The political process is complex and difficult to follow, no matter how deeply we care about climate policy. And yet, without federal clean electricity standards, energy companies are unlikely to change their behavior. So, what does good environmental policy look like? And what can we do as individuals to advocate for laws that reverse climate change?
Dr. Leah C. Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara and the author of Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States. Today, Leah joins Ross to discuss what makes for good environmental policy and why we need federal clean electricity standards. She weighs in on how public utilities abuse the political system, introducing us to the idea of intervener compensation programs as the most promising way to advocate for the public interest.
Leah goes on to share her criticism of Planet of the Humans, describing the film’s failure to address the nuances of life cycle analysis or the fossil fuel industry’s role in the climate crisis and explaining how the film’s thesis is out of alignment with the Michael Moore’s supposed progressive politics. Listen in as Leah shares a case study of climate policy in the state of Ohio and learn what you can do to let lawmakers know that you care about climate change.
Resources:
Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States by Leah Cardamore Stokes
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Dr. Leah Stokes, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara. Leah, thanks for being here. Oh, thanks so much for having me on. Indeed, one of the things I like to do and look for is when interesting books get published and then I get to make your publicist’s job easier because I just reach out to them and say, hey, I like this book. I think it will be very cool if you sent me a copy and I could read it and then interview this person.
And they typically take the bait. And it appears that your people have taken the bait too. So thank you for coming here to talk about your new book, Short-Circuiting Policy, Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States. There’s a lot there, Leah. I’m excited to dig into so much of this political science stuff that we have not really given the full shrift to yet. Yeah, that’s great. No, my title is super long because I had to put all the words on the cover, it appears.
So Who made you have such a gigantic subtitle?
Dr. Leah Stokes: I made me. When you’re an academic, you get to make the decision. So, yep.
Ross Kenyon: It’s descriptive. So I suppose that works. Well, broadly, how did you conceive the book? What are you trying to cover and convey? And to whom are you trying to convey it? Who is your audience? Who are you trying to reach with it?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, totally. So I started this book back in 2013, and I wanted to understand what was happening with clean energy and climate laws. A lot of the action was at the state level. So that’s what the book tends to focus on. But of course, there are also federal policies that are complementary. So I started to do interviews in various states. And what I quickly discovered was that there were attacks playing out against clean energy and I wanted to understand more about that. So the book relies on interviews, archives, data from things like the Energy Information Administration.
And I also fielded a survey of state legislators and their staff while I was running. So some of the information comes from that too. So yeah, the intended audience, I would say, is professionals working on clean energy and climate policy, as well as, of course, academics interested in climate policy. But I also think that the general public who has really woken up to the climate crisis over the past years, I encourage people to pick up a copy and check it out.
Ross Kenyon: I have a difficult relationship with policy. I care about ideas. I care about how government works. I care about the place that I live in, you know, basic human stuff. I feel like by the time policy is finished being made and is in law, not only does it change through that entire process, but then also how it is administered and applied is also maybe different from it was intended sometimes. I just find the process kind of discouraging and opaque and hard to follow and hard to participate in.
How much of that is a cop-out? Is there like a different way I should see it that might make me feel less alienated by the process?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, well, I think that what you’re experiencing is pretty common. And I talk about that a lot in the book. Policy is difficult to follow. And in part, it’s intentionally that way. I developed this idea called the fog of enactment, which is basically the point that You know, laws can be really complicated and it can be difficult to understand what’s happening while it’s happening. Nancy Pelosi, years ago, when I think it was the Affordable Care Act was being passed, she said, you know, we need to get people to understand these issues away.
And so policy can be really difficult to follow. Climate change as an institutional and political problem. Right now, with the coronavirus crisis, you know, all of us are staying home. We’ve made massive changes to our lifestyle. And yet emissions are going to fall maybe 4% or 5% this year. That’s it. I think what people need to understand is that the big levers of change are policy to get companies like electric utilities, fossil fuel corporations to change their behavior. And that is how we can transform our energy system and actually make progress.
