Book Project
Who Will Pay to Save the Planet? A Political Economy of Climate Change Mitigation
Climate politics are distributive politics. Mitigation policy can have widely varying effects on different parts of domestic economies. But much of the literature theorizes and quantifies mitigation as if it were nationally uniform. In this book, I provide a sector-level theory of mitigation stringency, and test it using sector-level econometric estimates of the "shadow price" of regulation (Althammer and Hille 2016). Beyond sectors' innate exposure to regulation, their ability to pass on costs to consumers and workers play a key role in shaping the stringency of policy applied to them. Blending formal theory, multi-level modelling, case studies, and public opinion analysis, the results highlight the importance of analyzing climate politics at the sectoral level.
This work is based on my dissertation, "Splitting the Check: A Political Economy of Climate Change Policy," which won the American Political Science Association's 2021 Virginia Walsh award for the Best Dissertation in Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics.
Distributive Dynamics in Climate Policymaking
De-Risking Decarbonization (working paper)
Climate change creates an intergenerational externality: present people create emissions which impose a cost on future people. This arrangement is not only unjust, but inefficient. The damage being done to the future is very likely to be greater than the cost of decarbonizing now. If decarbonization succeeds, the benefits to future "winners" will be bigger than the costs to present "losers." Using a model of conditional loan guarantees, I demonstrate the potential for politically and financially feasible international arrangements that would insulate present workers, and potentially consumers, from the costs of decarbonization.
Presented at the Environmental Politics and Governance conference, the Princeton Climate Futures Initiative workshop in 2020, and a workshop at Yale on "The Ten Most Pressing Gaps in Research on Environmental Policy" in 2019.
Mitigating Mitigation: How Labor Protection Strengthens Climate Policy (working paper)
When political economy arrangements protect labor, are countries more or less likely to pass strong climate mitigation policy? Previous work has found contradictory results, but most studies focus on national measures of policy which do not capture the burden of policy on different groups. This paper helps to resolve this debate by using sector-level data on mitigation stringency. The results show that when labor is protected—by coordinating institutions, strong unions, and labor market interventions—labor-intense sectors are willing to accept higher climate policy burdens.
Presented at the Western Political Science Association conference, San Diego, CA, April 2019
Paycheck Preferences: How Sector of Employment Affects Support for Climate Policy (working paper)
Stringent mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions imposes costs on emissions-intense businesses. People who work for these businesses face potentially greater economic risks from mitigation. Yet despite the large literature on climate opinions, few studies explore how sector of employment shapes attitudes towards climate policy. Building on efforts by Tvinnereim and Ivarsflaten (2016) and Bechtel et al. (2017), this paper offers the first study of sectors and climate opinion across many countries. The results show that emissions-intensity not only reduces individuals' support for strong climate policy, but also reduces the importance of other factors like income, education, and ideology for explaining support.
Presented at the Environmental Politics and Governance conference, Santa Barbara, CA, July 2019
Policy Reports
Hybrid Heat Homes: An Incentive Program to Electrify Space Heating and Reduce Energy Bills in American Homes with S. Pantano, M. Malinowski, and N. Adams, CLASP, 2021. https://www.clasp.ngo/research/all/3h-hybrid-heat-homes-an-incentive-program-to-electrify-space-heating-and-reduce-energy-bills-in-american-homes/
This report proposes a low-barrier, least-cost policy package to rapidly deploy efficient space heating and cooling solutions in the United States. It aims to "raise the floor" for electric space heating in the residential HVAC market, delivering 45 million new installations over 10 years and paving the way for more ambitious decarbonization efforts.
Is the United States Underplaying the Threat of Climate Change? Reevaluating the National Climate Assessment with J. Colgan, Climate Solutions Lab White Paper, 2021. https://watson.brown.edu/news/explore/2021/NCAreportCSL
The National Climate Assessment (NCA) is the U.S. government's official report on the science of climate change. Published in 2018, the Fourth NCA synthesizes a vast quantity of complex data gathered from 13 federal agencies and departments. Its authors should be proud of the massive scientific coordination it represents. But as the Fifth NCA is prepared for publication in 2023, we argue there is room to improve.
