Climate and Development Lab

Who’s Holding Back Progress on Climate Solutions in the Connecticut Legislature?

12/8/2021

After a year defined by wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and many dire climate projections, and an underwhelming global COP 26 summit that left many wondering what it will take to increase our ambition and urgency around a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society has released a new analysis that provides insights about who is influencing action and inaction on climate and clean energy legislation in the Connecticut State House.

After wading through thousands of pieces of testimony and analyzing lobbying expenditures from both fossil fuel and clean energy advocates, a picture begins to emerge of how the fossil fuel industry has built beachheads that give it a strategic advantage and can slow down strong climate policy and the potential for transformational change.

Here are five key takeaways from our report:

1. Climate and renewable energy solutions face a major lobbying disadvantage. The analysis showed that electric and gas utilities spent $24 million on lobbying between 2013-2020, amounting to four times that of renewable energy firms ($6 million) and more than eight times that of environmental organizations ($2.7 million).

2. A small group of anti-climate interests create the loudest opposition to climate legislation. The majority of positions taken in written testimony given by the electric/gas utility, heating oil, business association, auto, fossil fuel, and real estate sectors opposed priority climate legislation. Specific opposition to priority climate legislation most often came from AVANGRID/UIL, the CT Business and Industry Association, the Connecticut Petroleum Council, and Eversource.

3. Despite the lobbying money mismatch, supportive testimony dominates. The report is based on systematic collection and analysis of 2,940 pieces of public testimony on climate legislation, and found that despite being far outspent by anti-climate policy lobbyists, over 91 percent of testimony was supportive of climate legislation. Large numbers of testifiers supported legislation to ban fracking waste in Connecticut, facilitate shared solar energy, encourage electric vehicles, institute carbon pricing, create a Green New Deal and limit new natural gas infrastructure. Individuals speaking on their own behalf made up the largest segment of testimony, submitting over 3,000 positions on these bills - almost all in support of climate solutions legislation.

4. The messaging of opposition to climate policy is evolving. The report underscores a strategic shift in anti-climate messaging, veering away from attacks on climate science, and towards unsubstantiated arguments attacking the cost and reliability of renewable energy, as well as perceived interference in the market giving renewables an unfair advantage and projecting an image that Connecticut is “anti-business”.

5. There are things we can do right now to help level the playing field. In light of our findings, the report includes a number of recommendations for the legislature and proponents of climate legislation to consider going forward, including:

Evaluating and addressing the oversized political influence of utilities
Identifying opportunities to broaden climate coalitions to help advance policy and blunt pro-fossil fuel business attacks
Confronting anti-climate solution messaging on cost, reliability, and business atmosphere
Improving transparency, accountability, and opportunities for public voice in the legislature and its committee process

To read the full report, click here.

New CDL Report: Beyond Climate Denial – The Public Relations Industry’s Role in Obstructing Climate Action

11/30/2021

By Cartie Werthman & Emily Rockwell, with support from Kian Kafaie and Maya Jackson

A new CDL report examines the role of public relations firms in shaping public and political opinion on climate change, finding that their campaigns for fossil fuel industry clients have shaped the federal and state response to climate change. Through profiles of over 21 public relations (PR) campaigns on behalf of clients in the oil, gas and coal industries, this report finds that these campaigns employed similar tactics to shape opinion and achieve favorable legislative outcomes.

Common tactics:

Distorting climate science to promote uncertainty in the severity of climate change
Greenwashing fossil fuel clients to make them seem more environmentally friendly than they really are
Mobilizing front groups to act as a mouthpiece for fossil fuel clients and create the appearance of grassroots support for opposition to environmental legislation
Attacking opponents

The report also found that the leading PR firms in the country often played both sides of the battle for public opinion on climate change by representing both fossil fuel and environmental clients, sometimes at the same time.

These findings illustrate how PR campaigns have adapted over time to embrace more effective strategies –undermining climate science gave way to front group mobilization and greenwashing the fossil fuel industry. This report reveals how influential PR firms are in the fight to act on climate change: almost every campaign profiled in this report sought a legislative outcome at the federal or state level – and most achieved these political wins.

