On Climate Change, Place Matters But So Does Ideology

Over at The Vine, Mark Murro and Jonathan Rothwell are considering the locational nature of climate-change politics, which is something I have been thinking about for a while. They argue that the average carbon emissions in each state helps determine how senators will vote on the Boxer-Kerry bill:

[Last week], the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted to report out climate legislation, with ten Democrats voting yes, one Democrat (Montana’s Sen. Baucus) voting no, and all of the Republicans boycotting. If you look at the vote tally (using Project Vulcan data), you find that the states of senators voting "no" emitted 29.4 tonnes of carbon per capita, and the states of "yes" voters emitted 13.3 tonnes per capita, compared with a national average of 20.9 tonnes per capita.

They've got some other data points to back their idea up, but I don't find the regressions particularly convincing. I tend to think the situation is a more complicated combination of philosophical and regional factors. Like Matt Yglesias, I think that ideology plays a role, but only when it comes to consumers. For example, people who live in Massachusetts use a lot of energy to heat their homes. They also more likely to be liberal, and less opposed to legislation that may increase their costs. They're personally or politically invested in combating climate change and may be prepared to fork out a few bucks in their quest to save the planet.

Corporations don't share those ideological motivations. Their governing philosophy is purely capitalist. In other words, it's highly unlikely your local gas company wants to spend extra dollars on protecting the environment unless it is forced to. Their incentives are profit-oriented, and legislation that may increases the cost of doing business undermines that fundamental goal. That's the system, which is why regulation is often needed to align social and corporate interests.

As with most issues, Senators must navigate these tensions: the ideological proclivities of their voters versus the profit motives of businesses in their state. On climate change, geographically specific dynamics influence the equation. Natural resources, and the industries that benefit from them, tend to be clustered. If the state (or region) is a conservative one with a large energy industry, or a liberal state/region with a small energy sector, then it's a no-brainer for those senators. If it's a state like South Carolina that is conservative but stands to benefit in terms of jobs and economic activity from the expansion of nuclear power for example, then that's a trickier equation to balance. Harder still are those blue (or purple) states where there are fears that climate-change legislation may cost jobs in the coal or manufacturing sectors. There, the negative multiplier effect of potential job losses could outweigh ideological commitments to climate-change legislation, but figuring out the tipping point of that equation is a difficult task.