectors of the economy, they need to be very mindful of what different economic sectors mean in different communities. If communities in some sectors face losses, governments should design policies that either provide compensation or investments to make-up for this economic loss. Otherwise, they will face political backlash from residents.
What are the approaches to climate change policies in Europe, US, and China? And what are your thoughts on the future global leadership in this area?
In the United States, climate change is a highly polarising issue. It is much less so in Europe, even if of course interest groups opposed to climate change do exist also in Europe.
In the US, the Biden administration wanted to build a political coalition in favour - or at least not opposed - to the green transition and approved the reasonably ambitious ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ (IRA). Biden’s IRA was a policy designed to create so many benefits for people, communities, and firms, while imposing very few costs, that any administration afterwards would find it very difficult to repeal the law. The IRA included a huge amount of money – in the form of subsidies and grants – for investments in firms contributing to energy transition, which would benefit communities in the form of new jobs and tax revenue. The law specifically targets communities which have traditionally voted Republican. Some academics believe that, because of all these benefits for Republican communities, the IRA will continue under the Trump administration However, I fear that this will not be the case. We have already seen Trump sign an executive order putting a hold on all federal subsidies while also rhetorically embracing the oil and gas sector. These are very worrying signals, which affects the ability of the federal bureaucracy to administer the grants and subsidies from the IRA to firms which had previously been approved by the Biden administration to receive funding for new green energy projects. In my view, the Biden administration was the first one, in the US history, to take the issue of climate change seriously and to pass meaningful legislation to address it. For the first time, America made some meaningful progress on addressing climate change. However, I am now quite worried that the Trump administration will undo all that progress.
I believe that Europe has done much better than America in terms of implementing policies to address climate change, albeit much more needs to be done. Encouragingly however, even though many EU countries have seen recent electoral success for far-right parties - who openly oppose progressive climate policies – it is unlikely we will see the scaling back of policies as in the US. This is because of the role EU Directives play in mandating member states to adopt of strong climate policies.
Overall, I believe that America has now given up leadership on the climate issue. Europe, while performing better than America, is constrained by internal disagreements among its member states and by its lack of industrial capacity - as in Europe, we don't have the industrial capacity to build up the infrastructure needed to face the transition. These dynamics create an opportunity for China to take on a global leadership role in the effort to fight climate change. I believe that China is an interesting example. On one hand, China still burns huge amounts of coal – the dirtiest fossil fuel in the world – because of their need to provide electricity to their very large population, which has seen a massive increase in living standards in recent decades. On the other hand, China is one of the fastest and the largest adopters of renewable energies worldwide. They are the world leader on solar energy, electric cars, and have huge hydroelectric dams all over the country. Due to these advantages, China may try to position themselves as a global leader on the climate issue. For those of us who believe in Democratic politics as a system that can address major global problems, this is a worrying scenario.
I see Europe caught between the two big behemoths – America and China – both of which have the industrial capacity that Europe lacks. Will Europe align with America and potentially give up on some of its ambitious climate goals? Or will Europe engage more with China and try to play a game of soft diplomacy, not only to acquire necessary infrastructure for the transition, but also to keep good relations with both superpowers? Such considerations are at the heart of European climate and foreign policy going forward.
Max Bradley is a researcher at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences. Max doctoral thesis is entitled ‘How does Climate Change impact Democratic Politics?’. His supervisor is EUI Professor Filip Kostelka, while his co-supervisor is EUI Professor Simon Hix.