Full Report Available Here

New CDL Report: Can State PUCs Lead in the Clean Energy Transition?

10/28/2021

Can State PUCs Lead in the Clean Energy Transition? Lessons From Six States
By Cole Triedman, Eve Lukens-Day, Amanda Hinh, and Noah Ball-Burack, with support from Prof. Timmons Roberts

A new CDL report examines the challenges and opportunities that Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) are navigating as potential stewards of a clean energy transition in six diverse states: Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Washington. Each of the report's profiles investigate how the nuances of a state's political, economic, and cultural contexts, structural and procedural norms, and stakeholder dynamics explain how its PUC frames and acts on climate, as well as its overall success as a regulatory body.

Key findings:

Utilities often exert significant influence over commissioner appointments and elections.
Significant resource and structural advantages allow utilities to dominate PUC processes.
There is great variety on how PUCs frame and act on climate change.
PUCs pose significant technical and legal barriers to entry for many advocates, activists, the public, and journalists.
Rapidly changing renewable energy markets are influencing utility planning and commission regulation across the board.
'The players' involved with PUC issues are relatively consistent across states.
Commission staffs vary greatly in size, expertise, and reputation.
Commissions fall on a spectrum from political to technocratic.
A revolving door between utility and commission officials is not uncommon.

The findings suggest a range of implications for public policy, which include emphasizing the importance of legislative direction for spurring climate action at PUCs, recommending intervenor compensation programs as a means of improving public participation in PUC issues, improving utility accountability by strengthening campaign spending and lobbying rules, and more.

“We learned a lot from this research: utility commissions are heavy influenced by the very companies they are tasked to regulate," said Prof. Timmons Roberts. "But we also learned that some states do a far more serious job of balancing that power with solid laws and oversight systems than others. We need to do better in advancing the transition off of fossil fuels, and PUCs are a crucial piece of that puzzle.”

FULL REPORT AVAILABLE HERE

New CDL Reports: Chamber of Obstruction

6/29/2021

Image Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

Chamber of Obstruction: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Shifting Discourses on Climate Change, 1989-2009
By Cole Triedman, with support from Profs. Rachel Wetts & Timmons Roberts

A new CDL report examines key patterns of climate affirmation, uncertainty, denial and delay from several dozen historical U.S. Chamber of Commerce documents spanning the 1989-2009 period. The report finds that:

After acknowledging potential adverse climate impacts predicted by climate science in 1989, the Chamber shifted to discourses of climate uncertainty and denial.
After a decade of articulating a fundamental conflict between climate action and economic prosperity, the Chamber began suggesting that a long- term, non-transformative strategy for climate progress could combine formerly competing objectives.

After delaying addressing whether or not climate change was a solvable challenge, the Chamber introduced 'surrender' discourses that discredited the possibility of remedying climate change.

The Chamber framed non-transformative visions for climate governance when significant opportunities for climate progress were absent, while directly discrediting those policies and regulatory action when opportunities were present.

Bill Kovacs pushed the Chamber to more extreme and dramatic positions on climate change.

The findings suggest that, while the U.S. Chamber in 2019 adopted an "inaction is not an option" climate message and support for market-based climate policies, the shifts should be viewed with a heightened level of scrutiny.

Contact the lead author: cole_triedman@brown.edu

FULL REPORT AVAILABLE HERE

New CDL Report: Who's Delaying Climate Action in Massachusetts

1/30/2021

A new report from a CDL research team, in conjunction with the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) and the Institute at Brown for Environment & Society (IBES), analyzes climate and energy lobbying records details the actors working against climate action in Massachusetts.

A CSSN research team at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society collected 1,187 pieces of testimony and 4,072 lobbying records from Massachusetts climate and clean energy legislation. The study reveals four lobbying coalitions against climate action, and that utilities are uniquely powerful on Beacon Hill. The study provides insights for state level climate action and a new set of tools to research them.

