Climate capitalism and the global corporate elite network

Abstract

This article explores the political involvement of transnational corporations and their directors in elaborating the project of ‘climate capitalism’ advanced to address climate change. Climate capitalism seeks to redirect investments from fossil energy to renewable energy generation so as to foster an ecological modernization of production and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. I use social network analysis to assess the potential for climate capitalism, as a project of a section of the corporate elite, to replace the current ‘carboniferous capitalist’ regime. Corporate-funded climate and environmental policy groups (CEPGs) constitute major venues for the corporate elite to assemble and plan their response to the climate crisis. By mapping out the network of board-level interlocks between CEPGs and the largest transnational corporations, I first find that certain CEPGs are centrally located among the global intercorporate network, and thus well positioned to promote climate capitalism among the corporate elite. Second, I delineate a climate capitalist inner circle that includes the individual members of the corporate community who arguably are able to exert the greatest power to shape climate capitalism. However, many of them, close to the oil and nuclear sectors, may support a long-term transition away from fossil fuels, incompatible with avoiding dangerous climatic warming.

Keywords:

• climate capitalism
• climate politics
• transnational corporations
• interlocking directorates
• inner circle
• social network analysis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bill Carroll, Min Zhou, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on draft versions of this article.

Notes

1. The expression is from Lewis Mumford (2010 [1934]).

2. The British Columbia carbon tax might be an exception (Elgie and McClay 2013; although see Bumpus 2015).

3. Available online: http://fortune.com/global500/2011, consulted in October and November 2011.

4. This sampling strategy originally served to account for the fact that banks and other financial corporations generally declare lower revenues despite the fact that they control vast assets. Such a stratified sample thus avoids underrepresenting financial capital. In this case though, the situation was the opposite, as the 2010 G500 list included 391 industrial firms and 109 financial firms. To ensure comparability with previous studies, I nonetheless constructed a sample of 400 industrial and 100 financial firms.

5. For the purpose of the following analyses, directors of subsidiary firms who also are directors of one or more CEPG have been included as if they were board members of the parent corporation. This is to account for the fact that CEPGs’ boards are at times staffed with lower-level managers and directors of subsidiaries of major corporations, who do not sit on the parent company’s board but still represent it on CEPG boards. These linkages, despite the fact that they are not board interlocks in the classic sense, are meaningful and need to be considered in this study. They represent channels of communication between firms and CEPGs, and are indicative of an interest in influencing the climate capitalist project.

6. This discourse is found in the public material disseminated by each CEPG, available on their respective websites; for a more detailed description of CEPGs’ activities, see Sapinski (forthcoming).

7. The reciprocal of the largest eigenvalue of the network’s adjacency matrix represents the limit at which the equation does not converge anymore. The maximum allowable value for β would thus be the closest possible to this value (Borgatti, Everett, and Johnson 2013:171), approximated in the Ucinet software package by 0.995 times the reciprocal of the largest eigenvalue (Borgatti, Everett, and Freeman 2002).

8. In which case it is equivalent to eigenvector centrality, as described by Bonacich (1972).; see Bonacich (1987), Borgatti et al. (2013, 171).

9. See Heemskerk (2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Victoria Centre for Global Studies.

Notes on contributors

Jean Philippe Sapinski

JP Sapinski’s research maps out the relations between the global corporate elite and the field of climate politics, with a special focus on policy-planning organizations located at the interface between corporations and politics. His most recent project looks at climate geoengineering in the context of the relationship between the state, scientific knowledge, and the reproduction of global capitalism through the climate crisis.