This week we’re looking at the politics of just transition. Addressing climate change inevitably creates costs for some people. How does that affect the political feasibility of climate action, and what can be done about it?
Action to address climate change is essential. But the effects of such action are often imbalanced: the benefits are diffuse and long-term, while the losses are often frontloaded and concentrated amongst certain communities.
That imposes two kinds of challenge:
- the idea that some people, such as workers in fossil fuel industries, might face higher costs than the rest of us seems unfair.
- voters are rarely willing to accept short-term harms in return for future benefits that seem distant and uncertain.
A solution to these problems may lie in compensating those who face heightened costs, for example by retraining workers in affected industries. But would these schemes overcome the political hurdles to implementing the needed long-term policies? In a world of deep distrust in political leaders, can voters be persuaded that so-called ‘just transition’ policies really will be fair?
We are joined this week by Dr Fergus Green, Lecturer in Political Theory and Public Policy here in the UCL Department of Political Science and Dr Diane Bolet, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Political Behaviour in the Department of Government, University of Essex.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:00] Alan Renwick: Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we're looking at the politics of just transition.
Addressing climate change inevitably creates costs for some people. How does that affect the political feasibility of climate action and what can be done about it?
Hello. My name is Alan Renwick. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
Action to address climate change is essential. But the effects of such action are often imbalanced. The benefits are diffuse and long term, while the costs are often front loaded and concentrated among certain communities.
That imposes two kinds of challenge.
The first is normative – the idea that some people, such as workers in fossil fuel industries, might face higher costs than others than the rest of us seems unfair.
The second is political. Voters are rarely willing to accept short-term harms in return for future benefits that seem distant and uncertain. So building democratic support for vital policy change seems difficult.
A solution to these problems may lie in compensating those who face heightened costs by retraining workers in affected industries, for example, or by combining fuel taxes with car scrappage schemes and other similar measures.
Such schemes can certainly address the normative challenges, but will they also overcome the political hurdles to implementing the needed long-term policies?
In a world of deep distrust in political leaders, can voters be persuaded that so called just transition policies really will be fair?
Well, a recently published article suggests that the answer to that question might just be ‘yes’, at least in the right circumstances. It suggests that political parties that uphold just transition principles in their policies can reap electoral rewards in return.
And I'm delighted that two of the three authors of that article join me now in the studio. They are Dr Fergus Green, Lecturer in Political Theory and Public Policy here in the UCL Department of Political Science, and Dr Diane Bolet, Lecturer in Political Behaviour in the Department of Government at the University of Essex.
Fergus and Diane, welcome to you both. Great to have you on the podcast.
And Fergus, let's start with you. Do you want to begin by explaining in a little bit more detail than I did there? Just what is the problem that politicians are facing here?
[00:02:29] Fergus Green: Yeah. Thanks, Alan. Well, you've done an excellent job actually of laying out the problem.
So to mitigate climate change, we need to phase out the production and combustion of fossil fuels. And for the most part, this requires enacting new laws that directly or indirectly engineer such a phase out.
And it turns out it is quite hard to do this politically.
So we can distil the problem in terms of thinking about the costs and benefits of those laws. So the climate benefits in terms of reduced emissions are diffused across billions of people spread around the globe and disproportionately benefit people in the future, whereas the costs are concentrated in particular sectors and regions and they accrue immediately.
And so this makes life difficult for political parties that want to take ambitious climate action because they need to persuade voters to elect them, and voters tend not to like immediate costs for kind of benefits that they don't particularly highly value.
And this challenge of mobilising supportive coalitions of voters to support climate policy is particularly acute in communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry, because not only do they face the same potential consumer costs that everyone faces, for instance, if energy prices go up, but there are also a lot of people who are employed in those industries whose jobs and/or wages might be under threat.
And there are a few other factors that might be a little less obvious at play in these communities. So the fact that you have the people who are adversely affected are all proximate to one another facilitates their ability to kind of mobilise against the policies.
And at least in many political systems, those communities will be clustered in a particular electoral district, and political parties are incentivised to pay attention to large concentrations of unhappy voters in particular districts. And so they will be particularly attentive to the political signals coming from these places.
