Some of the most important fights over climate change aren’t being waged in Washington. They’re happening state by state, in a melee of utilities, fossil-fuel companies, state legislators, and persuaded voters.
To see one in action, visit Beaver, Pennsylvania, where two Westinghouse nuclear reactors produce roughly a fifth of the Keystone State’s zero-carbon electricity. Three years ago, FirstEnergy Corporation, a private utility worth $28 billion, announced that it would soon have to sell the nuclear plants or shut them down. Even though the reactors were supposed to operate for another few decades, the plunging cost of natural gas had made them noncompetitive. Only direct subsidies could keep the plants alive, the utility warned.
State lawmakers had not even proposed a bill floating that option when a new group called Citizens Against Nuclear Bailouts burst onto the scene. Boasting support from local manufacturers and, unexpectedly, the AARP, the group told local reporters that it opposed “any legislative effort” to subsidize the plants. At the same time, a micro-targeted group of Pennsylvanians received a deluge of direct mailers, phone calls, and Facebook ads, exhorting them to call state senators to oppose a “nuke bailout.”
“These billion dollar companies don’t need bailouts, they need to compete with other energy companies on a level playing field,” said one postcard-size mailer.
A small disclosure on the mailers revealed that they had, in fact, not come from a group of self-organized Pennsylvanians. The mailers were funded and shipped by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying champion for oil and natural-gas companies in national politics. The return address on the mailers was one of the group’s offices in downtown Washington, D.C.
Three years ago, after Donald Trump’s election, climate activists and environmental leaders turned their attention to state and local politics. They have stacked up real victories since. In December, a bipartisan group of 24 governors declared that their states were “still in” the Paris Agreement on climate change. And Democrats in New York, New Jersey, and Washington State have passed major bills aimed at eliminating carbon pollution from their local economies.
But climate activists have not been alone in switching focus to local politics: The oil industry has also pivoted. In the past few years, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and its allies have activated at the local level, fighting against—and occasionally beating back—climate-friendly policies in at least 16 different states. This surge of local activism has succeeded in slowing the growth of electric-vehicle sales and zero-carbon energy, experts say.
Perhaps most surprising, the industry has not only focused on the states, but also actually borrowed tactics and ideas from climate activists. The API’s local campaign is designed around a concept—dubbed the social license to operate—that was first invented by risk analysts in the mining industry but that was popularized, more recently, by far-left climate groups such as 350.org. The idea is a name for American society’s invisible permission slip to the fossil-fuel industry: the unwritten contract that allows companies to frack, drill, build pipelines, run oil refineries, and sell carbon-intensive fuels.
Since the mid-2010s, climate activists have focused on yanking that social license away. Now, the oil industry is pouring resources into an effort to retain it. Its activities “are having a tangible impact in preventing zero-carbon electricity and zero-carbon electric vehicles from getting adopted,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president of energy policy at Third Way, a nonpartisan think tank on the center-left, told me.
In a statement, Bethany Aronhalt, a spokesperson for API, said that the oil and gas industry supported “new approaches, policies, and technological innovation to address the risks of climate change.” She listed a few policies—including the USE IT Act, a bipartisan Senate bill—that have won API’s endorsement. The USE IT Act would increase federal support both for capturing carbon from the atmosphere and for using that carbon to make fossil-fuel extraction more efficient.
Last month, the API unveiled a huge new public-relations campaign, “Energy for Progress,” that cast its member companies as heroes in the fight against climate change. The campaign, which features images of happy young people in the woods, accompanied a systematic change in how API described itself. Its leaders now say it represents the natural gas and oil industry—with a big emphasis on the natural. But despite this new push, API does not support a carbon tax or any other policy that would reduce fossil-fuel use.
And at the state level, few climate-friendly efforts have escaped the attention of API or the broader oil industry. In 11 states, the industry has fought new laws that encourage electric-car purchases. In five states, it has campaigned against extending the life of nuclear plants, which generate more zero-carbon electricity in the United States than any other technology. And across the Northeast, it has tried to stop the construction of transmission lines that would import excess hydroelectric power from Quebec.
Of course, there are practical reasons for API to oppose such climate policy. Right now, API’s member companies command a massive market share of several sectors of the American economy. Gasoline and other oil-derived products generate 92 percent of the energy used to transport Americans and their goods—whether on the highway, on the water, or in the air, according to the Energy Information Administration. Natural gas generates more than a third of American electricity, and plunging prices mean that its share is rapidly growing.
Every electric vehicle on the road cuts into oil’s share of the transportation sector. By the same token, every retired nuclear plant necessitates a new surge of natural-gas production. “The oil and natural gas that are staying in the market from [API’s actions] are much worse” than the alternatives, Freed said.
The industry’s wake-up call may have come in 2018, when it faced two ballot questions in western states. In Colorado, voters were asked whether new oil and gas equipment, including fracking wells, should be set back 2,500 feet from homes and other occupied buildings. The industry plowed $41 million into defeating the question—and eventually won, persuading 55 percent of voters in the Democratic state to reject the effort. In Washington State, meanwhile, the industry dropped $31 million to fight a carbon-tax referendum, outspending supporters almost two-to-one. That effort—which was led by the Western States Petroleum Association, which works closely with API—also succeeded.
In the past several years, the oil industry has also worked with groups funded by the Koch Foundation to engineer a nationwide decline in financial support for electric-vehicle sales. Today, only 15 states offer subsidies or support for electric-car buyers, down from an all-time high of about two dozen states in 2015. (The New York Times and Politico have both previously covered the state-by-state fight over EVs.)