Ross Kenyon: And we’re definitely going to get into what are the roles of these various groups and what should individuals do and how much sleep should they be losing versus focusing on more institutional change later in the show. But I think maybe to give a nice baseline for the audience. What exactly makes a good policy? We’ve had people on before, like we had Brian Kaplan, who’s an economist. He likes the keyhole approach for many things. So a carbon tax is pretty narrow, right? It doesn’t have a lot included in that and compare that to something much more How do we determine what is a good policy and what to strive for and when?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, well, I’m a big fan of clean electricity standards. I’m a big fan of standards across the board. I think with climate change, what we need to do is set the rules of the road. We have to say, look, this industry has to meet these benchmarks. So I’m a big fan of what I would call So I think we got to set standards for electricity, for buildings, for transportation. And if we do that, actually, that’s about 70% of the problem in the United States. So that gets us a huge part of the problem done.
And the way we can do that is by having our federal government invest money into it. A lot of the Democratic primary was a debate about how much money is going to be spent by various candidates. I think a lot of people can feel like climate change is this overwhelming, impossible issue, but sometimes I think about how we’ve never really even tried to solve it. And if we put money on the table and actually tried to solve it and set standards and rules, we could make a lot of progress.
This is really the Inslee approach. And the people who wrote those ideas are now started a new organization called the Evergreen Alliance, which I’m an advisor to, and I really think that their approach is brilliant. And then lastly, we need to have we need to think about justice, right? We know that historic pollution has pushed the burden onto black and brown communities disproportionately. We can’t do that with the solutions as well, meaning that. Carbon prices, while they’re really great and they would shut down coal, which I strongly support, they’re also a regressive policy that raises the costs of people’s energy bills and can be politicized fairly easily.
So I tend to favor standards over those kinds of market-based mechanisms. But look, I’ll take any climate policy. You want a carbon price? If that’s what we can get done, let’s get that done. Because right now what we’re seeing is that The federal government is spending, what, four or five trillion dollars on this crisis and no money is going towards clean energy. If anything, there are big concerns that money is going to go towards bailing out the fossil fuel industry. So we’ve got to get some stuff done on climate change in 2021.
This is well past overdue.
Ross Kenyon: I think you brought appropriate nuance to all of that. And you definitely don’t want a yellow jacket situation coming about as a result of a carbon tax. And yeah, I can see how that would be quite regressive too. And we’ve talked about standards and we typically refer to them as performance standards if we are exactly talking But we had David Roberts on recently. And one of our colleagues who’s an economist, Alden Donnelly, big fans of, you know, setting like basically how lead got out of gasoline saying you must reduce the lead content of gasoline by X percent every year.
And it doesn’t matter how you do that. That’s up to you to determine. Is that what you mean by setting standards? Like people? Yes. Okay. So you’re not you’re not by fiat saying like every little thing that must be done. You’re saying get to this goal, figure it out.
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, exactly. That’s what a renewable portfolio standard is. That is the policy that my book really focuses on. And when we think about the progress we’ve actually made in cleaning up our electricity system, renewable portfolio standards have done an enormous amount of the work combined with... So I think we need to set standards, not just for electricity in a couple states, but for electricity in all 50 states. And then we got a couple states. Combine that with standards on electric vehicles. How many electric vehicles are we supposed to try to be getting out by certain years?
These are things like zero emission vehicles, ZEV policies. And then we got to do it on buildings too. We got to say, the Inslee team has talked about retrofitting 4% of the building stock every year. So it would take 25 years to turn over the building stock. So we know we have to do things to keep warming to safe levels, not that 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is what we’ve already warmed. The planet is a safe level. But if we assume 1.5 degrees Celsius is what we’re going to try to do, guess what?
We can’t build any new fossil fuel infrastructure. And we need our government to set the rules of the road to say, here’s the glide path down. Here’s what we need to be doing every year to keep on track with what’s necessary.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I tend to be favorable towards that standards approach because it seems to take what I like best about market approaches, which is that they’re flexible. You can rely on individual initiative and companies to get creative into figuring out how to actually meet these standards without just determining everything. Maybe that doesn’t work for all players, or maybe there’s some favoritism towards some but not others. I think that’s a pretty smart way to go. One of the things you mentioned here, Leah, you keep referring to, we’re in Washington, so we watch what Jay Inslee is up to.
