The United States: conditions for accelerating decarbonisation in a politically divided country

Guri Bang ()
Additional contact information
Guri Bang: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 2021, vol. 21, issue 1, No 4, 43-58

Abstract: Abstract President Biden faces tremendous challenges to overcome political polarisation as he re-commits the United States to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and promises decarbonisation of the US economy over the next three decades. To achieve deep decarbonisation, recent scholarship identifies the crucial role of broad policy mixes that create reinforcing effects between climate and energy policies to trigger technological innovation, restrict polluting activities, promote green growth, and ensure just energy transitions. Drawing on this literature, the article explores the conditions for developing such policy mixes in the US context in three policy phases. How and why have key policy conditions developed differently in the climate- and energy policy fields, and to what effect for decarbonisation policies? The analysis shows that growing political polarisation blocked bipartisan agreement, produced negative policy feedback, and caused instability in the climate policy field, whereas these mechanisms did not dominate the energy policy field. A more bipartisan approach to renewable energy policy allowed long-term experience and positive feedback in energy-policy programmes that helped to trigger technology innovation and subsequent GHG emissions cuts. Different policy conditions within these policy fields discouraged a coupling between them that could have facilitated green-growth policies. The economic shock caused by the coronavirus pandemic may potentially change policy conditions and build a path to deep US decarbonisation in the future, but only if political polarisation on climate change can be overcome.

Keywords: United States; Climate policy; Energy policy; Green growth; Political polarisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10784-021-09530-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ieaple:v:21:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10784-021-09530-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10784

DOI: 10.1007/s10784-021-09530-x

Access Statistics for this article

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics is currently edited by Joyeeta Gupta

More articles in International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().