Polluting Companies’ Lobbying Behavior When Evidence of Climate Change Increases

• In Event: Firm Politics in an Era of Climate Crisis

Abstract

As evidence of climate change is becoming stronger, even if polarization is high, some polluting groups are showing increasing support for environmental policies. The interaction between politicians, polluting interest groups, and workers in the polluting sectors can represent a possibility of constructive collaboration or an attempt to slow down the pace of effective green policies. How is evidence of climate change influencing groups' lobbying strategies? Does evidence of climate change increase the number of environmental NGOs lobbying and how polluting companies behave? What kind of green policies do polluting interest groups support? I constructed a panel dataset with the number of lobbying declarations for and against environmental regulation and natural disasters as units of analysis by county and year (from 2009 to 2016) for three states in the USA. I obtained evidence that lobbying "undecided" on environmental policies at the state level increases after a natural calamity with respect to lobbying "against" the same policies.

Author

• Giulia Leila Travaglini, Columbia University