What is the role, do you think, for states versus the federal government? Right now it seems like states, especially California and Washington and others, New York, other places try to be leaders in developing policies in this laboratories of democracy, smaller scale. What are the tradeoffs and how do we know which one to apply and when?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Well, I think that we have been experimenting with a decentralized federalist approach to climate policy for about 30 years. And we can see very clearly the limits of that. We’re behind on cleaning up our electricity system. We’re behind on reducing our emissions. We’ve had states work together through things like RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeast. We’ve had California try to pioneer its own approach and partner with other states and Canadian provinces to make progress, and we’re just not moving fast enough. The reality is that advocates have been trying since the 1990s to get a clean electricity standard through Congress, and electric utilities, fossil fuel companies, they’ve just fought them every step of the way, and we’ve never managed to enact one.
People may not remember this, but the Waxman-Markey bill included a clean electricity standard. It wasn’t just a sort of cap-and-trade program, which is what it’s so well known for today. The clean electricity standard was 20% renewables by 2020. And of course, now we’re in 2020 and we’re not at that. And there was some technical things where you could count efficiency or other things towards it. But, you That would have set a standard for every single state across the country. And we need that because right now we’ve got places like West Virginia that are only getting 5% of their electricity from clean energy sources.
I think Delaware and Ohio are at like 2% or 3% renewable energy. And Florida, which you may remember is a sunny place, very impacted by climate change, they’re at 15% clean energy. So we can’t have all these laggards across the country. We need everybody to be moving along, not just the leaders like Washington State and California and New York, as you mentioned. We need a federal policy to make sure that states across the country are making progress.
Ross Kenyon: Should that follow the same sort of standards model? Do you think that the federal government should set that and then states should find their ways to comply with that? Is that the best way to do it?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, I do think so. I mean, in many ways, the Clean Power Plan, which was built off of the Clean Air Act and the requirement to regulate CO2 as a pollutant because of the endangerment finding because of that court case between Massachusetts and the EPA— You know, that was a policy that applied across the country that set targets for everybody. And the Clean Power Plan was actually quite flexible in that some states had to do more, other states had to do less based on where they were at at the beginning of the policy.
But then states could figure out exactly how they wanted to go about doing it. So I could imagine that you set a standard at the federal level and that states can pioneer their own approaches and programs to getting it done. You could, for example, put a price on carbon in some place. So, yeah. Which again has a sort of market-based mechanism to it. So we’ve got to get the work done. And the fact is that doing this work will create a lot of jobs.
And we’re at a moment where so many people have lost their jobs. So we need to be asking ourselves, can the federal government be steering the ship? What do we want the 21st century to look like in the United States? We’re at a moment now where we can choose to go in a new direction and actually clean up our energy system and protect Americans from climate impacts that are already, you know, on our shores.
Ross Kenyon: Where do you think it makes sense for policy to be very detailed and more detailed than a standards approach? Are there places where things should be specified ex ante in great detail just in law?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, I mean, a standard is specifying targets and timetables. And I think that’s the critical thing. We don’t have infinite time. If you think about other kinds of public policies, if we don’t fix some kind of problem, it’s not great, but we can go and fix it later on, oftentimes. That isn’t the case with climate change. As we accelerate warming, as we start to push to higher and higher levels of temperature increases, we know that changes can be irreversible. If we lose coral reefs, for example, You know, if we start to lose some of the Arctic permafrost, these things are not easy to reverse and or really possible to reverse.
And so I think that climate change requires a clear roadmap. It requires our government to say to polluting industries, hey, you got to get on top of this problem and you’ve got to be cutting emissions by this amount, by this date. That’s really what the 1.5 degree report that the IPCC published in 2018 was all about. It was saying, here’s what you got to do to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And we know from people like Stephen Davis that means no new fossil fuel infrastructure can be built.
So... I think that standards can actually be quite detailed in terms of setting a direction for policy and making sure that the decisions that get made across all different parts of society are moving in the right direction when it comes to reducing emissions.
Ross Kenyon: You’re a political scientist, so clearly you like to geek out on policy, but not all of us are in that world so tightly. So what do you imagine people who are either acting as individuals or in civil society or businesses, what are the roles for them and how should they be thinking about climate policy?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Well, I think that a big challenge that we saw with the Waxman-Markey bill back in 2009 was that there was not enough public support behind the bill. Theda Scotchepal, a very well-known and excellent scholar at Harvard University, wrote a white paper looking at the failure of that bill. And what she concluded was that there was not enough public activism and support to try to get that bill passed. So right now, what we’re seeing is that the climate movement is growing and that groups like Sunrise or Zero Hour, these are youth climate movements, Fridays for Future, that’s Greta Thunberg’s organization.
