Take Senate Reform Seriously 

Policymakers trying to make green statecraft more durable must understand and grapple with the deep structural inadequacies of the US political system. While some may think of climate and democracy as separate problems, many advocates have long understood that the two issues are inextricably linked.¹ This essay illustrates that connection by explicating one of our most misrepresentative institutions, the US Senate. After reflecting on the structural flaws of the Senate, the essay offers some strategic takeaways for clean energy policy advocates.

Our Grossly Unrepresentative Upper Chamber

The US Senate is simultaneously among the most powerful and the least representative chambers in the world.² Equal state apportionment—granting each state two senators, no matter its population—refracts a series of often-overlooked biases throughout American politics.

The first and most basic bias arises between the residents of different states: The Senate accords a Wyoming resident 68 times the voting power of a California one. Though over 50 percent of the US population resides in just 9 states, their representatives collectively constitute only 18 percent of the chamber.³ And this disparity will likely grow worse. Thanks in part to the way that climate change will impact patterns of population clustering over time, one projection estimates that the inequity between the most over- and underrepresented states will double by the century’s end.⁴

Another bias, the more outrageous, concerns the way that equal state apportionment maps onto residential patterns of racial and ethnic minorities. According to a New York Times analysis, the Senate accords the average Hispanic American 55 percent of the voting power of the average white American. Those numbers for Black Americans and Asian Americans are 75 and 72 percent, respectively.⁵ (These Senate biases now have a pernicious sibling in the House of Representatives following Louisiana v. Callais, which has empowered state legislatures to effectively disenfranchise most voters of color in the South.⁶ For the foreseeable future, neither chamber of Congress will be capable of effectuating the multiracial democracy that the United States supposedly stands for.) Of course, these are some of the same communities that are disproportionately exposed to the harms of climate change and air pollution (and among the most motivated to address those threats).⁷

These imbalances—alongside the widely studied partisan ones⁸—hold obvious implications for using Congress to build a green industrial economy. Some of the most overrepresented states in the Senate are among the nation’s largest fossil fuel producers, giving extraction-dependent economies an outsize voice in energy policy.⁹ One recent study found that Senate malapportionment systematically biases policy outcomes in a conservative direction, and that even modestly reweighting Senate votes would produce meaningfully increased support for the pro-environment position.¹⁰ Another comparative study found that malapportioned bodies that overrepresent rural voters, as the US Senate does, correlate with lower gasoline taxes and rejection of the Kyoto Protocol.¹¹

Malapportionment in Action: From BBB to the IRA

Of course, clean energy advocates need not resort to the political science literature to grasp the implications of Senate malapportionment. In 2021–22, they lived it. That cycle’s 50-member Democratic caucus represented 56.5 percent of the population.¹² Yet Joe Manchin was able to dispatch Build Back Better (BBB) and then unilaterally dictate the terms of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), while representing just one-half of a state where only 0.5 percent of Americans live.¹³

In early December 2021, Manchin quipped to a gaggle of reporters that if his colleagues wanted to make seminal, New Deal–style investments, they “should elect more liberals.”¹⁴ The problem, however, is that doing so may prove nearly impossible under the logic of equal state apportionment. (By contrast, imagine Manchin’s irrelevance in a Senate that assigned voting power according to the principle of one person, one vote—if, by virtue of representing 56-plus percent of the population, Senate Democrats in 2021 had instead held 56 seats.) Indeed, Manchin himself distills the problem into synecdoche.

Manchin’s parochial opposition to climate policy and his potential self-dealing understandably villainized him in the eyes of the climate movement—and yet his reputation risks obscuring a blunt truth.¹⁵ Manchin was an electoral miracle, a Democrat who in 2018 won reelection in a state that Donald Trump carried by 39 points two years later.¹⁶ From this perspective, Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better package was merely the cost of doing business: Without his seat, Congress would never have enacted the Inflation Reduction Act.

Somewhat bemusingly, given his reputation, voting for the largest climate investment in history likely proved Manchin’s political undoing. According to Morning Consult, his statewide approval ratings rose from 40 to 57 percent (the largest improvement of any senator) over the course of 2021 and early 2022, as he pruned and eventually killed Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. But several months after signing off on the IRA, Manchin’s approval had fallen precipitously to 38 percent.¹⁷ The raw political lesson for any swing state senator, through whom any path to a majority runs, is dismayingly clear: The key to electoral vitality may be to publicly and dramatically oppose your own party’s policy agenda—and, unlike Manchin, not give in.