Key findings

Four distinct industry coalitions lobby against environmentalists
Testimony in legislative committees is nine to one in support of climate action
On lobbying, clean energy advocates are outspent 3.5 to one
Renewable energy interest groups stick to narrow industrial interests
Utilities lobby against solar energy, but support large hydro & wind power
Utility companies are uniquely successful throughout the legislative process
AIM (Associated Industries of Mass.) lobbies and speaks against rapid climate action
The fossil fuel industry lobbies heavily against pipeline rules, divestment, and carbon pricing
The real estate industry resists residential energy efficiency bills
Power generators fight hydro and wind supply
Opponents no longer deny the reality of climate change, but focus on cost and reliability
Climate action is tightly controlled by State House committees and leadership

“If you went to the hearings, you got one picture,” said Timmons Roberts, a co-author of the report and director of the climate and development lab at Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society. “But if you look at the lobbying records, it’s quite the opposite picture.”

FULL REPORT AVAILABLE HERE

73-page CDL report shows decades of policy interference, unambitious climate plans, by 10 utilities

12/11/2019

American Utilities and the Climate Change Countermovement: An Industry In Flux. A report by Cole Triedman, Andrew Javens, Jessie Sugarman, & David Wingate.

A team of four researchers at the Brown University Climate and Development Lab has released a 73-page report investigating ten large investor-owned utility companies. These companies were identified as historically central to the climate change countermovement, a complex network dedicated to opposing climate action and undermining science for the last three decades.

The report profiles Southern Company, American Electric Power, Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, FirstEnergy, Ameren, DTE Energy, Entergy, Consumers Energy, and Xcel Energy. It investigates each company's business and political networks, political activity and spending, and future climate plans.

Key Findings:

An elite cohort of coal, rail, and the utility companies have long nurtured close business relationships, and have coordinated closely in anti-climate action political organizations.
All major utility companies have future plans on climate change that initially appear ambitious. In reality, most demonstrate intensive future investment in natural gas and reliance on not-yet-marketable technologies.

"This team at Brown has taken the most comprehensive dive to date into how the coal industrial complex has worked for decades to delay and derail government policy aimed at solving global warming." - Kert Davies, Climate Investigations Center

FULL REPORT AVAILABLE HERE

Brown Climate and Development Lab brings new wave of climate change countermovement research to DC policymakers, activists

12/3/2019

The CDL Shifts: Climate and Energy Influence Networks in the United States
By Timmons Roberts, Director, and the Climate and Development Lab

While at the United Nations climate change negotiations in Bonn, Germany in November 2017, the Brown University Climate and Development Lab realized that the struggle for climate change action would have to be addressed at home first. President Trump had announced earlier in the year that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, a climate diplomacy milestone whose painstaking negotiation we had witnessed two years prior. It was time to head back home, time to entirely revise the lab’s research agenda and strategy and focus on getting the United States moving on this problem that threatens our society’s very existence.

The lab’s new research focus is on the actors and networks who have successfully blocked our nation from taking adequate action on climate change. Popular understanding of who those actors are is limited: most people jump to the Koch Brothers and Exxon-Mobil as the leaders. The story is far more complex, as our Fall 2018 report titled Countermovement Coalitions showed-- and which our current work mapping the climate change countermovement, investigating the public relations and electric utility industries, and tracking state-level lobbying expenditures confirm. The goal of our current approach is to provide a roadmap to the public and policy-makers, parsing out the money flows, organizations, personnel, and strategies being mobilized to block action on climate change at the national and state levels.

In late October this year, we travelled to Washington, DC to learn from senators, congresspeople, and their staffs, as well as journalists, activists, and other experts in the trenches of climate action, about how public policy machinery in our country really works. In the process, we had the opportunity to brief our research findings to figures at the frontlines of shaping policy and discourse around climate change. What follows are brief summaries of the four projects we put in the hands of key actors, and which we are developing into briefings and articles for the peer-reviewed literature.

