[Previous posts in this series: #1 / #2 / #3 / #4 / #5]
——-
As of Monday I will have taught my last class as a tenured professor, and I will be considered “retired” as of May 1.
I will continue to do some teaching at UT-Austin, but it feels strange. And it also feels like a good time to close down this blog.
“I’d like to thank the academy …”
I have worked at the intersection of energy and environmental policy for more than 40 years, 29 of them as a professor at UT. Many people have mistaken impressions of academia, and what happens inside classrooms. In my experience the University of Texas has been a place where dedicated students and faculty work hard to do exactly what universities should do: help students develop the skill sets that they need to understand and navigate the world. Full stop. It is neither corrupted by oil money nor a woke Marxist indoctrination center.
So please, enough with both kinds of nonsense.
My retirement makes me stop to appreciate all the smart, thoughtful students of mine, so many of whom have gone into just about every segment of the energy world. I am proud to have been a part of their professional journeys.
And where to begin about my wonderful colleagues — both my UT faculty friends and my wider energy/climate policy academic community? They have been almost uniformly gracious and collegial. It may not shock you to hear that some academic environments can be petty and nasty.[1] Not mine. So I especially appreciate that I have gotten to work with so many really nice, really smart people in Texas and beyond. I have been lucky.
And while energy law and policy scholarship has not engaged with Climate of Contempt quite like I hoped it would, I have received many positive reactions from people with whom the book did resonate — attendees at book talks, some veteran energy beat reporters and energy policy wonks, and the occasional out-of-the-blue compliment from a reader. Those reactions have been very gratifying. And the book won an award selected by an interdisciplinary panel of scholars at the University of Texas — also very, very gratifying.
So it has been cathartic these last few weeks to make one final (updated) case for why we (in the climate coalition) ought to be more curious and less judgmental about energy/climate politics, and for why the online world makes that task difficult.
People who are online understand the importance and power of the propaganda machine, but are caught in its web of incentives. People who aren’t online sense it’s awfulness, but tend to underestimate how much it influences their news sources and views. For both groups, today’s fractured, hyper-competitive news market oversimplifies issues, hides ambiguity and complexity, and makes political adversaries seem contemptible.
But a growing minority of reporters have begun to appreciate these problems, particularly the connection between online toxicity and partisan hatred. For example, the Texas Observer recently instituted a feature labelled “From online hate to real world harm.” And voter-centric energy podcasts like Andy Uhler’s “Phases and Stages” help us understand each other. May this approach to political reporting spread like wildfire.
“So, we’d like to close the show with a medley …”
I have decided to close out this blog on an unusual note, with musical versions of 6 key points I make in my book.
Why? Politics is frustrating, and academic writing — or my sense of what academic scholarship should be — is a poor emotional outlet for frustrations. But creative expression is an ideal outlet for those frustrations. That is why the drop-down menu for this web site has always included a playlist of songs by various popular artists addressing the topics covered in my book. And this being Austin, Texas, I too have long channeled my frustrations about energy politics into songwriting. [2]
So, yes, musical. Wait! … Where are you going? … It might not be that terrible … 🙂
OK, 6 key points, in song …
1. 24/7 ideological news makes us dumber and angrier. As with TV preachers, I have always had a morbid fascination with ideological media (read: broadcast propaganda), and have paid attention to its rise. About 15 years ago I overdosed for a few weeks on the old “Glenn Beck Show.” For those who remember it, it was the one in which he wrote on a blackboard in every episode, and also cried a lot (not unlike televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker). Watching Beck led me to write Swing Out Wide (Spotify / YouTube), which imagines what a steady diet of that kind of “news” does to one’s political perspective.
2. We know from news reports that many Congressional Republicans have always been horrified by Trumpism, but they go-along because they are afraid of losing primary elections dominated by MAGA voters. Even though I understood the political “logic” of this, I had expected more from them: more Kinzingers and Cheneys, and fewer Grahams and Rubios. So during the first Trump Administration I vented about that in a song called You Know This is Wrong (Spotify / YouTube).
3. In Climate of Contempt I argue that until we focus on breaking the spell of online partisan propaganda, political hatred will continue to intensify and trigger more political violence. That spell is powerful, and alienated or lonely men seem particularly susceptible to it. So, shortly after the Comet Pizza shooting in 2016, I wrote about that dynamic in a song called The Land of the Misfit Boys (Spotify / YouTube). And I tried to imagine where our current trajectory would eventually lead in a song called The Great Divide (Spotify / YouTube).
4. Donald Trump is adept at organizing hatreds, and amplifying them; but he is not creating them. A generation of ideological and social media did that. I suspect that in order to deprogram partisan hatred in people, we must do it away from the online world, one person at a time, among the people we know. Rise Up to the Love, Spotify / YouTube) is about that.
5. Populist critiques of liberal democracy from the left and right aim to replace it with some illiberal alternative. It is probably evident that I am far less optimistic about that kind of revolution than people on either the anti-capitalist, anti-liberal left or the theocratic, anti-liberal right. So in 2018, imagining a United States run by more authoritarian leaders willing to openly and directly persecute their political enemies, I wrote The Borderline (Spotify / YouTube).
6. If some form of semi-authoritarian faux-democracy does prevail, I suspect that we will miss (real) liberalism and the thousand small sanities[3] that go with it. That is the worry at the heart of a song I wrote in 2020 called You’re Gonna Miss Me (Spotify / YouTube). And I suspect that charting a path to net zero carbon emissions will be immeasurably more difficult in a post-liberal, ends-justify-the-means world that no longer respects pluralism.
So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, but no longer on this blog. Focusing on our democratic decay all the time, and diagnosing it in a way that doesn’t resonate with most of my fellow left-leaning types, is not satisfying. So I am closing down this blog and moving on to other things. (Life in a Minor Key (Spotify / YouTube).
In semi-retirement I plan to be off social media for the most part. It looks to me as though AI will further amplify the kinds of social and political damage I discuss in my book (see e.g., here and here); and scholars keep showing us that the psychological benefits of leaving the online world are real. So disconnecting seems like a good idea.
I still find energy law and politics endlessly fascinating, and will try to find other ways to stay involved, and to share my expertise. I hope to create an online course that dives deeply into energy law and politics, for example — along with travel, getting better at guitar and foreign languages, and all the other standard things retired people do (except golf, at which I am terrible).
Meanwhile, the scholars I link on this web site are still out there, still doing empirically rigorous work that deserves attention. I hope students and researchers will continue to use all the information sources linked via the menus on this site. And if you are a legal scholar, historian, reporter, blogger or podcaster writing about what drives energy and climate politics, I hope you will read what empirical political science has to say about that subject, and resist the pressure to cherry-pick studies and experts when framing the issues for your readers. None of us can avoid those pressures entirely, but our readers and listeners will understand energy politics better if we try.
Finally, many sincere thanks once again to people who took the time to read this blog over the last few years. I appreciate it. — David Spence
———————-
[1] Reportedly, a professor in my grad school program had punched another professor in a faculty meeting a few years before I arrived — over a dispute about departmental business. Fortunately for me, those conflicts had mostly disappeared by the time I arrived.
[2] My talented music producer friend, Denny Martin, helped me get some of my musical diagnoses of our political dysfunction performed by talented musicians and singers, and released onto streaming platforms.
[3] The linked book is Adam Gopnik’s moral defense of liberalism. As I describe in my book, liberalism isn’t the laissez-faire philosophy of some people’s imagination, or of recent experience in the U.S. It has always been an approach to social organization that aims to create a better, fairer society by managing group conflict fairly. That it has broken down in the U.S. suggests that it needs fixing, not discarding.
