Peddling false solutions: corporate carbon management and climate delay strategies
with Thomas Klug and Carmen Garro (part of CSSN grant on doublespeak of fossil incumbents with Brown University)
Fossil fuel companies face growing scrutiny for their role in the climate crisis and have shifted from denying climate change to portraying themselves as key actors in the energy transition. This discursive shift accompanies investments in both proven (e.g., wind, solar) and speculative (e.g., CCUS, biofuels, hydrogen) “low-carbon” technologies. Such investments greenwash corporate images, deflect accountability, and reinforce the continued necessity of fossil infrastructures, often extending sacrifice zones into marginalized communities. Using a novel text-as-data approach, we analyze 4,479 internal documents from five major U.S. fossil fuel firms submitted to the House Oversight Committee. We combine automated Named Entity Recognition and qualitative coding to trace connections between “low-carbon” projects, political and academic collaborators, and resistance from environmental justice communities. Our findings reveal how fossil fuel incumbents frame speculative technologies to legitimate their operations, lobby for favorable policies, and repurpose existing infrastructures, concentrating environmental and social risks in low-income communities of color. This study highlights how “low-carbon” investments function as a strategy of delay and opens avenues for critical investigation of their socio-spatial impacts.
A Political Backlash to Shifts in Coal Jobs? Lessons from Colombia
with Lennard Naumann and Jan Steckel (working paper)
Phasing out coal is a pivotal part of transitioning to an economy less reliant on fossil fuels that is compatible with a 1.5°C climate pathway. Potential socio-economic impacts of declining mining activity include losses in income and employment, outward migration, and generally regional economic contraction. However, the political implications of mine closures in industrializing countries are yet to be understood. Indeed, shifts in coal employment are potential contributors to increased political polarization. We investigate the case of Colombia, a country heavily dependent on coal exports that recently elected a left-wing president who won on an anti-mining agenda. Using a unique data set, we show how municipality-level changes in coal employment impact voting outcomes, looking at presidential elections from 2014 - 2022. Our findings show that changes in mining are associated with more support for pro-mining and reformist parties, and less support for anti-mining parties, hinting at political polarization. Voter backlash hence can pose an political-economy barrier to the public acceptability of phasing out fossil fuels that is crucial to be taken into account when designing just transition policies.
Reforming fossil fuel subsidies with citizens' approval: The case of Colombia
with Farah Mohammadzadeh Valencia, Brigitte Castañeda Rodríguez, Leonard Missbach, Jan Steckel, Jorge Garcia, and Jorge Bonilla. Collaboration between PIK and Uni Andes, part of EfD grant (OSF registry, in review)
Subsidizing fossil fuel consumption is both: at odds with climate change mitigation and a heavy burden on public budgets. Yet, efforts to reform such subsidies often face strong public opposition. We examine whether informing citizens about the effects of fossil fuel subsidy reform (FFSR) and complementary policy measures can increase public acceptance. We study this question using a novel survey experiment in Colombia, a country currently aiming at reforming existing fossil fuel subsidies. Building on Hoy et al. (2026), our experiment exposes respondents to different information treatments, including from an innovative calculation of personal costs, and options for complementary policy measures. Leveraging a representative sample with more than 3,600 respondents, we find that information provision alone has limited effects on public support, as citizens rarely update their at times incorrect beliefs. In contrast, policy design is crucial: Complementing FFSR with additional measures shifts public opinion from majority opposition to majority support. Informing about the environmental effects of FFSR is most effective and strongly increases support for environmentally oriented complementary policies. Opposition to FFSR without complementary measures remains primarily driven by concerns about impacts on poorer households. Our results inform about prospects for fossil fuel subsidy reform, when public opposition is of great concern.