[00:04:36] Alan Renwick: So just thinking kind of concretely to give some examples of that. I guess in the United States, we often think of West Virginia, for example, as a place where a lot of jobs are dependent upon fossil fuels, and that very much affects the politics there.
In a UK context, we often think of Northeast Scotland – the area around Aberdeen is very much the centre of the oil industry and therefore similarly a place where lots of jobs are at stake in these debates.
[00:05:00] Fergus Green: Exactly right. Exactly right.
And there's actually some evidence looking at the Appalachian coal regions in the US that by and large supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election. And so there is some somewhat more circumstantial evidence that this effect can lead to punishing parties that support strong climate action.
So these communities, as I said, face a sort of particularly concentrated or acute form of this more general challenge that political parties face if they want to introduce ambitious climate action.
And so the question we're interested in – the larger question that our paper speaks to – is really: given these challenges, how can political parties that want to do ambitious climate policy do so in ways that are essentially politically popular? How can they build coalitions of support?
And there've probably been kind of two types of solutions that overlap that have been discussed in the literature, and I'll just mention those which paves the way to this more specific question that we look at in our paper.
So one set of studies, or one proposed solution rather, is so called compensation. Now this is a term that is a slightly slippery term, but a narrow version of it could be monetary payments to those who are adversely affected by a policy to try and induce them to support the policy or to put them in the position that they were in before the policy and so on. But sometimes it's used slightly more broadly to include non monetary benefits.
[00:06:35] Alan Renwick: So that includes, for example, the kind of retraining thing that I mentioned in the introduction there or?
[00:06:39] Fergus Green: So I think some people use the term in that way to include that, yeah. And some people use it in a narrower way.
So one has to be careful here. But yes, I think, broadly, a lot of political scientists use it in that broader way, which could include retraining as well as monetary payments.
And of course, that could be two different kinds of actors. So we've mentioned workers, but you could also, in theory, and often it happens in practice, pay companies. You could compensate communities, for instance, by giving money to regional governments and so on. So there are various different actors who could be the beneficiaries of compensation.
And compensation strategies overlap with the second type of solution that's proposed, which is this idea that you flagged called a just transition. The core concept was articulated by the labour union movement where the concept originated.
And the idea is that where you have industries that are adversely affected by environmental policies and climate change policies, that we want to have redistributive policies so that workers, and also affected communities, have a financially secure and dignified pathway into alternative sustainable jobs and livelihoods.
So that is where it overlaps with the compensation aspect, right – potentially redistributive policies, but targeted at workers and affected communities.
But there's also a procedural dimension to just transition that's quite important for our paper. And the idea is that workers in particular should have some say over what these redistributive policies are. And that could be – and the mechanism that's usually proposed is – social dialogue between workers’ unions and affected companies and the government.
So that brings us to our paper. So what we really want to do in our paper is to test whether just transition strategy is politically effective, right.
So we know that this has been proposed. There's some survey evidence to suggest that these kinds of compensatory or just transition policies might increase support for climate policy relative to policies that don't have these elements. But there's no studies before ours that look at the effect of such a policy on voting behaviour. And that's what we set out to test.
[00:09:04] Alan Renwick: Fantastic. Thank you.
So the question here is we've got some just transition policies or we are imagining that a government has introduced some just transition policies. Does that have an effect upon subsequent voting behaviour?
So Diane, I guess we should turn to you at this point. What's the kind of overall approach that you take in this paper to investigating that question?
[00:09:27] Diane Bolet: Yeah. So to investigate that question, we were first trying to look at various countries that have implemented or sort of implementing just transition policies.
And we came up to be interested in Spain, and that's for several reasons.
One is more substantive. So despite the idea of just transition originating in the union movement in the US and UK, Spain has been one of the first countries to really implement it as a policy in a manifesto – party manifesto. And that was with the Socialist Party in Spain, so led by Pedro Sánchez especially since 2018.
The Socialist Party is called PSOE, and Pedro Sánchez made like this issue of addressing the coal mining issue in the country one of the key idea for the upcoming elections, which were in April 2019.