These groups are starting to raise the salience of these issues. And that is so important for politicians because- I’ve done some research, which I write about in the book, with chiefs of staff and legislative directors in Congress, as well as state legislators and their staff, and I asked all of these different groups, you know, what do you think the public thinks about climate policy? Do you think they like it? What do you think the public thinks about these clean energy targets? Do you think they want them?
And what I find is that these politicians and their staff are consistently underestimating support for climate policy. They think that the public doesn’t care or they think that the public doesn’t want them to act. And that’s just not true. And what you’ll find is that in 90% of the places there’s huge support for climate action. But our politicians and their staff do not know this. So one thing that the public has to do is make that message clearer. And what we find in our research paper is that The more politicians and their staff are meeting with lobbyists from the American Petroleum Institute or taking money from the fossil fuel industry, the worse job they do at understanding public support.
So I think talking about climate change, writing to your politicians, voting, raising it as an issue in public debates, those are all really powerful things that people can be doing. We need people to understand that there is massive widespread support for acting on the climate crisis.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that was surprising. We had Shane Skelton on recently from Political Climate and Julia Piper. And Shane was saying when he worked in a congressional office that actually they don’t get that many letters that are not form letters and they read them and take them seriously. You can actually have some degree of influence by writing serious letters.
Dr. Leah Stokes: 100%. I’m doing some additional research building off of that work on this exact topic. And I would really encourage people to reach out to their politicians and make sure that they know that they care about climate change. That’s not just your federal politicians, although that’s really crucial. It’s also state politicians, local politicians. Hold people’s feet to the fire and make sure they know that the public wants action.
Ross Kenyon: We’re zeroing in now on I want us to get to some sort of case study and sort of break this down a little bit. But one more thing to set the stage for that is I have a question. I always like to ask this about utilities. Utilities are typically governed now as monopolies where they’re granted some sort of exclusive right to provision power for a certain geographical area. And I’ve always been wondering, like, is this necessary? When might it no longer be necessary? And then if it is, why should a monopoly that has a legal status as a monopoly Why should they be allowed to influence the political process?
I don’t understand how exactly that works. It sort of hurts my brain to think about.
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, well, that’s something I get into extensively in my book. So in the early 20th century, private utilities were just getting established. Electricity was a new commodity. And there were business leaders, Samuel Insan, Insull being the most famous and well known, who realized that in order to make a profit, they would need to build large plants because the first kilowatt hour of electricity you sell is really expensive. But if you can sell more, you get economies of scale. So they wanted to get a lot of customers so they could build a big plant and spread those costs across lots of people.
Now, in order to do that, they needed to have exclusive franchise rights, basically a monopoly, because otherwise they would be competing And so what Samuel Insull did was that he convinced other people in the industry to support this idea of monopolies. And then they went and got state legislators to pass laws that put electricity in the state jurisdiction rather than the local jurisdiction and created public utility commissions. So This is written a lot in Richard Hirsch’s book, Power Loss, a really excellent history of this topic. And it’s also, of course, written about in my book, but he’s the sort of primary source on it.
And it was a deal, right? It was kind of a Faustian bargain. You said, hey, you get to be a monopoly. And in return, you have to be regulated by a public utility commission. This is the kind of thing that Elizabeth Warren is always talking about, right? We need corporations to be regulated, right? But especially when corporations are monopolies, there are some really thorny ethical questions. If you get electricity from a monopoly, I do, for example, from Southern California Edison, I can’t choose to buy my electricity from another company.
And if Southern California Edison decides to oppose clean energy or to create fake groups and pretend that the public opposes clean energy, you know, I can’t exit. I can’t say I’d like to go take my money. And this is exactly what’s been happening in Arizona with Arizona Public Service. This is a monopoly utility that operates in Phoenix, and they’ve spent, you know, $50 million over the last decade capturing their regulator, influencing unemployment. And if Arizona Public Service is the company that sells you electricity, you can’t choose to buy somewhere else.
So I think you’re right. There are really thorny questions around Citizens United and corporations' right to use electricity. Political spending as a form of free speech when those corporations are monopolies. And so I’m very critical of utilities as monopolies right now and all the ways that they have, you know, been abusing the system because of the Citizens United decision.