Disasters
Hurricane Fatigue: Storm Clustering Reduces Weather’s Impact on Climate Change Interest with M. Lerner (working paper)
Climate change will make extreme weather, including powerful storms like Hurricanes Sandy, Harvey, and Maria, more common. Some commentators express hope that clusters of extreme weather events will focus public attention on climate change. Alternatively, increasingly common scenes of destruction may give rise to fatigue, generating less additional interest in climate change with each successive weather event. In this paper, we investigate how past storm impacts moderates the relationship between present storm impacts and climate change interest. Using internet searches in the United States to measure public interest, we find that when more Americans have been killed by storms in the recent past, the impact of new storm deaths—whether in United States or abroad—weakens. Rather than stoking attention to climate change, the proliferation of severe weather may dampen it instead.
Presented at the American Political Science Association Conference, September 2020
From Peril to Promise? Local Mitigation and Adaptation Policy Decisions after Extreme Weather with L. Giordono, H. Boudet. Current Opinion in Sustainability, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.10.002
Exposure to extreme weather — the frequency and severity of which has been linked to the climate crisis — has been posited to yield local climate change mitigation and adaptation policy. Here, we outline lessons from a nascent, but growing, literature focused on local policymaking in the wake of extreme weather events. Recent research shows that exposure often yields local adaptation policy, but mitigation is rare. Moreover, while policy change is conditional on event characteristics and local contextual factors, there is no clear formula for local policy action. We call for a more robust theoretical framework and analysis of key combinations of event characteristics, contextual factors and mechanisms. We also recommend attending to the quality of local policy decisions in the spirit of Dietz’s criteria for environmental decision-making.
Local Adaptation Policy Responses to Extreme Weather Events with L. Giordono, H. Boudet. Policy Sciences, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-020-09401-3
The experience of disaster does not always yield policy change. We pose two key research questions. First, to what degree to communities impacted by an extreme weather event propose and enact post-event policy change? Second, what conditions lead to policy change? We use a comparative case approach with 15 cases and fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis methods to address these questions. Our approach adds to the existing literature on policy change and local adaptation by selecting a mid-N range of cases with strong potential for acting as focusing events, therefore sidestepping the problem of selecting on the dependent variable. Our approach also takes advantage of a novel method for measuring attention, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach.
Presented at the International Conference on Public Policy, Montreal, Canada, June 2019
Computational Text Analysis
When Focusing Fails: Media Coverage of Climate Change in the Wake of Disasters with L. Giordono, H. Boudet. (working paper)
Extreme weather and natural disasters are potential ``focusing events'' that could theoretically raise concern about climate change and motivate policy action. But whether focusing occurs in practice is dependant on how the media interprets events' relationship to climate change, if at all. In this study, we apply computational topic modelling to 95,000 articles about climate change published in the last twenty years.
Presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Conference, April 2021 and the Environmental Politics and Governance Conference, June 2021
Climate Discourse and Campaign Contributions in US Congressional Hearings with F. Krawatzek (working paper)
What is the monetary value of the words said in the US Congress? How much does it cost to shift a legislator’s discourse? We explore these questions and study the extent to which individual donations to members in the US Congress shift the way these legislators speak in congressional hearings. Our analysis uses a structural topic model (Roberts et al. 2014) to identify the themes which structure discussion in hearings. We identify the links between shifting topic use by individual legislators and the donations they receive from different kinds of donors. We verify the mechanism identified at the micro-level with a set of case studies.
Presented at the American Political Science Association conference, Boston, MA, September 2018
An Exploration of Social Identity: The Geography and Politics of News-Sharing Communities on Twitter with A. Herdağdelen, W. Zuo, & Y. Bar-Yam. Complexity 19(2), pp. 10-20, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1002/cplx.21457
We map the social, political, and geographic properties of a news-sharing community on Twitter. By tracking user-generated messages that contain links to New York Times articles and the follow relationships between their authors, we find that users cluster into three communities based around local, national, or global issues.