And we looked at these elections because at that time the Minister of Ecological Transition – so it's an internationally renowned climate policy expert, Teresa Ribera – kind of pushed the idea of a just transitions a few months before an election, so in this April 2019 election.
[00:10:40] Alan Renwick: So this was specifically in relation to the coal industry.
[00:10:43] Diane Bolet: So that was exactly.
So one thing I should mention is the coal industry in Spain was kind of on a decline like in many other countries.
And what was particularly interesting with Spain is that the coal mines were no longer competitive, so they're no longer financially viable.
And so Spain is part of the EU. There was a 2010 EU directive that kind of pushed for the uncompetitive coal mines to close down effectively by December 2018. And that was conditional on state aid. But that was kind of like the main push for governments to really think of a transition.
The PP, so the previous party, so the Partido Popular, the kind of right wing party, was not really addressing the issue – like kind of kept, you know, pledging on retaining the coal industry. So that was perceived as absurd among the communities.
But PSOE made it a big so policy promise among these communities a few months before the April 2019 elections.
One way to do that, Teresa Ribera went and did what Fergus just described: kind of negotiated a just transition agreement with the affected mining companies, mining unions, and all the local stakeholders – local actors.
And so after six weeks of negotiation she managed to reach an agreement, which consisted of a 250 million euros package to directly compensate the affected workers and communities.
So that included retraining schemes for younger miners, but also early retirement schemes for older miners. But also included more place-based policies, so community wide investment in the form of business initiatives or economic development and environmental restoration.
The agreement was signed in October 2018, and two months later it was enshrined in law, so that became perceived as a credible commitment in January of 2019.
And it was particularly interesting for a design, you know, reason that it happened just six weeks or seven weeks before the election.
So it was kind of a salient... It was a very highly visible issue among the communities, which is why it was also interesting for us to look at the case of Spain to directly test the effect of a just transition policy in these communities.
[00:13:08] Alan Renwick: Fantastic. Yeah.
So we've got this case where you've got the introduction of a just transition agreement-
[00:13:15] Diane Bolet: Yes.
[00:13:16] Alan Renwick: -shortly before an election. So we have an opportunity to see, okay, so does this have an electoral effect?
And I guess what exactly is the kind of electoral effect that you're looking for, that you're testing for, in the analysis?
[00:13:28] Diane Bolet: So we're looking at the most like direct electoral effect that we can see in political behaviour like studies – just electoral support.
And this is actual voting behaviour. It's not relying on survey evidence. It is actual administrative data of electoral results in these communities.
So we collected the vote share in these coal mining municipalities. And that's since 2008. So we're back in time so that we can compare it before the elections of interest and after to see if there's any change.
But what's also interesting in our case is that what matters is to compare it to similar municipalities. And so what we also did is we also collected the vote share of municipalities that are in the same provinces, but didn't receive the just transition, or will not receive the just transition policy, so to make them as comparable as possible.
[00:14:25] Alan Renwick: So this is what political scientists call a difference in differences research design.
[00:14:28] Diane Bolet: That's exactly right. So that's the intuition behind it. It's to be able to compare the difference between two types of groups, so here will be the treated municipalities – so those that will receive the just transition policy, so the areas that we're interested in – compared to those that are similar, but will not receive the just transition policies.
And so that's the first difference.
And the second difference is to compare it before our election of interest, which was April 2019, which is when the pledge, or when the policy promise of these policies, was enacted, so during the campaign.
And so the intuition is: if there was no promise – policy pledge – around those just transition policies, we would not expect any difference in the vote share between these two types of groups, between the coal mining municipalities that will receive the just transition policies and those similar municipalities that will not receive the just transition policies.
So, that's what we're comparing.
[00:15:30] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So you're comparing the change over time-
[00:15:34] Diane Bolet: The change over time.
[00:15:35] Alan Renwick: -In those different places.
[00:15:36] Diane Bolet: Exactly.
[00:15:37] Alan Renwick: So if there is no effect from the policy, then you would expect any change in the vote share of the Socialist Party at this election in the other parts of the regions that aren't affected by the policy to be the same as the change in the parts of the regions that are affected by the policy.