Ross Kenyon: Two broad ways to take this. One, do you think a more decentralized, bottom-up approach with microgrids and household solar and stuff like that, do you think that might make centralized provision and utility provision of power unnecessary? As a related question, could you just have multiple providers of power inside of the same geographical area competing? People always like to point and say, the only argument I typically hear, this is in popular circles, not in academic circles. So I’m sure there’s more sophisticated arguments. But people say, do you really want there to be multiple power lines going to everything?
I’m like, I’m sure they would cut some sort of deal and figure it out. Like there’s incentives to do so. Anyways, what do you make of that whole dog’s breakfast I just served you?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah. So on the second point, that’s kind of retail competition in the electricity system. And it does exist in a few places, including Texas being the really well-known example. ERCOT is the system there. The interesting thing is that not a lot of people change their electricity service provider just because they’re given an opportunity to do that. You know, I think the bigger issue is not getting rid of monopolies. If I were to start the system from scratch today, I wouldn’t design it to have electricity companies be privatized and monopolies.
I certainly wouldn’t. But that is the system that we have today. And so it’s a little difficult to just magically, you know, change it. What I’d rather do is have better regulation of these And the problem is that public utility commissions that are supposed to be their regulators are often captured. So we have to find a way to get those systems to be less captured. A lot of advocates have focused on changing the ownership structure as a solution to that. And in the conclusion of my book, I have a section on that for those interested.
I’m not a huge fan of the idea that if you change a private utility to a municipal utility or... And that’s because if you look at the municipal utilities and public electricity providers, they’re sometimes pretty bad too. The Tennessee Valley Authority is written about in Russell Gold’s book, Superpower, which is an excellent read. And it does not come across well. This is a federal power authority. You know, the same could be said for some municipal utilities and for rural electric co-ops. So I don’t think it’s just the ownership structure that it’s the critical variable.
But I do support people running campaigns to put pressure on private utilities. And if part of those campaigns are to say, well, we’re going to make our own electricity system and exit, I think that’s a good way to put pressure. Intervenor Compensation Programs is a really promising way forward. This is a policy that exists in California. It might actually exist in Washington State or I think it’s Oregon. It’s only in about three states across the country. What it does is it allows It allows groups that are intervening in regulatory proceedings at public utility commissions to be paid for their time.
So if you are going to try to talk about consumer rights and make sure that electricity bills aren’t being jacked up by monopolies, you can be paid for that. If you’re going to go and talk about how we need to keep the air clean and reduce our carbon emissions, you can get paid for that. And so a big reason why California is so successful is because that policy has paid advocates to show up and advocate in the public interest. Monopoly utilities are always paid to show up because they get to recoup all their costs in the regulatory process.
So I do think that we have to be thinking about public utility commission reforms and make sure that monopoly utilities are not capturing the political system. Maybe that means we have to try to break up private utilities. I just think that is going to be a really difficult thing to do because in the places where it’s been tried, like in Colorado and Minnesota with Excel, it’s been a long battle that hasn’t gone anywhere. So, you know, it’s a thorny and difficult issue. But if people are interested in that, my book does talk about that in some detail.
Ross Kenyon: Your book is very detailed and there are a number of case studies where if you really want to dig in, there’s a lot of room for you to do so in a great kind of way. Oh man, some of this stuff seems improperly suited to activism. So I’m going to say this. Neutrally, although you could take it in a bad way if you had that mood about you, listener. But I think activism encourages a sort of simplification, right? Like the ideal is the picket sign, some sentiment or policy change that fits on there.
Vote for or against X thing. I’m angry about why thing, etc. But then like the exact policy changes that are necessary to reform something like PUCs seems really detail oriented in the worst kind of way. Like I think I’m fairly smart and I’m daunted by it. And so and my attention is slipping trying to absorb all the relevant information to even make an informed choice. So is this is this even like the best place for democracy to be practiced or how do you make it easier so that people could do it effectively?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Well, that’s why an intervener compensation program is so great. I totally agree that, you know, you and I are not going to be full-time advocates to try to reform public utility commissions. There are some groups doing that, as I mentioned, but it’s unlikely. And so we need... We need to have people representing us in the system and they need to be paid for their time because otherwise advocates are going to struggle to find enough money to go do the work that they need to do. They’re going to have to raise money for membership.