Networks of Opposition: A Structural Analysis of Climate Change Countermovement Coalitions
Visiting Research Professor Bob Brulle

To expand the map of key actors involved in stopping climate action beyond just the Koch Brothers and ExxonMobil, Visiting Professor Robert Brulle examined a sample of twelve major anti-climate action coalitions from 1989 to 2015. While these coalitions involved over 2,000 organizations, a large majority of the organizations only belonged to one coalition. The 179 organizations which belonged to two or more coalitions form the core of the anti-climate action movement. This group of 179 organizations largely fell into three groups: coal, railroads, and electric utilities, the oil and gas industry, and the conservative movement. These coalitions have mobilized when efforts to act on climate change have gained political traction. There was a large effort to stop climate action surrounding the Kyoto treaty in 1997, around Senators McCain and Lieberman’s Climate Stewardship Acts of 2003-2004, and then again in 2007 and 2008 to oppose climate action leading up to the 2008 election. When the Republicans took control of the House in 2010, many of the coalitions disbanded due to a lack of threat of climate action.

What this analysis ultimately shows is that opposition to climate action is not just based on ExxonMobil or the Koch Brothers network. Rather, there are three communities, each working to shape climate policy in its own interests and to oppose mandatory carbon reductions. These are the major oil companies, working primarily through API, the conservative movement, centered on the Koch network and conservative think tanks, and coal, rail, and electric utilities, operating through large coalitions. To address this multifaceted effort requires a strategy that recognizes the complexity and diversity of anti-climate action efforts.

The full paper is available here.

The Public Relations Industry’s Role in Shaping Countermovement Messaging
Cartie Werthman ‘21 (leader), Olivia Williams, Eve Lukens-Day, and Kimberly Collins
The coalitions identified above direct an enormous percentage of their spending towards public relations campaigns. Behind the scenes, leading public relations firms have largely reframed the discourse around climate action to benefit the climate change countermovement. In order to understand these long overlooked actors in the countermovement, this research team profiled twelve of the public relations firms most implicated in climate change denial and the delay of climate action.

The amount of money involved in these highly coordinated public relations campaigns was staggering. The American Petroleum Institute, which was identified in Brulle’s research as a key player in the countermovement, spent more than $50 million per year on public relations over the last decade. An analysis of energy trade groups’ 990 tax forms revealed that fossil fuel trade groups spent fifteen times more on public relations than the four largest renewable energy trade groups combined.

The highly lucrative contracts between the countermovement and public relations firms often last multiple years and entail a variety of tactics: astroturf front groups, greenwashing, and personal attacks against their opposition. In fact, several of the astroturf front groups profiled in the CDL’s Countermovement Coalitions report were run largely by large public relations firms. They can be effective opposition to climate legislation: on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute, the PR firm Edelman created the front group Energy Citizens, which presented itself as a citizens group when it organized 20 rallies around the country to protest the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act during the August congressional recess. When some of these public relations firms faced scrutiny for these climate denial campaigns, they quickly transferred the fossil fuel accounts to subsidiary firms in order to avoid public backlash. Without the work of these leading public relations firms, the climate change countermovement would not have been able to frame the climate action discourse around denial and delay to the extent it has.

Countermovement Utilities: An American Industry in Flux
Cole Triedman ‘21 (leader), Jessie Sugarman, Andrew Javens, David Wingate

The coal-rail-utility cohort identified in Professor Brulle’s research is not necessarily surprising: they represent three carbon-intensive industries that have driven the extraction, transportation, generation and distribution of America’s primary historical source of energy. This project focuses on this cohort, profiling ten electric and natural gas utility companies historically active in the climate change countermovement. It investigates business and political relationships with coal and rail companies and interrogating their future energy generation plans. Our research found that many of the same coal companies (Peabody Energy, Murray Energy, and Alliance Resource Partners, among others), and almost exclusively the same four rail companies (BNSF, CSX, Union Pacific, and Norfolk Southern), were doing business with the profiled utilities-- again and again. Furthermore, through the membership, leadership, and funding of the same business associations, think tanks, and climate denial coalitions, this elite cohort of companies have coordinated on anti-climate efforts for decades. Several of the country’s most formidable climate denial groups, including active denial juggernaut America’s Power, are in fact dominated by this industry trio.