[00:15:55] Diane Bolet: That's exactly right. Yeah.
[00:15:56] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Fantastic.
So what do you find?
[00:16:00] Diane Bolet: So we found that there was a change of vote between these two types of municipalities in the 2019 election.
We found a positive and significant effect, which means that it is statistically significant. So it means that there are differences between these two types of municipalities.
And we found that the PSOE vote share has increased by 1.8 percentage points in the coal mining municipalities in 2019. And that might not sound like a lot of increase, but we should remind ourselves of two things.
So the first one is we're looking into areas that are already traditionally supportive of PSOE. So there is... There could have been what we say, in the statistical jargon, the ceiling effect. So it's always harder to find more support in areas that already strongly support PSOE.
And the second one is we should remind ourselves of the counterfactual scenario that if there was no like... The counterfactual scenario would have been that PSOE would have closed the coal mines without a just transition policy. So without redistribution, but also without the procedural dimension.
And there, if we rely on secondary evidence, we would have expected a loss of support for PSOE because that would have meant job loss. That would have meant the communities would have punished the incumbent for that.
So the fact that we found a positive effect and we found it relatively strong is already quite compelling and indicative that the address transition policies were successful and actually popular. Yeah.
[00:17:35] Alan Renwick: Fantastic, yeah. And I'm just looking at the graph in the in the paper. It's often easier to do this kind of thing with visuals, which unfortunately we don't have on the podcast.
But just looking at the graph, you can see the kind of pattern of change over time in the Socialist Party support in the municipalities that were part of this agreement and the municipalities in the same regions that were not part of the agreement.
And you can see that across both of those groups support for the Socialist Party goes up, but it goes up by more in the places that that have the agreement – that are affected by the agreement.
And so how confident can we be that it's really the agreement that is something that's making an important difference here?
[00:18:18] Diane Bolet: Yeah, so we ran a few other analyses to make sure that we're quite confident that this is related to the just transition policy.
So we looked at different... So, first of all, the design allowed us to be confident about the treated groups, so they are the areas that will be receiving the just transition policies.
We did a lot of other statistical tests, so the results remained the same.
What was also interesting is we tested it on other vote shares than the ones for PSOE. We looked at the general turnout because it's just interesting to see if the inhabitants in those coal mining municipalities would have just changed their electoral behaviour and they mobilised more and more inclined to actually turn out to vote. That would have meant something slightly different than a just transition.
We didn't see that. We didn't see an increase in turnout, which is a good thing for us.
Other like variables we tested on was on a support for Podemos, which was interesting. So it's a kind of like a left wing or radical left party that promoted more the ecological benefits of transition rather than address transition per se. We're compensating the communities.
And we didn't see any increase the support for this party, which kind of showed that the coal mining communities were not rewarding parties that were just defending like the issue on the environment. But really it was the idea of a just transition, which was the combination of redistribution and the procedural dimension, that was supported.
[00:20:01] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So Fergus was making that distinction earlier between a pure kind of compensation package, which is just about sort of what you're giving to people, and a just transition package that is also about the kind of process and giving people agency and working out their futures.
Do we know that the fact that this was a just transition package rather than a pure compensation package that made a difference?
[00:20:25] Diane Bolet: So that's an interesting question because now that we were confident enough to say that the coal mining municipalities were electorally rewarding PSOE for enacting the just transition policies, we needed to know what, why – what aspects of the deal were particularly popular.
And so we ran a few statistical tests to see, first of all, if it was only about redistribution. And if it was only about this kind of redistributive aspect among this coal mining municipalities we would have expected those that have a higher share of direct beneficiaries of the policy, so the coal miners to be even more supportive of PSOE.
So we were then doing like comparison between the coal mining municipalities to see if there's a variation there. And we did not see an effect. So we did not see that coal mining municipalities with a higher share of coal miners were more supportive of PSOE rather than other coal mining municipalities with lower share of coal miners.
So it doesn't mean that redistribution is not important since the deal also included the community-wide investment, but it was clearly not what drove the effect.
