Labor, Business, and the Political Barriers to Climate Action

For a brief moment in 1988, America seemed ready to confront climate change. Scientist James Hansen’s senate testimony on rising temperatures received widespread media coverage, a Global Climate Protection Act passed with bipartisan support in Congress, and even incoming Republican president George H. W. Bush spent his campaign discussing the need for action on global warming. But in the years that followed, discussions stalled and fell apart. In spite of initial momentum, the last 30 years of American climate policy making have been marked by gridlock, inaction, and frustration. What went wrong?

An ambitious new book by political scientist Matto Mildenberger probes for answers. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with over 100 policy advisors, politicians, and lobbyists, Carbon Captured seeks to explain the last 30 years of national climate politics, focusing primarily on the United States, Norway, and Australia.

At its core, the book provides a new explanation for climate policy inaction. For decades, the conventional wisdom has been that global warming is largely a “collective action” problem. Each country has no private incentive to single-handedly stop emitting carbon — so the logic goes — because doing so would damage domestic economies while doing little to stop the entire sum of global emissions. As a result, each country continues to pollute and instead “free rides” off of other countries’ efforts to clean up the environment. More than some theoretical curiosity, this line of thinking has dominated strategic discussions at international climate agreements throughout the world. If the “collective action” diagnosis is correct, one solution is to encourage the countries of the earth to simultaneously make binding agreements to reduce their individual carbon emissions, thereby solving the “free rider problem.”

For Mildenberger, however, this diagnosis misunderstands the underlying cause of climate inaction. From his analysis, global warming is not primarily a free rider problem between countries. Rather, global warming legislation has failed because of political fractures within countries. Before international climate policy is even possible, he argues, countries must ensure that these measures enjoy domestic political support.

But forming political coalitions to confront climate change has been extremely difficult. Mildenberger describes what he calls a “double representation” of carbon polluters. In essence, global warming policy divides laborers who work in carbon-intensive industries (like coal mining) from laborers who don’t (like education). It also divides carbon-intensive businesses from businesses that have small carbon footprints. And, perhaps above all, it divides businesses and laborers that exist on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. By Mildenberger’s analysis, these fissures produce coalitions that are too weak and diffuse to build political momentum. The result is that we cannot muster sufficiently strong coalitions to pass climate legislation, and we are left with the status quo of policy inaction.

Carbon Captured draws on decades of empirical evidence to argue these claims. Some of the book’s most vivid analysis considers America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Crafted in 1997 and currently ratified by virtually every country except the United States, the Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty which commits countries to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. In the lead up to its creation in 1997, Mildenberger argues Bill Clinton faced anti-climate policy pressure from both major corporations and certain labor unions. Before the talks began, Clinton began considering less aggressive carbon reductions to, as his presidential economics advisor put it, “attenuate corporate and union opposition.”

The story of corporate opposition is frequently told. In 1997, the Global Climate Coalition, a lobbying group representing major corporations and oil companies, ran a $13 million dollar campaign to highlight alleged costs of the Kyoto Protocol. The auto-industry funded Coalition for Vehicle Choice and the coal-funded Center for Energy and Economic Development joined in as well, forming extensive lobbying campaigns to combat climate legislation.

Less discussed is Mildenburger’s claim that certain American labor interests were also opposed to the Kyoto Protocol. The United Mine Workers of America, for one, teamed up with major coal businesses to advocate against climate action. The Industrial Union Council of the AFL-CIO also lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol, as the agreement did not require emissions reductions from developing countries. The AFL-CIO, fearing international competition from these developing countries, subsequently became a key advocate for the “Byrd-Hagel Resolution”, a unanimously approved agreement which effectively killed the United States’ ability to join the Kyoto Protocol. With Democrats in the United States traditionally relying upon labor to form political coalitions, the incident underscores how the politics of climate change policy upset traditional party affiliations.

This research culminates in the book’s urgent conclusion in which Mildenberger explores how his research can promote effective climate action. He argues that two frequently championed policies — carbon pricing and binding international climate treaties — are well suited for late stages of society’s decarbonization efforts. But in order to get to a place where such policies are attainable, he argues we need to prioritize policies which are both politically feasible and likely to build powerful pro-climate coalitions in the future. Carbon pricing, a broad umbrella of policies which charge firms fees when they pollute, is undesirable for Mildenberger. He suggests such policies make costs salient while leaving environmental benefits, namely improved environmental quality for future generations, mostly obscured. The book suggests a more prudent policy would be clean energy mandates, which require that electrical utilities derive a certain proportion of their energy from carbon-free sources. Carbon Captured argues these policies may make the costs of climate policy less directly visible. What is more, he argues climate policy should aim to bridge divides between labor and environmental movements by pairing environmental action with efforts to ensure employment for displaced workers. The BlueGreen Alliance, which combats climate change while expanding economic opportunity for laborers, provides an example of what such action could like.

Critical readers will certainly leave the book with questions. For one, some scholars and policymakers prefer directly pricing carbon (with fees and taxes) to the policies Mildenberger promotes, arguing that carbon pricing is the cheapest and most efficient method for eliminating fossil fuels from the economy. Some also suggest that carbon pricing can become more politically palatable if governments redistribute fee revenues to workers and the disadvantaged. Such “fee and dividend” policies have been adopted with success in Canada and Switzerland. In the United States, such policies enjoy the support of diverse interests, including everyone from Senator Bernie Sanders to economist Greg Mankiw, former adviser to George W. Bush.

Questions notwithstanding, it is undeniable that Mildenberger has written an engaging, deeply researched history of both international and domestic climate politics. Perhaps most crucially, this book underscores the importance of expanding the political contours of the environmental movement with policies that can improve both the environment and individual’s economic livelihoods. As Democrats aim to build momentum behind ambitious climate legislation, Carbon Captured is sure to be an important and thought provoking read for years to come.