In 2019, ignoring the threats of climate change is no longer economically viable for even the most carbon-intensive industries. To that end, each of the ten utility companies profiled have recently published seemingly ambitious emissions reductions plans, many planning to reduce emissions by 80% or more by 2050. Our analysis of these documents find: 1) Each company plans for reduced coal use, 2) Each plans for aggressive investment in natural gas infrastructure, 3) Most plan for greater shares of natural gas-fired electricity generation compared to renewable energy, and 4) Most cite not-yet-marketable technological innovations in their emissions reductions plans. While the utility industry’s departure from coal may point towards a fracturing of the historically well-coordinated coal-rail-utilities cohort, its demonstrated future reliance on natural gas infrastructure and innovation calls their decarbonization commitments into question.

Discourses of Delay In Massachusetts Climate Lobbying and Testimony
Professor Timmons Roberts and Galen Hall ‘20 (leaders), Trevor Culhane, Dana Kurniawan, Derek Russell
Research on climate and energy politics in Massachusetts revealed a microcosm of the same dynamics that play out at the national level. Massachusetts once led the pack of states addressing climate change through legislation with its passage of the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, but progress has stagnated in recent years. This delay comes at a critical time for climate action, and despite multiple popular campaigns for more ambitious clean energy legislation from citizens’ groups. In that context, this group’s study asked: Who are the actors pushing for and against more ambitious climate policy in Massachusetts? How do they make their case in public? And what tactics do they employ privately?

This group analyzed the public testimony that environmental groups and others gave at hearings for climate and energy legislation over the past six years, as well as testimony given by opposition groups. This testimony was categorized into different discourses, such as appeals to social justice or economic efficiency, which we used to qualitatively describe the way different coalitions advocated in public. Using a public database of lobbying activity in the state, the group compared the prominent actors who submitted public testimony to those who engage in the most lobbying. While environmental groups publicly testify far more than utilities and energy companies, the latter vastly overshadow environmental groups in terms of lobbying. The three largest utilities in the state each spend over $50,000 per year at the State House, for instance. These findings, combined with information from multiple expert interviews, paint a picture of political stagnation caused by entrenched utility and energy companies operating behind closed doors.

ExxonMobil Charitable Giving Practices
Visiting Research Professor Bob Brulle (leader), Brett Cotler, Celia Hack, Finn Lowden
While Robert Brulle’s work has found that the climate change countermovement involves far more actors than just the Koch network and ExxonMobil, it is undeniable that ExxonMobil has been a leader of the countermovement. Since the 1980s, one of the primary mechanisms that the multinational oil giant has used to push climate denial is charitable giving. This research group is working to build a comprehensive database of Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil’s charitable contributions from 1980 to the present, and plans to examine the charitable giving practices of other major fossil fuel corporations in the future. The preliminary report specifically analyzed Exxon and Mobil contributions to institutions of higher education from 1980 to 1988, the year when James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, gave his public testimony to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on the dangers of climate change-- the first such testimony to draw national attention.

Although fossil fuel corporations’ efforts to sow seeds of doubt extend far beyond university campuses, their efforts to build relationships with the nation’s premier institutions of higher education have profound consequences. Some instances of the consequences of ExxonMobil’s donations include the ability to influence what topics and technologies are researched at universities. If universities attempt to advance unfavorable research, ExxonMobil can withhold decades-long donations that departments depend on to function. In addition, funding for research programs on marine or atmospheric sciences in the 1980s indicate that fossil fuel producing corporations may have been aware of anthropogenic climate change prior to Dr. Hansen’s testimony in 1988. Their donations also could have been used to influence department heads, scholars, and utilize school resources to conduct potentially-biased advanced research in the climate and atmospheric sciences, geology, policy, and Middle East studies departments.

