926 21 AUGUST 2020 • VOL 369 ISSUE 6506 sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: JIM WEST/SCIENCE SOURCEW
hy is it that America has not been
able to achieve science-based
targets for carbon emissions re-
ductions despite the availability
of numerous economically and
ecologically rational solutions?
This question is often framed in terms of
job losses or energy security arguments. In
Short Circuiting Policy, a timely
political ethnography of U.S.
energy policy, Leah Cardamore
Stokes argues that clean energy
programs initially gained trac-
tion as potential opportunities to
create green jobs and reduce car-
bon footprints but then waned,
even as the economics increas-
ingly favored their success. Focus-
ing on state-level politics, Stokes
carefully lays out how Arizona,
Kansas, Texas, and Ohio struggled
to contain the power of the fossil fuel and
electric utilities industries and, in doing so,
failed to sustain a clean energy trajectory.
The book’s title is a reference to a passage
from political scientist E. E. Schattschnei-
der’s 1942 book, Party Government, which
reads: “Pressure politics is a method of short-
circuiting the majority.” This sentiment isENERGY POLICYBy Saleem H. AliOne step forward, two steps back
echoed in economist Mancur Olson’s 1965
book, The Logic of Collective Action, which
laid out a theory of how concentrated ben-
efits can trump diffuse cost factors. Stokes
convincingly argues that climate change
fits this paradigm perfectly. She reveals how
successful green energy policies are eroded
through a process she refers to as retrench-
ment, and how renewable energy infrastruc-
ture development has succumbed to a series
of negative feedback loops that
have kept progress on a treadmill
of policy inertia.
Drawing on more than a hun-
dred interviews with key decision-
makers and stakeholders, as well
as detailed document and me-
dia analysis, Stokes explores the
consequences of stalled environ-
mental policies at length. She
discusses the usual mechanisms
of influence, such as political lob-
bying and advertising campaigns,
but also reveals more pernicious phenom-
ena, including “astroturfing,” wherein the
entity advancing a particular policy is con-
cealed by an ostensibly grassroots campaign.
Such efforts, she argues, create a “fog of
enactment”—a gap between interest groups’
expectations of a given policy and its actual
implementation—comparable to what others
have documented in tobacco legislation ( 1 ).
The democratic process is fragile, reveals
Stokes, and highly vulnerable to powerful
interests. What’s more, when citizens agreewith a politician on a particular issue, they
often take cues from them on unrelated is-
sues, including energy policy.
The environment was once a unifying
cause in American politics. In 2007, former
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, an
otherwise polarizing Republican, co-wrote a
book called A Contract with the Earth to re-
mind conservatives of as much, referencing
the party’s environmental legacy ( 2 ). How-
ever, Stokes shows that a carefully curated
campaign advanced by conservative groups
such as the American Legislative Exchange
Council, the State Policy Network, and
Americans for Prosperity—sensing ambiva-
lence toward green policies from core Re-
publican Party supporters—began targeting
the base with messaging against renewable
energy in the late 20th century. Such cam-
paigns gained momentum between 2000
and 2010. The impact of this anti-environ-
mentalist miasma continues to this day.
Using the heuristic of what she calls a
“narwhal curve,” Stokes provides a useful
visual primer for how steep a rise in re-
newable energy transition is needed. She is
also more sympathetic to nuclear power in
her analysis, noting that the retirement of
nuclear plants is making our task of transi-
tion even more challenging. On this point,
I had hoped that Stokes would have been
more willing to critique environmentalist
organizations as another sort of special in-
terest group. Many of the pathologies that
she identifies in fossil fuel and electric util-
ity interests also apply to the anti-nuclear
movement, which derailed any potential
for economies of scale being realized from
this clean technology. [Extreme risk aver-
sion and a misapplication of the precau-
tionary principle trumped hard data in
this regard as well ( 3 ).] She could have also
engaged with some of the literature that
challenges the dominance of the interest
group hypothesis in explaining political
influence, for example, the work of Gunnar
Trumbull ( 4 ). Despite these minor misses,
Stokes has written a highly readable and
compelling book that will be of interest to
environmental policy scholars and the gen-
eral public alike. jREFERENCES AND NOTES- N. Oreskes, E. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt
(Bloomsbury, 2010). - N. Gingrich, T. L. Maple, A Contract with the Earth (Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 2007). - S. L. Montgomery, T. Graham Jr., Seeing the Light
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017). - G. Trumbull, Strength in Numbers (Harvard Univ.
Press, 2012).
10.1126/science.abc8702
Wind turbines loom behind an oil pump in Texas,
illustrating the enduring tension between clean
energy and fossil fuels.Interest groups and state-level political inertia have stalled
many of America’s clean energy initiatives
BOOKS et al.
Short Circuiting Policy
Leah Cardamore Stokes
Oxford University Press,- 338 pp.
The reviewer is at the College of Earth, Ocean
and Environment, University of Delaware, Newark,
DE 19716, USA. Email: [email protected]Published by AAAS