Simone Pulver

Making sense of corporate environmentalism : An environmental contestation approach to analyzing the causes and consequences of the climate change policy split in the oil industry

The threat of climate change has elicited divergent climate policy responses from the worlds major oil multinationals, splitting the oil industry into two factions. This article analyzes the causes and consequences of this split in the oil industry. First, it demonstrates that oil companies made divergent assessments of the market risks and opportunities related to climate change based on the scientific networks and policy fields in which they were embedded rather than on rational economic criteria. Second, it documents that although the climate policy split in the oil industry has had few effects on oil company operations, it changes the terms of debate over profitable corporate action on climate change, with significant material consequences for climate regulation and patterns of energy production. This analysis contributes to the debate between treadmill of production and ecological modernization theorists by highlighting the midrange processes of contestation shaping the long-term environmental trajectory of capitalism.

The Corporate Boomerang: Shareholder Transnational Advocacy Networks Targeting Oil Companies in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Transnational advocacy networks (TANs) targeting corporations differ from those targeting states in the strategies they employ, determinants of network effectiveness, and assessments of goal achievement. This article develops a corporate boomerang model to analyze the dynamics of corporate-focused TANs. The model is used to assess two case studies of corporate-focused TANstargeting the US-based oil corporations Chevron and Burlington Resourcesactive in Ecuadors Amazon region. In both TANs, corporate shareholder activists played a central role in the networks. The comparison demonstrates that the success of the Burlington TAN relative to the Chevron TAN can be explained by differences in the cohesiveness of the two networks and in the vulnerability of the two targets.

Ethics-Based Environmentalism in Practice: Religious-Environmental Organizations in the United States

Debates over the “death of environmentalism” juxtapose two approaches to environmental advocacy: an issues-based environmentalism that relies on technocratic, legal, scientific, policy-oriented and issue-specific advocacy activities and an ethics-based environmentalism that has as its primary focus the promotion of deep-seated changes in individual and societal values and behavior as they pertain to stewardship of the earth. The latter is presented both as a critique of the former and as a road map for a more effective environmental movement. This study documents the practice and challenges of ethics-based environmentalism through an analysis of the religious-environmental movement in the United States. Interviews with forty-two U.S.-based religious-environmental organizations revealed that the majority of these groups see themselves as engaged in an ethics-based environmentalism grounded in frameworks that tie God to nature and emphasize action, community, and justice. Groups also identified some of the challenges inherent in ethics-based environmental advocacy, including the need to confront societal norms, work on long time horizons, access funding, recruit support, and measure and document success.

Conflicting Climate Change Frames in a Global Field of Media Discourse

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

Carbon market participation by sugar mills in Brazil

The perspectives of developing-country firms are missing from the policy literature on carbon markets. This research addresses this gap by analysing participation in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) by sugar mills in Brazil. Specifically, the research documents how far the CDM has penetrated into Brazils sugar sector; how sugar mill owners/managers perceive the benefits, risks and costs of CDM-related investments; and the processes by which Brazilian sugar mills entered the carbon market. The mill-level analysis of CDM participation reveals the market and non-market dynamics that drive patterns of sugar mill investment in carbon abatement. First, access to a trusted source of information was a key driver of initial CDM participation by sugar mills, alongside other market drivers such as revenue, cost and reputation concerns. Firms with pre-existing relationships with carbon industry experts were more willing to assume the risk of carbon market participation and were in a much better position to capture early opportunities in emissions reduction projects. Furthermore, carbon market consultants, rather than mill owners/managers, were the primary agents of CDM activities in Brazils sugar sector. Consultants approached sugar mill owners, identified firm-level carbon market opportunities, created project templates by developing methodologies, convinced mill owners/managers of the benefits of carbon abatement investments, and guided projects through the bureaucratic CDM project approval process.

Characterizing the climate issue context in Mexico: reporting on climate change in Mexican newspapers, 1996–2009

Mexico stands out as an exception in the climate policy arena. In 2012, the Mexican government legislated a long-term greenhouse gas emissions reduction target, a feat which other large emerging economies (and many industrialized countries) have not been able to match. An analysis of newspaper coverage of climate change in Mexico from 1996 to 2009 offers insight on the issue context within which Mexico pursued its unilateral action. Like in many developing countries, climate change news coverage in Mexico increased steadily over the 15-year study period, with a significant increase in attention to the issue in 2007. Initially, news coverage of climate change in Mexico was dominated by framings tying climate change to weather patterns and adverse impacts at national and sub-national levels. As news coverage of the climate issue matured, there was an increase in frames linking climate change to domestic economic and energy concerns. A review of the secondary literature on climate change news coverage in other countries in the Global South suggests this domestic focus, in discussions both of climate impacts and of greenhouse gas emissions drivers, is unusual and may offer some insight into the antecedents of Mexico’s climate policy leadership.

Firm decisions to invest in low-carbon projects in developing countries: The influence of climate policy and evolving carbon markets

Firm decisions to invest in low-carbon projects in developing countries: the influence of climate policy and evolving carbon markets Nathan Hultman(1, 3, 4), S Pulver(2) (1) University of Maryland, School of Public Policy , College Park, MD, USA (2) Brown University, Providence, RI, USA (3) Joint Global Change Research Institute, College Park, MD, USA (4) Martin Institute for Science & Civilization, University of Oxford, UK