They’re going to have to go to foundations. And utilities can just collect monthly payments from people who need to use electricity in their homes and put some of that money into lobbying. So we need the system to make sure that money is being provided for advocates on our behalf. We do not all need to be people intervening in public utility commission hearings. What you can do if you want to is you can join organizations that do this work. The Sierra Club is really important. Their Beyond Coal campaign has been crucial to shutting down coal plants across the country and intervening in PUC proceedings.
Fantastic chapters as well. And then there are local groups on a state-by-state basis, the Utility Reform Network in California being one that comes to mind. So maybe learn about who is advocating on about electricity and become a member. Give them five, ten bucks a day. And you know what’s cool about an intervener compensation program? It happens automatically for all people in the state. So for example, in California, it’s about 17 cents a person a year to pay for this program and it returns back to electricity rate payers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
So when independent reviews of that program have happened, it’s been shown that it’s really a wonderful investment. So we need policies that automatically create better outcomes for people so that, yeah, not everybody has to be a full-time investor. You know, utility advocate or know all the details about these things. So my book is really about pointing out the problem. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to be a full-time advocate on this. And I’m sure most of your listeners are members of organizations, but support people who are trying to advocate, for example, to pass an intervener compensation program, because then you won’t have to think about this nearly as much.
Ross Kenyon: All right. Fair enough. And you mentioned a couple of organizations like Beyond Coal and 350.org, which I learned about both of these from Planet of the Humans. Have you seen that, Leah? Unfortunately, I did watch that film. Yes, I do not recommend people watch it. Just kidding. Obviously, we know about the Sierra Club and 350 and Bill McKibben’s been on the show and- Yeah. Okay. So you just wrote a piece about this. We’ll get back to the utilities and public policy stuff.
But since this came up naturally, because I had to make that joke, what happened in that movie?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah. So Michael Moore, who’s a household name, released a film on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day last week with his longtime producing partner directing it, a person named Jeff Gibbs. And from what I can tell from watching the film, this was sort of a side project that Jeff had for maybe the last decade. It’s a lot of very out of date things about clean energy. And I have the strong impression that they had a strong thesis going into the film and decided they were going to tell that story, which was that clean energy is evil and climate activists are somehow corrupt and they are to blame for the climate crisis.
At one point, Jeff Gibbs says environmentalists are driving us off a cliff, for example. And it didn’t really matter that they found very little evidence to back up their claims. They had their thesis and they ran with it. And I just think that’s really bad journalism, especially when there’s so much more attention to climate change and people want to solve the problem to deliver this nihilistic take. I don’t think that Jeff Gibbs or Michael Moore did enough thinking. I mean, what is Michael Moore thinking coming out with a film that says renewables are all evil?
It’s just beyond irresponsible and quite incoherent to his supposed progressive politics. And you know, if you want to critique capitalism and say that growth is the problem, that’s fine. In fact, Naomi Klein has done a very good job of that. But the film doesn’t get into that And so population control would not solve the climate crisis and it’s fairly racist. So I think the film is extremely problematic and I do not suggest people watch it, especially climate advocates because it’s very demoralizing and disheartening. All of us know that there are problems with renewable energy, and we grapple with that in our work.
But the film is not constructive or trying to point out ways that we could improve. It’s just a doomer, nihilistic film. And so I think if people watch it, they’ll be kind of sad.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, man. Yeah, there’s a couple of moments that were quite grim. Yeah, you’re not wrong there. There’s... So many angles to take. There is a germ of truth in there that, of course, the production of solar panels involves industrial processes that are not so great. And then also, they spent a lot of the movie focused on the downsides of biomass. But for all of these things, the details and the lifecycle analyses matter quite a lot. There are good versions of those things, and there are very bad versions of those things.
But you just said all of them are bad and ends up in this sort of anti-civilization kind of primitivist screed against everything.
Dr. Leah Stokes: I know. And I find it so bizarre. Initially, my piece had a whole section which got cut about, you know, how could these filmmakers who themselves, they can only make their film because the industrial era exists, right? Cameras, computers, cars to drive around in, planes to take. You know, they are only able to make this film because industrial society works and all of us benefit from industrial society. Of course, there are negative externalities from any kind of industrial process, whether that’s, you know, lithium mining for batteries or cobalt extracts.
