How Partisan Hostility Pushes Power Plants to Emit More Carbon

Political divisions that tear apart families and poison friendships may also be warming the planet. That is the central finding of a study published in the American Sociological Review, which analyzed CO2 emission rates from 20,115 fossil-fueled power plants across 92 democratic countries and found a consistent pattern: the more partisan hostility a democracy harbors, the dirtier its power sector.

The research, led by Don Grant, professor of sociology and fellow with the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, draws on a crucial distinction between two forms of political division. Ideological polarization - policy disagreements over taxes, immigration, healthcare - can spur democratic function by forcing debate and driving policy innovation. Affective polarization is something different and more corrosive: it is the personal distrust and demonization of people who belong to the opposing party, the kind of hostility that makes compromise feel like betrayal.

Grant and his colleagues measured affective polarization on a 0-to-4 scale across their 92-country dataset, then correlated those scores with plant-level CO2 emission rates - specifically, how much carbon is released per unit of electricity produced. After controlling for economic development, energy mix, and regulatory frameworks, the relationship held firm.

Uruguay to Poland: what the numbers reveal

The contrast between the dataset extremes is instructive. Uruguay, which recorded the lowest affective polarization score, showed power plant emission rates 11 percent below the cross-country average. Poland, at the top of the polarization ranking, showed emission rates nearly 8 percent above average. The United States ranked near the high end for affective polarization and above average for emissions.

The mechanism runs through institutional erosion. As citizens entrench into rival coalitions organized more by partisan identity than policy interest, stakeholder networks that historically pressured utilities to adopt cleaner practices begin to fracture. Environmental groups get sidelined from decision-making. Regulatory agencies become targets in partisan battles rather than neutral enforcers. The formal architecture of climate policy may remain intact on paper while losing the social scaffolding that makes it function in practice.

"As these coalitions harden, governance becomes more difficult, existing policies lose effectiveness, and legislative processes designed to foster compromise are increasingly undermined," Grant said.

The study found that government-owned power plants are particularly vulnerable. Public utilities must navigate competing political demands and, in polarized environments, tend to prioritize the concerns of whichever coalition holds power rather than bridging both sides.

A different era of environmental politics

The contrast with earlier decades is stark. In 1970, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to pass the Clean Air Act, authorizing the EPA to establish national air quality standards. Environmental protection was not yet a partisan wedge. Utilities included environmental stakeholders as routine collaborators. That era has largely passed.

The EPA recent move to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding - which classified greenhouse gas emissions as a public health threat and underpinned major climate regulations - reflects exactly the kind of polarization-driven policy reversal this research predicts. Grant describes affective polarization as "a runaway phenomenon that threatens to erode democracies' capacity to protect the planet."

The analysis also found that in high-polarization countries, climate policies are measurably less effective at curbing emissions even when those policies formally exist. A law on the books does not guarantee compliance when the institutions enforcing it are undermined by political conflict.

What Britain's coal exit demonstrates

The paper does not end in pessimism. Britain offers a counterexample. Despite a tradition of rancorous parliamentary politics, Britain closed its last operating coal plant in September 2024, ending more than 140 years of coal dependence. Grant attributes this partly to framing the energy transition as a national undertaking rather than a political victory for one faction - an approach that helped insulate the policy from partisan sabotage.

The study carries meaningful limitations. Cross-national comparisons of affective polarization rely on survey instruments that may capture different things in different cultural contexts. The 92-country sample spans democracies at very different stages of development and with very different energy systems, and confounding variables are difficult to fully eliminate. The findings establish a consistent pattern rather than a precise causal mechanism; whether polarization drives emissions or energy politics drives polarization remains an open question.

Still, the breadth of the dataset gives the finding unusual weight. Twenty thousand power plants across nearly 100 countries is not a case study reflecting one nation's idiosyncrasies. The association between partisan hostility and carbon emissions holds across democratic systems with widely varying political institutions and legal traditions.