As we saw in the previous chapter, the corporate construction of climate change as ‘risk’ is an inherently political activity. This is evident not just within organisations but through their interactions with other social groups and with government. In this chapter we examine more closely the role of corporations in the political struggle over the framing and definition of climate change as an economic and political issue, focusing on a number of countries – Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States– where the battle has been most fiercely fought.

Climate change provides an especially salient example of businesses' intensifying determination to shape social and economic outcomes (Barley, 2007; 2010). Nowhere has this been more evident than in the increasingly contested sphere of climate politics. Corporations have sought to influence the agenda on climate policy and carbon regulation directly (through campaign contributions and lobbying) and indirectly (by manipulating public opinion through marketing, newspaper op-eds, ‘astroturfing’ and political action committees). Various features of regulation have been both favoured and opposed, but one common denominator has been conspicuous: the conviction that the answer to climate change should inevitably revolve around market expansion and economic growth.

Corporate political activities around climate change can be split into two camps. As noted in previous chapters, the first of these is rooted in the emerging discourse of ‘corporate environmentalism’, which sees climate change as both a business risk and an opportunity and emphasises innovation, technology, self-regulation, and marketisation as preferred responses. The second is what has been called the ‘fossil fuels forever’ perspective (Levy and Spicer, 2013), which seeks to downplay the threat posed by the climate crisis and rejects proposals for carbon regulation. Both positions have involved corporations in significant political activity, much of it geared towards defining government policies on GHG emissions mitigation, fossil fuel development, renewable energy, and carbon pricing and regulation. Each camp has engaged in coalition-building with like-minded enterprises, industry groups, the media, think tanks, NGOs, political parties, and individual politicians.