And so we were then interested in looking at the second dimension, which really makes it all about a just transition, is this procedural dimension.
And so what we did there is to look at the role of unions because it could be considered as a trusted actor and kind of a part of the social dialogue that Fergus mentioned.
So what we did is that we collected the union density in these coal mining municipalities since we were interested of the role of unions.
So unions were really trying to make this commitment credible among the communities.
And so what we did here is that we once again compared the different coal mining municipalities and those with higher union density versus those with lower union density.
And here we found that the coal mining municipalities with a high union density were actually more supportive of PSOE than the coal mining municipalities with lower union density, which kind of indicates the importance of the role of unions and the role of the procedural dimension.
To corroborate this evidence, we conducted some elite interviews with the key players of the negotiations of the just transition agreement. And so that included representatives of the mining companies, the mining unions, and representatives of the central government but also local, regional, provincial governments.
And what we found... And we did find evidence that corroborated this – the importance of the procedural dimension. So the unions organised deliberative, local assemblies at each stage of like a salient milestone of the agreement. I should remember that the agreement took six weeks to proceed, so it was quite a long process.
And the union representatives really talked to the members, but also the rest of the communities, to kind of share their views on the deal, on the concept of the deal, why it would be a credible commitment, what would be a good thing, the different aspects of the deal. And that was done all the way throughout the negotiation stage.
And so this kind of evidence, the qualitative evidence with interviews and the quantitative evidence, kind of indicate the importance of the procedural dimension that is part of the just transition agreement.
[00:23:47] Alan Renwick: Yes, that's really a nice example of a combined mixed methods study using both the quantitative analysis and also a qualitative interviews as well.
So the overall finding is that: yes, the Socialist Party in Spain actually benefitted electorally from having introduced this just transition policy, which I guess is potentially positive for other parties thinking about similar policies in other places as well.
But I guess that leads, Fergus, exactly to the question: how far can we safely generalise from this particular case?
[00:24:22] Fergus Green: Yeah, so there's a few things to say about that. So I think it's worth just going back to our larger question that we were interested in, which is basically: how can political parties that want to introduce ambitious climate policy do so in a way that's politically popular – that doesn't cost them electorally.
And in a sense, by looking at a fossil fuel community, we've picked what political scientists call the least likely case, right? You would think that fossil fuel communities would likely be the most hostile.
And what we've shown is that even in that case that it's possible to introduce ambitious climate policies of phasing out coal mining here and still build electoral support.
So in one sense that suggests that for other communities where the costs of climate policy might not be so severe or concentrated that it should be easier, right, to introduce ambitious climate policy.
Now, in another sense, there were certain features of the Spanish case that made this a more likely case than, say, certain other fossil fuel industry cases in other countries and other times and other contexts.
And so what we did in our discussion section of the paper is to identify four features of the Spanish case and think about whether less propitious conditions in other contexts might affect how well our findings generalise. So I'll just go through those four conditions.
So one is basically about the economic outlook for the industry in that context, but for the climate policy. So what's kind of the baseline economic conditions facing the industry?
And in the Spanish case, as Diane explained, the outlook for the industry was fairly weak, right. So it was a relatively uncompetitive industry. It was being propped up by state aid and the European Union was pushing the Spanish government to essentially phase out the industry by 2018.
So the industry was not in a strong condition before the government came along and, sought to introduce a policy to phase it out. And that matters obviously because if the industry is not in a strong position, then the businesses and the unions in that industry are not in a particularly strong bargaining position when it comes to bargaining with the government about, you know, the future of the industry, whereas if the industry is very profitable and doing very well, then they're obviously going to be in a stronger bargaining position.
So that's factor one. Factors two and three are more about the political institutions within the country.
So the second factor is about the way that industry groups are organised and incorporated into the political process. Now, and the idea here is that in countries where businesses are organised under a hierarchical-encompassing institution that essentially organises all of the business interests, and unions have a similar structure whereby there's sort of a central union federation that is able to bind the existing unions, and then the government has a structured process for interacting with unions and business.
So this is what's sometimes called corporatism.