Near-Term Planning

A few takeaways from these reflections come to mind.

First, securing a Senate majority supportive of clean energy policy is no easy feat—and green industrialists should plan accordingly. Constructing that coalition requires pitching the electoral equivalent of a perfect game two cycles in a row. (It is easy to forget, for example, that the 50 senators who voted for the IRA included two who won in nail-biter runoffs in Georgia that easily could have gone the other way.)¹⁸

As a result, those advocating for new clean energy policy should not put all their eggs in the legislative basket; it is quite possible that a new president will be forced to make policy exclusively through executive-branch agencies. Clean tech and industrial policy experts should therefore spend some time planning for that scenario. Of course, doing so is less exciting than crafting a legislative agenda, given the inherent limitations of executive policymaking—to say nothing of the judicial hostility to the administrative state evinced by the current Supreme Court majority (which was constructed by a Mitch McConnell–led Senate “majority” that represented a minority of the population).¹⁹

Second, even if clean energy’s legislative allies secure the chamber, any majority is likely to be slender, relying on swing votes from senators in traditionally conservative states. Of course, the electoral considerations imposed by equal state apportionment do not exclusively predict the voting behavior of individual senators; personal commitments or idiosyncrasies can play an important role. Yet all things being equal, reformers should anticipate needing to solve for a Manchin redux in which the deciding vote will likely have electoral incentives to make marquee breaks with party orthodoxy.

Specifically, green industrialists might question whether the traditional strategy for waging a legislative campaign—winning an intraparty coalitional fight to get their priority included in the party’s signature legislative effort—is always the soundest strategy. Hypothetically, it might behoove clean tech advocates to position their intervention as bipartisan, as the geothermal community has done,²⁰ lest they fall prey to the same political dynamics that led Manchin to excise so much of the Build Back Better agenda (such as the Clean Electricity Performance Program). Of course, depending on the specific policy intervention at issue, this strategy may not be available in practice. 

Third, policymakers should consider building new institutions or programs that assume a competitive electoral environment. As the Senate illustrates, our highly competitive electoral environment is to some degree manufactured by unrepresentative formulas baked into the political system. But for now those formulas dictate political outcomes. Absent exogenous shocks or substantial party realignment, we should expect that a pro-climate governing coalition, even if obtained, will prove ephemeral.

Consequently, clean energy advocates should attempt to design their programs and proposals in expectation that policymakers less enthused by clean energy will take power sooner rather than later. One example for how to do this comes from Saule Omarova, whose National Investment Authority proposal features a number of design choice that would help insulate the new institution from political backlash—such as financial independence after a one-off congressional appropriation, a multilayered quasi-corporate structure, and stakeholder input into the board nomination process.²¹

Longer-Term Necessities

If these nearer-term recommendations sound incommensurate to the dramatic scale of the climate crisis, that is in some ways the point. The aperture for achieving our clean energy policy ambitions under this counter-majoritarian political system is narrow and contingent—and may well prove unsustainably so. Accordingly, climate thinkers and advocates should join the growing movement for more fundamental political system reform.

To that end, lawmakers will ultimately need to address the Senate’s severe malapportionment. Roughly speaking, existing reform proposals break down into two categories: denuding the Senate’s powers and reapportioning the chamber’s voting power.

To reduce the Senate’s power, the lowest-hanging fruit would be to eliminate the filibuster, which adds a further counter-majoritarian layer to an already egregiously counter-majoritarian institution. This can be accomplished with the support of a simple majority of senators.²² More creative, and constitutionally ambitious, proposals would reassign core senatorial prerogatives—confirming nominees, ratifying treaties—to the House or, taking a page from 20th-century reforms to the House of Lords, impose new limitations on the Senate’s ordinary legislative powers.²³

Reapportioning voting power within the Senate would require contending with Article V’s stipulation that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” Taking that proscription as valid,²⁴ the most obvious, if partial, mitigation is to add new states by statute: Granting statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico would help ameliorate some of the outrageous racial and ethnic disparities baked into equal state apportionment. Others have proposed dividing up existing states or adding a set of nationally elected at-large Senate seats.²⁵ Finally, some, including the late John Dingell, the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives in US history, have called for outright abolition of the Senate and a shift toward a unicameral legislature.²⁶

Conclusion

Fixing institutions like the Senate will require years of work and may ultimately entail changes to the Constitution, a daunting endeavor that some might characterize as fanciful. But then again, the same could be said of addressing the climate crisis. On both fronts, the scale of the challenge does not obviate the need for action.