"There is and can be no single ex ante identifiable message, so we should think carefully about the institutional arrangements for message selection" would have been preferable to "don't shoot the messenger".

Second paper of our SER special issue (with @vapunkt.bsky.social & @trgn.bsky.social) out just hours after the first and it's just as great - congrats Nick! 🎉 More information in the thread below ⬇️

Weakening state and civil society institutions that governed/steered/regulated public utilities did not depoliticise those sectors, but rather ceded their political control to powerful private interests. Recreating and re-empowering such institutions could help challenge those interests today.

In another sense, the history of ‘stranded assets’ exposes the naivety of the policymakers who sought to insulate market provision from political control. Deregulation did not replace a messy political order with a harmonious economic order: it merely replaced one political economy with another.

Proponents of deregulation argued that, once liberalised energy markets are in place, market forces will *already* compensate investors for the political and regulatory downside risks they bear. The case for compensating owners of fossil fuel assets again, after these risks crystallise, is weak.

If this compensatory logic is applied to fossil fuel assets today, however, it risks turning the ‘polluter pays principle’ on its head. But the original ‘stranding’ debates also teach us that stranding was only ever supposed to be a temporary phenomenon.

The language of ‘stranding’ was introduced to describe these novel losses – and private investors in the pre-deregulation public utilities sought (and often won) compensation for the stranded costs of their stranded investments.

That changed with deregulation, triggering political conflict over who should shoulder losses related to legacy assets: the original investors, the ratepayers, the government, the still-regulated network providers or businesses operating in newly competitive markets.

Prior to deregulation, US public utilities such as telecoms and electricity were often privately owned/funded, but heavily regulated – meaning that investors could almost always recover their capital costs through regulated fees from captive ratepayers. 'Stranding' was nigh-on impossible.

The concept of ‘stranded assets’ has become central to analysis of the climate crisis. Rapid decarbonisation will result in the mass devaluation of a whole host of fossil-fuel-related investments. But where did the language of stranding come from, and how has its meaning changed over time?