Conflicts and Perception in the Nickel Boom: Understanding Public Narratives of Chinese Investment in Indonesia
with Xiaoran Li and Jan Steckel (part of Geoclimrisk)
Chinese investment in Indonesia’s nickel industry has grown rapidly over the past decade, making the country central to global electric vehicle (EV) supply chains. A key turning point was Indonesia’s 2014 ban on raw nickel ore exports, designed to capture more domestic value through downstream processing and to reinforce a resource-nationalist agenda. While the policy successfully attracted large-scale foreign investment, most prominently from Chinese firms. It also imposed significant short-term costs and fueled local contestation over environmental damage, corruption, and other social issues. Existing evaluations of the ban emphasize its economic trade-offs and institutional challenges, but much less is known about how these dynamics are reflected in public discourse. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing Indonesian media coverage of nickel projects to investigate: (1) the types of conflicts and environmental problems associated with nickel investments, and how they have evolved since the export ban; and (2) how conflicts is framed in public narratives, including whether Chinese-backed projects are disproportionately targeted or “scapegoated.” Using machine-learning methods (topic modeling and sentiment analysis) combined with qualitative framing analysis, we aim to link patterns in media discourse to the broader political economy of critical minerals. The study contributes to debates on resource nationalism, the geopolitics of the energy transition, and the contested legitimacy of Chinese-led development models.
Orthodoxy’s obstruction of climate policy, and what can be done about it
with Andres Bernal
Despite accelerating climate impacts, U.S. climate policy remains deeply inadequate. We argue that a key source of this failure is the enduring influence of orthodox economic frameworks, which have constrained policy ambition and narrowed the range of policy options. The Green New Deal (GND) marked a sharp rupture in this paradigm, reframing climate action as industrial policy oriented toward public investment, employment, equity, and a just transition. Although the GND was never enacted, elements of its investment logic reappeared in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). At the same time, the IRA’s compromises - particularly diluted environmental justice provisions and continued deference to fiscal restraint - underscore the resilience of orthodox constraints. We apply machine-learning methods to a representative corpus of U.S. public discourse on climate policy. We develop a taxonomy distinguishing orthodox from heterodox economic framings and trace their relative prominence across the GND and IRA policy cycles. Our findings identify how orthodoxy continues to delimit climate policy, and where pathways for overcoming these barriers may lie.
Denial 2.0: Internal Communications of Fossil Fuel Majors
with Julian Barg, Geoffrey Supran, Thomas Klug, Holly Caggiano, and Madison Lore (database publication)
Amid growing scientific and public consensus to decarbonise energy production, recent work on fossil fuel industry majors documents a strategic shift from a strategy of climate denial towards a broader approach of climate obstruction. Emerging evidence points to fossil fuel majors’ active role in delaying action on climate change, most scientific studies are limited by publicly disclosed data. We hence compile a set of internal corporate documents from a 2024 U.S. Congressional Investigation into the climate-related activities of six key fossil fuel entities: ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Chamber of Commerce. These released documents feature internal communications which have been first digitised, then coded according to their content type (including emails, reports, contracts), scope of redaction, and entity lists (including actors, technologies, policies). This dataset is relevant for scholars, journalists, and policymakers interested in understanding lobbying and corporate behavior, discourse mismatch, and climate obstruction.
Technology Fitness as a Driver of Regional Pollution Patterns: Lessons for the Green Transition
with Maria Enrica Virgillito, Lorenzo Tortora, Aurelio Patelli, and Angelica Sbardella (part of PRIN-PNRR Project)
This paper investigates the relationship between industrial pollution, innovation capacity, and left-behindness across European regions. Focusing on toxic emissions from industrial activities, we combine plant-level pollution data with patent-based measures of regional technological fitness to examine how pollution concentration varies with local innovation potential. We introduce a regional index of technological fitness (green and non-green) and relate it to pollution profiles. Empirically, we show that regions with higher technological fitness display lower and more diversified pollution concentrations, while low-fitness regions remain locked into more toxic industrial specialisations. The strength and form of this relationship varies across European macro-areas, reflecting long-standing territorial heterogeneities: technological fitness is particularly informative in Central and Eastern Europe, while green technology capabilities are more evenly distributed in Northern and Mediterranean regions. Sectoral evidence indicates that the energy sector is a key area where innovation capacity and pollution outcomes intersect. Overall, the findings suggest that innovation capability is a structural determinant of left behind places. This has important implications for place-based industrial transition policies in Europe.
