Environmental Behavioral Sciences Seminar

Preempting Decarbonization: The Natural Gas Industry, the Republican Party, and Roadblocks to Sustainable Buildings
Societal decarbonization likely requires changes to building standards encouraging electrification, partly through restricting connections to legacy utilities such as natural gas. Yet while some municipalities have taken action, an important parallel shift undermines it: more than half of U.S. states (covering 47% of the population) have, since 2020, passed state-level laws preempting municipalities from restricting utilities. We investigate the timing, content, and partisan support of these bills, examining similarity in text use across them using a plagiarism-detection tool. States passing preemption were not only more Republican but more ideologically conservative, typically featuring less professionalized state legislatures. We also examine qualitative evidence of the natural gas industry’s lobbying, showing that industry groups claimed influence over key bills (supported largely by Republican legislators). We consider the broader implications of these findings for supply-side decarbonization in a context of climate federalism under significant influence by fossil fuel industries and allied policymakers. We conclude with an examination of workaround options that localities are exploring in light of state preemption.

Bio
Edward Walker is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at UCLA. He studies how social movements, organizational processes, and political institutions intersect and generate social change, often focused on environmental movements. He is author of Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy (Cambridge University Press) and co-editor of Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation (NYU Press), and his articles have appeared in such outlets as the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and other leading journals. His public commentaries have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and other venues. He is co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Net Zero Living and has held fellowships at Stanford University (CASBS) and the University of Michigan.