The CDL Looks Ahead
October’s trip was stunningly successful, especially for just our second year traveling to Washington. Our highlights were briefing members of Congress, watching a Congressional hearing titled “Examining the Oil Industry's Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change” in person, and cooking feasts each night for experts and advocates that quickly became friends. We were effective in raising some awareness of the complex network perpetrating climate denial and delay, but our work has only begun. We will continue with these projects, polishing results, preparing policy briefings, building up our outreach capacity, and distributing our work. The bigger project remains to be done, but it has begun.

The 2019-20 CDL:
Timmons Roberts, Director, Robert Brulle, Visiting Research Professor, Cartie Werthman, Undergraduate TA, Cole Triedman, Undergraduate TA, Kim Collins, Brett Cotler, Celia Hack, Galen Hall, Andrew Javens, Dana Kurniawan, Finn Lowden, Eve Lukens-Day, Derek Russell, Jessie Sugarman, Olivia Williams, David Wingate.

Brown’s Climate and Development Lab begins new chapter to uncover networks of denial

12/28/2018

By Professor Timmons Roberts and the Climate and Development Lab

For years, Brown University students in my “Engaged Climate Policy” course watched firsthand the negotiations to design the Paris Agreement, eventually adopted by 196 countries in 2015. Taking 15 students to the United Nations climate change negotiations across the globe since 2010, the course was unique in the U.S. The class was the center of my Climate and Development Lab, consisting of a dozen Brown undergraduates, a couple of grad students, research fellows, postdocs and myself, who conducted original policy research and spent a week at the negotiations “embedded” with top research institutes, environmental and international organizations from around the world.

Then in June, 2017, President Trump announced that he’d be withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. With a record delegation of 18 Brown students at the UN talks in Germany in 2017, we heard U.S. dignitaries like Michael Bloomberg and Jerry Brown proclaim that “We Are Still In!”-- that states, cities and corporations would pick up the slack and meet the pledge to reduce emissions our nation made in Paris. As the country most responsible for the greenhouse gases disrupting our planet’s climate, the rest of the world has always looked to us to do the heavy lifting. These local efforts are therefore crucial. To keep the effort by the international community to solve this wicked problem moving forward, national efforts matter most. We needed to get back in.

Therefore, it was time for us to change course.

AILAC countries push for strong outcome on 1.5C in Katowice and compete to host COP25

12/14/2018

By Guy Edwards

Ricardo Lozano, Colombia's Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development (left). Photo credit: Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible.

Five years ago this week we reported from Doha, Qatar, on the creation of AILAC at COP18. The group made important contributions to the creation of the Paris Agreement alongside the Small Island States, Least Development Countries, the EU and others. AILAC’s Peru also hosted COP20 in 2014, which helped to tee up a successful outcome in Paris.

Now at COP24 in Katowice, AILAC is pushing for countries to agree a process to increase ambition in 2020 guided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 1.5 degree Celsius report. To complement this process and to demonstrate their commitment to advancing domestic climate action, three of its members - Chile, Costa Rica and Guatemala - communicated their interest in hosting COP25 in 2019.

Latin American and Caribbean countries are competing to host the 2019 UN climate talks. That’s good news for the region and the world

12/6/2018

By Guy Edwards and Isabel Cavelier*

Hosting the UN climate change negotiations is a massive undertaking. The president of the annual conference has to shepherd 195 countries toward a successful outcome while organizing a venue for 20,000 people over two weeks. The conference can also be boon for domestic climate action, as banks, investors and development agencies focus on the host nation.

Brazil’s decision to ditch its offer to host the 2019 conference (known as COP25) is nonsensical and unfortunate. Last month, Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Relations, under pressure from the incoming administration, announced that it was rescinding its offer to hold the UN climate talks, citing the $100 million price tag to organize the conference and the transition period as president-elect Jair Bolsonaro prepares his administration and policies.

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