Right. Or, you know, using fossil fuels to manufacture solar, photovoltaics or, you know, using steel, which is a very carbon intensive process to make wind. And yet those of us who actually want to solve problems are trying to grapple with those things. And exactly as you say, talk about the nuance and the life cycle analysis to say, under these conditions, this is bad. And under those conditions, it’s better than the alternative, which by the way, is fossil fuels. It’s crazy how little the film So yeah, and especially on biomass, biomass is a very complicated, Biomass can be done better If you’re cutting down forests to put wood pellets on tankers and ship them over the EU, which is something that’s That’s really bad.
Ross Kenyon: Now, I wanted to invite you on because this nuance is so important. For many things, the truth doesn’t easily fit on a picket sign. And these details really do matter to get these issues right. Like Nori, we’re a carbon removal marketplace. There are versions of carbon removal that we think are distracting. And as this sector grows, you’re going to see more and more people that co-opt the language and the ideas of it. And you really have to dig into some of this stuff or you don’t know what you’re And I think that’s a fine, if that was the message of the film and you’re saying, well, some dopier elements of the environmental movement have glommed onto green energy, that anything that even looks like green energy, no matter if it’s greenwashing or not, is great, then that’s a bad version of environmentalism.
But I don’t think it’s fair to paint so universally with that. There are versions of environmentalism that are robust and clear thinking and fair in ways that I enjoy. And I’m sure you support many of the same groups too.
Dr. Leah Stokes: The film went after the smartest, most grassroots parts of the movement. Bill McKibben is a brilliant, kind, detailed, hardworking journalist and activist. His work is so beautiful. And the reality is that Bill McKibben wrote to the film So I don’t even really view this as a documentary because it’s not really about facts. It isn’t about having a nuanced conversation. Conversation about solutions and their pitfalls, which anybody who has worked in energy to, you know, if they’ve taken my class, they would know, you know, this is my undergraduate class on energy.
They would know that all energy systems have trade-offs, that we have to try to minimize those trade-offs. And yeah, I think the point that you make about carbon removal is so interesting because there are certain parts of the progressive movement that are just knee-jerk against it. And my attitude is we’re at 415 parts per million. I live in California. We have droughts. Wildfires, I’ve had to evacuate my home more than once because of wildfires in the five years I’ve lived here. You know, this is not a safe level of concentrations for me and for many other people living in small island nations, for example.
And so how are we going to remove carbon? So we need to be able to have space to have complex conversations about technologies and how they get manipulated and some of their trade-offs. But this film does not contribute productively to that conversation. And I think Naomi Klein said it best. She had a tweet about it. You know, she wrote a book called This Changes Everything, which is a critique of capitalism and how it creates climate change. But she said this film is not productive to advancing that conversation.
If people want to have a conversation about, you know, wealth, here’s a thing that people might not know. There’s something called the Kaya Identity or IPAT. It’s an equation which shows you where emissions come from. It says impact, environmental impact is a function of population, affluence and technology. And the film takes on Population, which generally, as I’ve already pointed out, is not a great lever to pull for all the reasons I said. And then it says technology is hopeless, so we can’t pull that lever.
And it really leaves on this table the idea of income inequality or the human Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was curious where he was hanging out because many of the things that he laments their absence, I feel like I’m interacting with those arguments on a regular basis. Many of the people I speak with, these concerns trouble them and there are many ins and outs to all of Yeah, I don’t know. Like the idea that most of these environmental movements are so tied up with capitalist organizations, thinkers, companies, that they’re not doing anything productive. I feel like I see more stuff critical of capitalism than anything else.
But I don’t know, maybe I’m not going to the right cocktail parties. It could be that too.
Dr. Leah Stokes: No, and if capitalism’s the problem and fossil fuel corporations are the problem, how come the film never talks about corporations? It’s so strange. Michael Moore has made a career criticizing corporations, Roger and Me, Bowling for Call. You know, why didn’t he make a film going after electric utilities and fossil fuel companies who have lied about climate science for decades? I mean, look, the evidence is there for corporations being really terrible for the planet. And instead of blaming corporations, they blame environmentalists. And it’s just so wrongheaded.
Ross Kenyon: You know, given how worked up you are and how intense this conversation is, we’re guaranteeing that some of our listeners now have to check it out. I know. Tragic. Streisand effect, big time going on right here.
Dr. Leah Stokes: I’m just warning people that it’s not going to leave you in a good mental headspace. I’m sure your listeners know about all the tradeoffs involved in clean energy and struggle with it. I do. But this is not going to provide any insight for you. It’s just going to leave you feeling demoralized.
