Climate Policy, Energy Technologies, and the American Developmental State

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the United States (US) economy has produced an enviable record of high-tech innovation in industries ranging from information technology, to biotech, medical engineering, semiconductors, software, telecommunications, and defense. While this record has long been acknowledged and celebrated, attempts to understand the roots of this success have often been confounded by misguided conceptions about the institutions responsible for facilitating it. One particularly influential narrative (commonly referred to as the Varieties of Capitalism framework) has generally sought to attribute the American style and capacity for high-tech innovation to its supposedly liberal form of market economy, in which relatively unfettered markets provide the conditions necessary to promote rapid and disruptive technological changes across the economy. This chapter begins from the assumption that this general fetishization of market forces impairs our ability to properly understand the American state’s role in high-tech innovation generally, and climate innovation specifically.