EPG Seminar Series
Environmental Politics and Governance (EPG) Online seminar series at the Department of Social Policy, LSE.
We will being holding in-person viewings at LSE, with some presentations also happening in-person. If you would like to attend these, please indicate interest here.
For any questions related to the seminar series, please email the academic organiser Dr Liam Beiser-McGrath.
2025/26 Seminar Series Schedule
4 December, 4.30pm-5.30pm, OLD 2.21
Performing Decarbonization
Anthony Calacino (University of Oxford)
Fossil fuel firms as climate-forcing asset holders face an existential contradiction: their profitability mostly relies on continued hydrocarbon production, yet, increasingly, they are under pressures to decarbonize and go green. Existing accounts often portray corporate greenwashing as reputation management aimed at consumers and investors. This paper argues that climate-forcing firms also deploy environmental messaging as a political strategy to shape the media and policy arenas. Using an original dataset of nearly 5,000 YouTube videos released by fourteen of the world's largest oil companies between 2008 and 2025, we apply text-as-data methods to examine when and why oil firms emphasize environmental messaging. We explore such messaging at key political junctures. The first juncture is when national climate mitigation legislation is under debate, consistent with the view that firms seek to preempt more ambitious mitigation policies. Second, messaging changes when ambitious climate candidates are competitive in national elections. The third juncture is in the lead-up to UNFCCC climate summits, which reflects the growing influence of climate-forcing asset holders at these global meetings. Moreover, we find different rates of environmental messaging between Global North and South firms, as well as between private, traded and state-owned. These findings reposition greenwashing as a form of political influence rather than only consumer persuasion, contributing to theories of corporate power, disinformation, and the political economy of climate change.
When do Congressmembers Break the Party
Line on Climate Policy? The Significant Impact of Employment in High-Emitting
Industries
Peter Wyckoff (LSE)
Climate policy is a highly polarized issue in the United States, yet Congressmembers repeatedly deviate from their party's position on votes on climate bills. Between 2009 and 2022, 234 House members and 65 Senators voted at least twice against their party's position on climate legislation. This paper argues that small but distinctly uneven variation in employment shares exposed to climate policy across districts can help explain these deviations. Using industry emission intensity rates and granular employment data, this paper finds that a 4-percentage point difference in exposed employment share roughly doubles the likelihood a Democrat will deviate from their party line, and halves the likelihood for a Republican. The paper presents two potential mechanisms for the outsized impact of these small employment shares: employment multipliers, and local industrial undiversification.