Winds of Change: The Environmental Movement and the Global Development of the Wind Energy Industry (review)

Ion Vasi’s Winds of Change stands out in at least two respects among an increasingly diverse array of works concerning climate change. It is a welcome addition to the literature for its concentration on the wind industry as a viable alternative to the fossil fuels that provide 90 percent of world energy consumption today. Even more importantly, it painstakingly explains how this wind industry developed unevenly across the globe over the last four decades, outlining the crucial role environmental movements played in the social construction of climate change as an environmental problem.

Vasi asserts that his work’s most important theoretical contribution is to “bring social movements into the study of market formation and industry growth” (p. 191). Indeed, emphasis on technological innovation or the role of markets dominates earlier works on development of the wind industry. Those that focus on technological innovation argue global growth is explained by decreasing costs traced to improvements in technology, and that cross-national variation stems from contrasting technological approaches. Analyses that concentrate on market forces contend the adoption of specific energy policies and supply of wind turbine components, as well as deregulation of electric utilities, shape wind energy price and, thus, market penetration.

Yet such approaches tell only part of the story. Innovations may fail to diffuse widely not because they are poorly developed, but simply because they are perceived as undesirable. His discussion of “blue-blooded” NIMBY opposition to the Cape Wind project off Nantucket over the last decade is a case in point. Inversely, “fruit and nut” Californians welcoming an immature and unreliable wind industry to their state in the early 1980s further supports this argument. Something else, then, must be shaping these perceptions.

Similarly, market forces themselves cannot explain the differentiation between feed-in tariff successes in Germany and Denmark and limited initiatives in France and Sweden. Again, something else is at work. Vasi asserts that social movements are this missing link, and identifies three key pathways that environmental activists exploit to influence the wind industry. Activists may interact with government policymakers, energy sector actors such as those running utilities, and the general public. Influencing international agreements (such as Kyoto) is a fourth potential pathway, but this approach receives scant attention in his work.

After an introduction, the first chapter provides the big picture and runs a 143-country dataset through multivariate regression analysis, identifying the main factors influencing strength of national wind energy industries. Vasi finds that industry grows fastest in countries with a strong environmental movement, but cautions that the impact of this environmental movement is “mediated by the presence of political allies and availability of high quality wind” (p. 51).

Subsequent chapters delve deeper into the qualitative role of the environmental movement, relying on interviews with environmental activists, energy policymakers, and wind power engineers in six countries across five years, as well as thirty years of newspaper and journal publications. Vasi highlights environmentalist influence on policymakers with in depth examinations of Feed-in Tariffs and Renewable Portfolio Standards. Proper homage is paid to the legacy of anti-nuclear movements as the first wave of environmental activism in the 1970s in countries like Germany and Denmark as well as a second wave of activism surrounding opposition to acid rain. These movements then evolve into pro-renewable and wind energy campaigns when conditions such as a viable Green Party in Germany emerge, in sharp contrast with countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States where substantive national policies have yet to form. Later chapters that discuss efforts to target consumers and business are drier than one would expect and rely too much on lengthy quotes from interview subjects without sufficient discussion of powerful themes that emerge from them, such as human health connections to environmental policy shifts and the legacy of Rachel Carson.

Winds of Change is a valuable addition to literature about the environmental movement and wind...