[00:27:51] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Exactly.
[00:27:53] Fergus Green: So in countries that have corporatist institutions, it's sort of easier to facilitate these kinds of bargains.
Now Spain here is not necessarily the most likely case. It's kind of an intermediate case.
So Spain doesn't have entrenched corporatist institutions, but it does have a history of sort of ad hoc arrangements – quasi corporatist arrangements – around economic policy. And certainly in the coal mining sector, you had relatively few unions and businesses. So they themselves – that sector itself – were quite concentrated.
So that sort of suggests that, you know, you don't necessarily need corporatist institutions to be able to do this kind of bargaining. Some sort of more moderate degree of organisation and centralisation can be sufficient for sort of ad hoc arrangements.
And then the third factor is about links between labour unions and political parties. So in the case, in the Spanish case, PSOE had strong links to the labour unions, and that obviously facilitates trust and goodwill amongst the parties.
Many countries have labour parties that have these more or less formalised ties with labour unions. So UK, Australia, Germany, Norway. So that could travel sort of reasonably well.
And then the final one, which I suspect we might want to talk a little more about, is about the government's fiscal capacity to support, to provide, the kind of compensatory mechanisms given the size of the industry, right. So obviously the richer the country, the more fiscal capacity they have, and the smaller the industry that they're supporting, the more likely it is that they'll be willing and able to provide the compensation or redistributive aspects.
[00:29:34] Alan Renwick: So just on that final point, the coal industry in Spain was really quite small, employing fewer than 2, 000 people if I remember correctly-
[00:29:53] Fergus Green: That's right, yeah.
[00:29:55] Alan Renwick: -And even then this scheme cost 250 million euros. So I guess there's a question about, you know, if you're Poland, for example, where you have a way, way bigger coal industry with many more people employed, are you really going to be able to afford a scheme such as this that would enable you to overcome the short-term problems?
[00:30:06] Fergus Green: Yeah, so this is an important question.
I think it's worth to say on the Spain case that the price tag is perhaps not as big as it might sound at first instance because that 250 million euros was spread over eight years. So that works out at just over 30 million pounds a year, which is not – sorry, sorry, 30 million euros a year – which is not a huge amount of money for even a sort of middle income country, let alone a relatively wealthy country like Spain.
But you are right that the industry was relatively small, so 1,700 affected workers, and of course you also had the community investments – infrastructure and other kind of community-level investments – in these municipalities around the 28 coal mines.
So you've mentioned, what about countries where the fossil fuel industry is much larger?
So I think there's a few sort things to say there.
So one thing to say is that, and this I think is particularly relevant for countries that will be sort of financing their own transition, which is that there are certain things and ways you can kind of structure the redistributive aspects such that you get more economic bang for the buck as it were.
So what obviously as a government you want to be doing is not necessarily just paying people to exit the industry or paying companies to exit that business strategy. You want to be investing in the productive capabilities of the economy. So that would suggest emphasising policies where you're, for instance, retraining workers, you're investing in infrastructure, right, so that you are essentially facilitating the growth of these regions, right, in new industries.
So you can invest this money in more or less productive ways, I guess is sort of the key point. And if you're switching to cleaner industries then you want to be supporting the infrastructure and the workers needed for those industries.
The other point to make is that rich countries have obligations under the Paris Agreement and other international climate agreements to support poorer countries with finance, technology and capacity building for the transition. And so for poorer countries that have even larger coal industries, so India springs to mind, for instance, right, there's a reasonable expectation that richer countries should be supporting those countries to undertake a just transition.
And there are some examples of things called just transition partnerships, where various countries have been supporting poorer countries to undertake just transition. And this is likely to grow in the future.
[00:32:52] Alan Renwick: We're running short of time, but can I put one final quick question to each of you, maybe.
Diane, we've talked about the effects of the policy upon voting shortly after the policy was announced.
I guess there's a potential concern that once people see how the policy goes when it's implemented then, you know, things are always a little bit messier than maybe they look when they're first announced.
I think I'm right in saying you're doing some current research that takes us a little bit further and looks at attitudes further down the line on this. Do you want to just give us a very quick hint of where you're going with that?
