Global Environmental Policy Seminar

Political Economy of the Clean Energy Transition

Why is climate change hard to solve? Political barriers stand in the way of policies that could start reducing emissions today. The first part of my talk explains the origins of these political obstacles, and how policymakers can address them. Then, I'll present an empirical paper that estimates the electoral effects of the energy transition in the United States. I examine the shale gas revolution that displaced coal. I argue this intensified the salience of national environmental regulations and increased support for Republican presidential candidates. I analyze presidential elections from 1972 to 2020 with a difference-in-differences design and find that the shale gas shock increased Republican vote share by 4.9 percentage points. Geospatial data, media analysis, and interviews show that voters blamed environmental regulations for their community's decline and that the backlash was more likely to occur where the shale shock was least visible. The attribution of blame for economic dislocation helps to explain electoral behavior in places "left behind," and sheds light on political responses to climate policy.

Bio

Alex Gazmararian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, where he holds both the Procter and Prize Fellowships. He studies political economy. His research aims to understand political barriers that prevent action on climate change. He has written two books and multiple peer-reviewed articles on the political economy of climate change. His first co-authored book, Uncertain Futures: How to Unlock the Climate Impasse (Cambridge University Press), has received three awards, including the American Political Science Association's award for best book on science, technology, and politics. His next co-authored book, Climate Fault Lines: The Political Economy of a Warming World (Princeton University Press) brings together economic models of climate change with models of politics to predict and test how people, businesses, and governments are responding to global warming.