Domestic-level fossil-fuel interests

This began life meant to be a quick-hit post with a simple look at numbers; it ballooned into a post that was too long, and yet not long enough to actually do the subject justice. C'est la vie...

Something I've been trying to do better lately is understanding what the electoral strategy of climate politics looks like in the US. In a general sense, right now, it involves electing people friendly to environmental legislation. But some legislators are inherently more likely to be friendly than others. In theory, all legislators - regardless of party or personal inclination - should find it difficult to vote for climate legislation if they come from states with major stakes in fossil fuels. In particular, coal and oil producing states. So, looking at those:

The key coal states, in order of production as of 2000, are

Wyoming - 339 thousand tons of coal per year
West Virginia - 158 thousand tons of coal per year
Kentucky - 131 thousand tons of coal per year
Pennsylvania - 75 thousand tons of coal per year
Texas - 49 thousand tons of coal per year
Montana - 38 thousand tons of coal per year

After that, you have Illinois, Virginia, North Dakota, and Colorado, all between 29 and 33 thousand tons. For these states, particularly Illinois and Virginia with their larger economies, it's likely that the coal industry isn't decisively important, though it may have an effect.

The key oil states are:
Alaska - 665 thousand barrels per year
(80 percent of Alaska's economy comes from fossil fuels. An Alaskan senator simply can't vote for fossil fuels limitations.)
Texas - 393 thousand barrels per year
California - 240 thousand barrels per year.
Louisiana - 84 thousand barrels.

(Of these, it's pretty clear that in California's policy leanings haven't been too strongly influenced by its oil industry; if I did this analysis more seriously, I'd redo these numbers as percent-of-state-economy, which I'm pretty sure would wash California out, but I couldn't find a quick source for those numbers.)

So for emissions mitigation purposes, let's say you would expect to have a lot of trouble in 8 states: Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Montana, Alaska, and Louisiana.

But I'm not sure the facts bear this prediction out very strongly.

In the House, we can look at the vote on the Waxman-Markey climate bill. What we see there is that 85% of non-fossil-fuel-state Dems voted yes, while 66% of fossil-fuel-state Dems voted yes (there were only 8 Republican yes votes, none of them from fossil fuel states, so it's hard to say much about Republican votes other than the obvious observation that climate change doesn't align with the Republican platform).

So there's an effect, perhaps, but it's not as strong as I might have predicted. And the 8 fossil-fuel states are a pretty conservative bunch to start with; it's not really clear that the difference is due to anything more than general difference in local ideological center. In Texas, 9 out of 12 Democratic reps voted yes; if anything, that seems an impressive showing for a state as conservative as Texas. One might argue that the 19 fossil-fuel-state reps that voted yes had an effect on the bill, pulling it toward the center and away from stronger measures during negotiation for their votes. In fact, there's certainly some truth to that in an abstract sense, but given that there were 34 non-fossil-fuel-state Democrats who voted no (vs. 10 from fossil fuel states), it seems there were plenty of conservative Dems available to act as potential centrist weights even without the fossil fuel state reps.

The Senate is a little harder. There were eight senators from the fossil fuel states prior to the 2010 elections, and near as I can figure based on a quick pass, they break down like this, in terms of general attitude toward climate legislation (I've listed them in descending order of apparent enthusiasm):

YES or Lean YES:
Baucus (Montana)
Tester (Montana)
Casey (Pennsylvania)

MAYBE
Specter (Pennsylvania)
Begich (Alaska)

NO or Lean NO
Rockefeller (West Virginia) (could possibly be classed as a MAYBE)
Byrd (West Virginia) (could possibly be classed as a MAYBE)
Landrieu (Louisiana)

Only Landrieu is a really clear no; she voted against cloture on Lieberman-Warner. Byrd and Specter didn't vote. Begich wasn't in office yet. Baucus, Tester, Casey, and Rockefeller voted for cloture, but Rockefeller later signed a letter stating that he'd voted for cloture, supported climate action in general, but couldn't support final passage of Lieberman-Warner specifically. 10 senators signed this letter; of the 10, only Rockefeller was from a fossil-fuel state.

What this suggests to me is that within the fossil fuel group, there are 2-3 yes votes on climate legislation; 2-3 maybes that could be convinced under the right circumstances; and 2-3 no votes.

I frankly expected to see stronger effects on environmental voting. Initial thoughts on why not? Well, one could argue that Montana shouldn't be in the group; its coal production is the smallest of the group, though that's in the context of a small total state economy. If we remove Baucus and Tester from the Senate group, we remove the two strongest fossil fuel yes votes, and the effect looks stronger on the Senate side. On the House side, the solution is likely to look at the specific districts involved and see which, if any, are really involved in the fossil fuel industries in their states; most are in Pennsylvania and Texas, larger economies with many other contributing industries, and many of the Democrats are likely from urban areas that may not depend in obvious ways on fossil fuel production. In other words, the answer may simply be that the Democrats already have very few real holdings in fossil fuel producing areas, period.

Anyway. Next steps, when I get around to it: get fossil fuel numbers as a percentage of state economy and see how that affects the picture; look at individual House districts.