Drivers of political parties’ climate policy preferences: lessons from Denmark and Ireland

ABSTRACT

Political parties are important actors in domestic climate politics. What drives variation in parties’ climate policy preferences? To contribute to a growing literature on the party politics of climate change, we focus on the roles of public opinion, party competition, and parties’ traditional policy preferences in shaping parties’ climate policy preferences in Denmark and Ireland. In case studies that draw on in-depth interviews with policy practitioners, we show how parties respond to public opinion, accommodate issue-owners, and are powerfully constrained and enabled by their existing preferences. These mechanisms also help to explain different responses on climate policy across the left-right spectrum. Competition between mainstream parties is particularly powerful, but can constrain as much as it enables ‘greener’ climate policy preferences. While climate change may be a distinctive problem, the party politics of climate change features similar incentives and constraints as other domains.     

Consumption-based emissions accounting: the normative debate

ABSTRACT

The normative debate surrounding consumption-based emissions accounting, conceived of as a method for constructing national emissions inventories, is investigated. The focus is to examine whether such accounting would be more just than the current method of production-based accounting. It is argued that there is no good reason to think that consumption-based accounting would be less just, and some reason to think that it would be more just. The consequences of this for the overall question of whether to adopt consumption-based accounting are also investigated.     

Is renewable energy still green? Shaping Australia’s renewable energy enterprise in an age of ecological modernisation

ABSTRACT

Renewable energy (RE) illustrates well the logic of ecological modernisation (EM). This logic has successfully transformed RE from a fringe idea owned by largely environmental actors to a mainstream one embraced by a broader constituency. This mainstream embrace inevitably (re)shapes the renewables enterprise. Not all renewables actors today are driven by environmental goals. Instead, key actors, particularly in corporate or community domains, nurture competing norms and aspirations. How the renewables project is envisaged and the goals it is directed to serve can thus differ considerably. Understanding these differences is important since transformations in the energy domain will not only impact climate protection but shape social futures in significant ways. The analysis proceeds in two interrelated steps: first, empirically – conducting an exploration of some of the main projects and actors in the contemporary Australian RE space; and second, theoretically – considering these empirical developments through an EM lens.     

Another avenue of action: an examination of climate change countermovement industries’ use of PAC donations and their relationship to Congressional voting over time

The political mobilization of American business elites in the 1970s and 1980s has been well studied by political scientists. Environmental sociologists have explored how industries in this elite countermovement have organized to prevent environmental legislation. The literature often focuses on the efforts of this movement to shape public opinion on climate change. However, political scientists argue business elites are running several parallel strategies simultaneously in order to protect their interests. FEC data are utilized in multilevel logit models to examine how donations from industrial Political Action Committees (PACs) relate to Congressional representative’s environmental voting behavior over a 20-year period. Industries associated with the environmental countermovement have increasingly used PAC donations over time, and every additional $10,000 a representative received from countermovement industries significantly decreased odds of their taking the pro-environmental stance even when controlling for representatives’ demographics, districts, Congressional polarization and time-period.     

Does climate denialism still matter? The prevalence of alternative frames in opposition to climate policy

Issue frames portraying climate science as uncertain are cited as a key impediment to new climate change and energy policies. However, some have recently argued that the debate over policy impacts, especially policy impacts on consumers, has become more politically salient than the debate over science. This study applies qualitative content analysis to 340 documents from the conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, to test whether certain policy frames have become more common among leading opponents of climate policy in the United States. The results indicate a continued reliance on science framing, with more directed attacks on climate scientists and fewer frames stressing the uncertainty of climate science. An increase in the use of policy frames related to effects on consumers also suggests that opposition to climate policy is taking new forms as the political debate evolves, with ramifications for climate change policy opposition on an international scale.     

From conflict to resilience? Explaining recent changes in climate security discourse and practice

The recent rise of resilience thinking in climate security discourse and practice is examined and explained. Using the paradigmatic case of the United Kingdom, practitioners’ understandings of resilience are considered to show how these actors use a resilience lens to rearticulate earlier storylines of climate conflict in terms of complexity, decentralisation, and empowerment. Practitioners in the climate security field tend to reinterpret resilience in line with their established routines. As a result, climate resilience storylines and practices turn out to be much more diverse and messy than is suggested in the conceptual literature. Building on these findings, the recent success of resilience thinking in climate security discourse is explained. Climate resilience – not despite but due to its messiness – is able to bring together a wide range of actors, traditionally standing at opposite ends of the climate security debate. Through resilience storylines, climate security discourse becomes something to which a wide range of actors, ranging from security to the development field, can relate.     

Public opinion on climate change: Is there an economy–environment tradeoff?

Does the state of the economy condition public concern for the environment? Scholars have long argued that environmental preferences decline during economic downturns as individuals prioritize short-term economic needs over longer-term environmental concerns. Yet, this assumption has rarely been subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny at the individual level. The presumed link between economic and environmental preferences is revisited, using the first individual-level opinion panel (n = 1043) of US climate attitudes, incorporating both self-reported and objective economic data. In contrast with prior studies that emphasize the role of economic downturns in driving environmental preference shifts, using a stronger identification strategy, there is little evidence that changes in either individual economic fortunes or local economic conditions are associated with decreased belief that climate change is happening or reduced prioritization of climate policy action. Instead, the evidence suggests that climate belief declines are associated with shifting political cues. These findings have important implications for understanding the dynamics of political conflict over environmental policy globally.