Have you ever wondered why Germany is a forest of wind turbines, while the United States remains a patchwork of massive SUVs and polarised debate? Or why Australia, a country blessed by endless sun, became the first in the world to rescind a carbon tax?
Looking at the global map of climate policies, it’s too easy to presume that those who lag behind simply do not care about the environment. Reality, however, is far more complex. It’s not merely about how much sun hits a country’s shores; it’s about politics: that is, the architecture of interests, institutions, and the capacity of a government to effectively cooperate with firms.
The Three Paths to a Green Future
Research from Science suggests that countries follow specific paths, determined by their political DNA, to foster the green energy transition:
1. Isolation: When policy-makers are shielded from electoral turnover thanks to the greater autonomy of the bureaucracy and peculiar electoral rules, they have more room for manoeuvre to transition easily to a green-energy-driven economy, such as nuclear energy. In France, for example, a very “isolated” political system allowed the country to increase its nuclear energy capacity from 8% to 70% in less than a decade, without the government being hindered by industry or opposition parties.
2. Compensation: This is more of a “stick and carrot” approach, in which governments alleviate firms' and consumers' transition costs to reduce the risk of losing out from policy change. Germany notoriously bargained a 40-billion-euro “carbon compromise” with local companies to gradually eliminate lignite extraction in exchange for their political support for the energy-transition agenda.
3. Markets: Here, the government steps back and relies on market forces to effectively transform the sector. Countries like the US and Australia usually fall into this category, where emission reductions are usually the result of market-driven spontaneous changes (such as the shift from carbon to natural gas), rather than national policy.
Why “Disrupting” is Harder than “Building”
One thing is building a new wind farm; another is telling a hundred-year-old car company that it can no longer sell internal combustion engines. Here is where government-firm relationships become the definitive game changer. Take the fight for electric vehicles (EVs). You would expect Germany, the land of car engineering, to be at the forefront. On the contrary, Germany struggled to renovate its automobile sector because of the high level of political coordination. In fact, the German government and national automakers negotiated potential sector transformations through talks held behind closed doors, relying on internal consensus. Even though this creates stability, it also allows incumbents to slow the pace of change to protect their production, investments, and vested interests in diesel technology.
Conversely, American automobile policy has been an arena of fierce competition. Since the American system is more pluralist and conflictual, the Obama administration was able to circumvent traditional industrial incumbents and build coalitions with tech-challengers and innovators such as Tesla, while addressing the rising green sentiment via rigorous carbon emission standards.
Institutional Capability
Even with the best intentions, a government needs the right tools to act. This is what researchers call institutional capacity: the government’s ability to solve problems and smooth conflicts to achieve its political goals.
Germany and Japan, for instance, have specialised offices for climate policies. They can plan sophisticated regulatory measures, such as mandates, carbon caps, and hard standards, since they have the bureaucratic power to implement them. Nations like the US and Australia, instead, lacked formal central offices with official green policy mandates during key transformative moments. Thus, they usually leverage fiscal measures, subsidies, or tax cuts to reshape firms' behaviour, though these are usually less effective in driving a wide structural revolution.
The Power of Institutionalised Public Opinion
Do the people actually count? They do, but only if their voice gets “institutionalised” through the political system. The mere existence of green sentiment in the polls is hardly sufficient to shape fundamental change.
In Germany, for instance, this sentiment is channelled through the Green Party, which holds a significant number of seats in parliament. This direct political representation forces climate concerns into coalition agreements, pushing the government towards green policies that impose real costs on major polluters. This shows that when green incumbents are necessary partners to maintain political power, the government cannot simply ignore their agenda.
In the UK, however, and in all majoritarian "winner-takes-all" systems (such as the US) there exists a fundamental barrier to the rise of a third outsider party. In those systems, a green party can receive millions of votes without obtaining any seats if its political support is distributed over the whole national territory, rather than being concentrated in specific districts.
This type of institutional architecture allows these environmental concerns to be absorbed by larger traditional parties, thereby weakening their political potential. The proactivity of larger parties is usually directed toward the “average voter” and toward maintaining support from other coalitions, such as big companies or trade unions, which are usually very sceptical about climate policy.
Without an autonomous Green Party dedicated to holding them to account, these governments prefer industrial policies (such as subsidies for clean technology investments) over more punitive carbon taxes. These ‘carrots’ provide concentrated benefits to businesses and appear as economic ‘wins’, while avoiding the ‘sticks’ that would force voters to pay a visible price at the petrol pump.
But are they truly capable of producing long-term change? Ultimately, for public opinion to align with a vanguard position capable of genuine grassroots change, those political systems would need to challenge their own foundations and the structural obstacles of the two-party trap, which prevent small ‘revolutionary’ parties from finding a permanent home in the halls of power.
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