Business interests have often stymied progress on climate policy, raising the question of the source of business opposition to decarbonization policy. We bring time into the study of business and climate change to build new theory on the relationship between firm ownership and policy opposition. Climate policy confronts companies with an intertemporal tradeoff: incur costs today for gains in the future. Firms with short-term owners face pressure to maximize short-term profits, making them unable to undertake this tradeoff. They therefore oppose climate policy. We test our argument using a dataset of US firms and an original firm-level measure of climate policy opposition. Firms most exposed to short-term capital oppose policy more than observably similar firms with long-term ownership. Our theory develops the micro-foundations of long-term policymaking. The greater an economy’s exposure to impatient capital, the more business opposition policymakers are likely to face in adopting long-term policies.
September 24, 2025
In this article, published in Nature, BESI Climate lead Jonas Meckling gives an account of a major shift in global decarbonization politics — from international cooperation on the costs of climate change mitigation to competition for the benefits of clean technologies.
July 31, 2025
In a new article for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, environmental historian Matthew Shutzer traces how images of extractive technologies have shifted from thematizing social questions about labor and industrial capitalism to serving as representations of the ecological crises of the present.
July 18, 2025
In the rush to meet net-zero emissions targets, delays in connecting new, clean electricity generators are a major obstacle. One culprit of these delays is ineffective policy. Why do some states manage to overcome political barriers to interconnection? This case study, authored by energy policy research and BESI Climate affiliate Kathryn Chelminski, compares the utility interconnection regimes in New York and Massachusetts to find out.