Climate coalitions and anti-coalitions: Lobbying across state legislatures in the United States

Abstract

With action on climate change gridlocked in Washington, D.C. over the past three decades, the U.S. states have become arenas for intense policymaking action. Interest groups frequently play pivotal roles in deciding the fate and content of climate mitigation policies in these legislatures. Yet basic questions about their activities still lack systematic, large-scale analysis. We ask: Who are the main actors in state-level climate disputes, and what coalitions emerge as they take positions on specific areas of clean energy policy? Who wins in these contests? We built a novel dataset of interest groups' policy positions encompassing 224,530 lobbying and testimony records on 5449 pieces of legislation in 12 states. These data were supplemented with issue area categorizations for bills and organization type categorizations for interest groups. We find patterns relating the structure of support and opposition for climate policy to party control of the legislature, the amount of fossil fuel production, and the nature of utility regulation in each state. We then characterize the policy preferences of several major industries active in these arenas. The results establish the first landscape of climate policy support and opposition to understand past and future developments in climate policy at the state level, across twelve diverse states. Utilities and pro-environment organizations dominate lobbying and testimony, followed by miscellaneous energy (including renewable energy) organizations, the oil and gas industry, and business associations. The ideological leaning of legislatures explained significant portions of lobbying by key groups: utilities, fossil fuel firms and associations, and environmental advocates.