Contested voices: an automated text-as-data pipeline for public attention to hydrogen conflicts in Spain
with Marcel Llavero Pasquina, Arnim Scheidel and the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice
The Environmental Justice (EJ) Atlas maps and documents socio-environmental conflicts around the world. We investigate hydrogen as a commodity that perpetuates energy colonialism and pushes the frontiers of sacrifice zones. Simultaneously, voices of local opposition to green energy projects are multiplying. News media echo local acceptance and opposition, juxtaposing contested visions. We propose a novel pipeline that maps geolocalised hydrogen projects in Spain to news coverage on opposition and resistance via the LexisNexis database. Using the conflicts already coded in the EJ Atlas, we train an algorithm that automates coding classification based on newspaper coverage.
Gendered labour markets in US sacrifice zones: historical legacy and new divides in the low-carbon transition
with Linnea Nelli and Maria-Enrica Virgillito (book chapter with Palgrave)
Are sacrifice zones - places bearing a disproportionate burden of industrial toxicity - characterised by a gendered geography in terms of labour market outcomes? In this chapter, we conceptualise and document the gender dimension of disproportionate exposure to toxicity across US labour market counties. We show that in areas where toxicity exceeds the national average, women face the greatest exclusion from the labour market. Drawing on inactivity rates and median earnings at the US census tract level (N=82,714), aggregated to the county level, we also examine the spatial relationship between toxic exposure and lower-carbon production facilities. The structural co-occurrence of feminised disadvantage and toxicity is evident at both geographical scales: counties in the top 10% and 20% of the toxicity distribution simultaneously rank in the upper tail of female inactivity and the lower tail of median earnings, while men's labour market outcomes remain largely unaffected. The geography of toxicity displays along more established historical directrices, the Rust Belt, the Deep South and the Silicon Slopes in Utah. Such a geography of sacrifice zones results from capital mobility in search of cheap labour historically less regulated by local institutions. Although usually those areas are represented by disadvantaged male labour force, harshly hit by globalization and deindustrialisation, we show that women face the burden of negative economic spillovers derived from industrial lock-in in manufacturing decaying activities. A spatial overlap with battery and solar manufacturing facilities further characterises these high-toxicity areas, raising urgent questions about the making and remaking of place-based inequality in the low-carbon transition from a feminist economics perspective.
Left in the Dark: Divergent Media Narratives on Energy Affordability, Justice, and Policy
with Danielle Deane and the Tishman Center
This study examines how energy democracy and affordability are framed across two distinct categories of news media in the United States: the mainstream versus heterodox, ethnic, and local outlets. Coverage is analyzed across four thematic domains: Justice, Savings & Money, Jobs & Income and Legislation & Policy. By contrasting coverage patterns between community and mainstream outlets, this research surfaces potential gaps in public information and highlights whose voices are centered in energy policy narratives. We further situate our findings within a communications and reach framework, examining what is covered and how widely these narratives travel, and which communities they ultimately reach (work in progress).
Mapping AI Data Center Siting in Environmental Justice Communities
with Madeleine Killough and Yukyan Lam from the Tishman Center
This study presents a spatial co-location analysis of approximately 5 thousand AI data center locations across the United States, mapped against Environmental Justice (EJ) community designations. By overlaying data center siting patterns with indicators of cumulative environmental burden including proximity to pollution sources, demographic vulnerability, and health risk indices, this research interrogates whether AI infrastructure expansion is disproportionately concentrated in or near communities already facing compounding environmental and socioeconomic stressors. Findings are intended to inform advocacy, policy, and regulatory efforts opposing the unchecked expansion of data centers in vulnerable communities (work in progress).
What Activates Renewable Discourse? The Role of Gas Price Shocks
with Jan Steckel, Annika Stechemesser, Finn Krueger
This paper examines how energy shocks, exemplified with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, have shaped public discourse on renewable energy in Europe. We build a media salience index of renewables from LexisNexis covering ten European countries at monthly frequency across multiple languages, and pair it with IEA data on dependence on Russian gas. Identification relies on a continuous difference-in-differences design, where treatment is regional exposure to the 2022 energy shock. The findings speak to climate salience as a contested, finite resource on the news agenda and its interaction with geopolitical crises (work in progress).