Pumping Gas: Green Liberalism and the Politics of Energy, Transportation, and Climate Change, 1987-93, Benjamin Wollet

A public debate over energy, transportation, and climate change policies emerged in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This paper examines the groups that led this debate, including policymakers, scientists, environmentalists, and industry representatives. These stakeholders struggled over how to reconcile the universal need for a healthy environment with the popular desire for affordable mobility. Their relationships with transportation, and with automobility in particular, help illustrate the difficulty of addressing economic and ecological imperatives simultaneously.

“Pumping Gas” argues that entrenched economic interests, expectations about transportation, and misperceptions of climate change stymied efforts to reduce the environmental costs of mobility. In the late 1980s, scholars and federal policymakers proposed using market mechanisms like energy taxes to limit greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Faith in the power of the market to solve ecological problems—what scholars have called “green liberalism”—was on the rise. However, many energy producers and consumers resisted measures that would have raised the costs of energy and mobility. Ultimately, forces of the status quo overwhelmed the neoliberal Clinton administration’s attempt in 1993 to enact a modest energy tax. This failure ensured that Americans would continue to spin the wheels of their old habits and dirty cars.
This paper serves as a case study of the contested emergence of “green liberalism.” It examines how various stakeholders portrayed the roles of government and markets in guiding economic and ecological change. It builds on recent scholarship on the politics of climate science, green capitalism, and sustainability in the late twentieth century. Also, it highlights the importance of transportation issues to environmental politics in general and to climate change in particular. To bring a wide spectrum of voices into conversation with one another, this paper draws on government documents, industry records, periodicals, and activist publications.

Tags: climate changeenergypolicytransportationhistorybwollet@udel.edu

Department Name: History
Appears In: GSG presents 10th Annual Graduate Students’ Forum

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