The Green-Energy Culture Wars in Red States
The battle over the nation’s energy future has become another front in the escalating cultural and political confrontation between what America has been and what it is becoming.
The states that are most deeply integrated into the existing fossil-fuel economy, either as producers or as consumers, tend also to be the places that are most resistant to, and separated from, the major demographic, cultural, and economic changes remaking 21st-century American life.
These fossil-fuel-reliant states are nearly all among those moving most aggressively to restrict voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights; to ban books; and to censor what teachers and college professors can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. The majority of them rank near the bottom among the 50 states in the share of their residents who hold four-year college degrees, are foreign-born, or work in occupations tied to the new digital economy, according to census figures. Industry marketing figures show they tend to rank near the bottom of the 50 states in adoption of electric vehicles and near the top in their. Most of them have larger populations of white voters who identify as Christianand rely heavily on blue-collar work in the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: production of energy and other natural resources, manufacturing, and agriculture. Republicans dominate their electoral landscape, both in state and federal offices.