Ross Kenyon: We’ll see. I’m expecting emails now. So we’ll see what happens with that. We only have a couple minutes left. And I really wanted to do at least like one walkthrough of either a really successful or a really unsuccessful case study from your book that you think listeners might be able to get a taste for what’s inside the book in a really detailed kind of way.
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, well, I’d love to talk about Ohio. Last summer, Ohio rolled back its renewable energy laws and energy efficiency laws and basically replaced them with a coal bailout. It’s something that myself and David Roberts have both called the worst energy policy in the nation. David Roberts wrote about it for Vox and I wrote a piece for The Guardian and all the bloody details are in my book. But basically in that state, anti-wind groups and the fossil fuel industry, electric utilities worked for years to try to roll back the clean energy law and they eventually succeeded last year.
And what’s so crazy is that the energy efficiency policy in Ohio was paying people back. It was saving lots of energy and it was totally like a I want to say $5 billion or something. I can’t remember the number, but it’s in my book. And instead of supporting a policy like that or supporting a renewable energy law when the state gets like 3% of its electricity for We’ll be right back. But rather than shut down those plants, First Energy Solutions, which was in bankruptcy and is now called Energy Harbor, as well as American Electric Power, AEP Ohio, they both lobbied very heavily the state legislature to get a bailout.
And what’s so interesting is there was a race for the Speaker of the House, I believe. They wanted to make sure that the right guy, a shill for their industry, would get the power so that he could make sure this was on the agenda. So not only did they back him in his election, they also backed like 12 other people who they knew would vote for him so that he could take power over the chamber. And then they quickly jammed through a bailout last summer. And in my book, I calculate approximately how much money that is likely to be over the course of the time that bailout exists.
And The law was very ambiguous. You can’t figure it out from the law, but you can figure it out various other ways. And I estimate that it’s probably $5 billion going towards keeping these three coal plants open until 2040 likely. And that is just so unethical. Air pollution. And I’ll see you next time. These anti-wind activists managed to get, as part of a budget bill, a rider, which is a provision attached to a law that really has nothing to do with the law. And what they did was they changed the setback rule for wind turbines so that they had to be farther away from a property line.
And that meant that basically no wind energy in Ohio could have been built with the existing plants. And since that time, the wind energy industry has been pretty much locked out of the state. You So Ohio has a policy right now of subsidizing coal, making it impossible to build wind energy, and has no plan really for how to deal with the climate crisis and is supporting air pollution and carbon emissions rather than supporting cleaning up our energy system.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. So if you want to dig into all those grisly details, your book is a very good place to do so, you would argue.
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, it’s got all the details about what electric utilities and fossil fuel companies have been up to for the last few decades and it’s not good.
Ross Kenyon: Very succinct there. Nice. Nice little cap. The book is called Short-Circuiting Policy with a very long subtitle. I’ll do it for you, Leah, just out of the goodness of my heart here. Interest groups in the battle over clean energy and climate policy in the American states. Yeah, yeah. I think it’s I think it’s fine. I think it’s descriptive, as I said. I don’t know why I’m picking on that. Sorry. I sometimes laugh about it, too. Yeah, that’s great.
Links in the show notes if you want to buy the book, that will be there. Dr. Leah Stokes, thanks so much for being here. We’re glad to have you.
Dr. Leah Stokes: Thank you so much for having me on. And yeah, to all your listeners working on clean energy and climate policy, stay in the fight. Your work is essential more now than ever before. And don’t be disheartened when the haters come calling.
Ross Kenyon: And they will come calling. Leah, you’re on Twitter a lot too. What is your handle?
Dr. Leah Stokes: Oh, I’m on Twitter too much. It’s Leah, L-E-A-H, Stokes. Leah Stokes. And yep, I blast my opinions to the universe on a regular basis there. It’s brave. I kind of stay away from it personally. It has its upsides and its downsides.
Ross Kenyon: There are professional downsides to not engaging, but there are personal, spiritual, there’s a sanctuary I’ve created. I don’t want to pierce.
Dr. Leah Stokes: Yeah, I know. I’ve started taking my weekends offline off Twitter to just focus on gardening and Reading books and sort of detoxing from it. So yeah, you know, you can set boundaries around it.
Ross Kenyon: Very wise. Well, great. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes or Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, tell your friends. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review.
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