[00:33:29] Diane Bolet: Yeah, yeah, still ongoing research for that.
So the paper that we presented is kind of looking at the kind of the policy, the announcement of the policy, that was enshrined in law, but that hasn't really been implemented yet.
So we've been interested to look at the implementation effects, so on electoral support for PSOE.
And so what we've been doing is... So we ran this survey last year a week before the 2023 general election in Spain. And we were targeting the coal mining municipalities only. So we had around like 400 respondents. And we were asking a lot of questions about their perception of change in their local areas without really directly, you know, mentioning the word just transition, not to give them a kind of a cue.
So from what we have collected so far is that the direct beneficiaries of the just transition policies were aware that they received the retraining schemes or early retirement schemes that was processed relatively quickly and effectively.
What was a bit more difficult was the place-based policies, these kind of community wide investments that have been delayed due to COVID, right, because they started the delivery of those policies in 2021, so right during COVID. And so there we saw that the respondents of that survey were not particularly aware of any changes in their local area.
So this is something quite intriguing. And we're thinking maybe if there is some sort of disappointment with the delivery of the policies, then maybe they will turn towards the far right party. But we didn't observe that. So I think that's quite reassuring.
[00:35:14] Alan Renwick: Yeah, so positive initial findings, partially, but further work to be done. And we'll need to have you back in order to investigate further.
And finally, Fergus, so you have had another paper just out in Science, the most prestigious journal of all, just about. So many congratulations on that. A very quick view on what's the kind of core argument of that paper and how it relates to what we've been discussing here
[00:35:41] Fergus Green: Yeah, so of course what we've been discussing here are the political challenges of phasing out fossil fuel industries. And what we look at in the Science paper is making the case for governments to not allow new fossil fuel projects.
And to make the link, basically, part of the case for not allowing new fossil fuel projects is that phasing out fossil fuel projects once they already exist is politically very challenging. It also, as we mentioned in the Science paper, tends to be more economically costly and there are also often legal hurdles to phasing out projects before the end of their economic life.
And so there are various kind of challenges. If you want to kind of basically mitigate climate change, then you want to do it in a way where you're building as little new fossil fuel projects as possible.
So the other key part of the Science paper is we look at various scenarios that have modelled the energy transition to net zero emissions by 2050 to stay within the agreed goal of the Paris Agreement of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
So we look at these various scenarios and we basically unpack the energy demands in those scenarios and show that, in order to meet energy demand under these 1.5 degree scenarios, no new fossil fuel projects are needed.
Now of course one could build a lot more new fossil fuel projects and then phase even more of them out very quickly and still stay within the kind of the goal. But because of those difficulties that I mentioned, and because of the challenges of phasing out existing projects, we think that means there's a very strong case for not allowing new fossil fuel projects.
And so the paper is about arguing that government should introduce policies, particularly bans on new projects, and that civil society actors should advocate for such bans in the hope that we can build a global moral norm against new fossil fuel projects.
[00:37:47] Alan Renwick: Well, if only we had time, I would ask more questions about that, because it's a really great paper and a fascinating read, and it would be excellent to share it. But listeners will just have to go and read the paper themselves. It's a Science paper, so it's very short.
[00:38:07] Fergus Green: It's very short.
[00:38:09] Alan Renwick: Yeah, absolutely worth reading.
Well, thank you so much, Fergus and Diane. Really great conversation and such important work that you're doing.
The main article that we've been discussing is called ‘How to Get Coal Country to Vote for Climate Policy: The Effect of a Just Transition Agreement on Spanish Election Results’. It's by Diane Bolet, Fergus Green and Mikel Gonzalez-Eguino, and it's currently available on early view in the American Political Science Review.
We also just mentioned at the end there Fergus's new article, ‘No new fossil fuel projects: The norm we need’, which is co authored with Olivier Bois von Kursk, Greg Muttitt and Steve Pye. And that was published in the 31st May 2024 edition of Science.
Next week are going back in time, looking at the links between war and state formation in nineteenth century Latin America.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was researched by Alice Hart and produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.