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 Resource Database of Cumulative Impacts Laws and Tools: Emerging Policy Opportunities to Protect Environmental Justice Communities from Additional Burden
with Yuykan Lam, Ana Baptista, Anna Yulsman, Madeleine Killough (forthcoming in Environmental Justice)
The Environmental Justice (EJ) movement has persistently called attention to the failure of government policies to prevent and reduce cumulative impacts (CI), the multiple and compounding social and environmental stressors that disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color. The crisis of CI facing these communities has resulted in decades-long organizing efforts to advance substantive government policies that can respond to this persistent problem at the heart of environmental injustices. Beginning in 2019, the Tishman Center created a broad compilation of national and sub-national laws, policies, mapping tools, agency guidance, and gray literature on CI and definitions of EJ communities. In recent years, there has been a proliferation, not only of CI assessment methodologies and mapping tools, but also of specific policy proposals to address CI in permitting decisions. Much of this policymaking has occurred at the state level, where grassroots EJ advocacy has resulted in the passage of innovative CI policies. In response to these developments, version 2.0 of this initial database was created to focus on CI mapping tools, assessment methodologies, and policies (laws and regulations) codifying a CI requirement in permitting decisions, for the purpose of more directly informing advocacy efforts to protect EJ communities through improved regulatory frameworks. Tools, methodologies, and policies were collected using key search terms of online media and legislative websites, as well as referrals from EJ advocates. Data were summarized on the purpose and scope, definitions of key concepts, calculations and points of comparison, burden or exposure indicators, and thresholds for determining CI. The current database includes 6 states with laws and/or regulations requiring CI consideration in permitting decisions, 7 states with tools or methodologies for assessing CI, and 5 states with proposed laws that are being considered. The policies are examined from the perspective of how CI laws, particularly at the sub-national level, have evolved over the last two decades, including insight into the commonalities and distinct differences of approaches to CI in permitting. We conclude by sharing some of the challenges, opportunities, and emerging trends in CI policymaking.
Consensus or Cheap Talk? Discursive Politics of South Africa's Just Energy Transition
with Thomas Klug, Giacomo Raederscheidt and Jan Steckel
The concept of a just energy transition has been hypothesized to serve as a unifying frame for designing socially accepted fossil fuel phaseout policies. We investigate how this concept is used in public debate, and whether the introduction of just energy transition policies re-orients or reinforces existing positions of actor groups. We use South Africa as an example, mapping the positions of different actor groups and tracing changes over time. Using a novel text-as-data approach, we examine approximately 2,300 newspaper articles published between 2008 and 2023. We deconstruct just energy transition narratives and classify political stances into three types: skeptics, opportunists, and realists. We validate these classifications with structural topic modelling and use them to train a machine-learning stance classifier that tracks discursive shifts and reactions to policy developments. While most actors agree that a just transition should address climate goals, energy access, and socioeconomic inequality, their visions differ in terms of preferred technologies, enabling policies, and the pace of transition. Our findings suggest that policies such as the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) tend to reinforce existing political stances rather than reshaping them.
Dirty Talk: Media Discourse and the Struggle over South Africa’s Coal Transition
with Giacomo Raederscheidt and Jan Steckel (in revision process)
This paper investigates media discourses on coal in South Africa to understand the state of progress of its energy transition. We hypothesize that shifts in public discourse precede regulatory change. Using an integrated text-as-data pipeline, including topic modeling, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis, we analyze approximately 8,000 national newspaper articles from 2010 to 2024. Topic modeling reveals five discourse clusters: Mining industry, Transition politics, Energy crisis, Mining affected communities, and Politics in mining and energy. These highlight coal’s enduring economic importance and its entanglement with political elites, notably the ANC and Eskom. While energy transition technologies have gained attention - particularly around the announcement of the Just Energy Transition Partnership with South Africa in 2021 - explicit discourse on coal phase-out remains marginal. Positive sentiment toward the mining sector and transition politics suggests that the transition is not framed as a coal exit. In this sense, the observed framing reveals not only media priorities but also the discursive power of dominant actors in structuring transition pathways. Our findings underscore the value of combining computational and qualitative approaches to examine socio-political transition discourses, with implications for broader applications of text-as-data in policy research.
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.
How to make fossil fuel subsidy reform socially acceptable in Colombia: the role of information and compensatory policies
with Farah Mohammadzadeh Valencia, Brigitte Castañeda Rodríguez, Jan Steckel, Jorge Garcia, and Jorge Bonilla. Collaboration between PIK and Uni Andes, part of EfD grant (OSF registry)
Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies needs to be a cornerstone policy to reach the Paris Climate Agreement. A common concern for introducing adjustments to prices is related to the possible adverse (or regressive) impacts on poverty and inequality. Colombia is in the process of phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, both for diesel and for gasoline. Since these types of policies generate public revenue, experts suggest to design pricing policies that include revenue recycling schemes. The underlying question we aim to answer is what type of revenue recycling scheme significantly increases public support for fossil fuel subsidy reduction (FFSR) in Colombia. We carry out a country representative survey experiment (N=4000 households) to test for different revenue recycling schemes and whether additional information on fairness, effectiveness and environmental impacts could further increase support. The results and analysis will highlight viable entry points for the development of climate policies and related communication campaigns in Colombia.
From Coal to What? Ten Years of Coal Media Narratives in India
with Arne Arens
We present a systematic map of ten years of narrative dynamics in India’s coal discourse, based on over six thousand English-language news articles, to understand state of energy transition. Using dynamic topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and named entity recognition, complemented by targeted qualitative analysis, we quantify topic trajectories, tone, and actor salience. The results show how energy-transition discussion remains marginal and mostly nested within coal supply and energy-security frames. Discursive power is visible in the privileging of certain problem definitions and actors, which structures agenda setting around continuity rather than change. Business and energy-security frames dominate persistently. Environmental and governance frames remain marginal or episodic. Event-driven spikes are short-lived and do not durably reweigh the discourse.
Positive tones are most often associated with topics in proximity to power, and status-quo business. We further highlight the dominance of certain organizations, agencies, and regions, and show Coal India Limited absolute discourse dominance. China is the most frequent actor in the energy transition topic. The results provide an evidence-based foundation for subsequent analyses of policy windows and framing strategies around the necessary energy transition away from coal.
Orthodoxy’s obstruction of climate policy, and what can be done about it.
with Andres Bernal
Denial 2.0: Internal Communications of Fossil Fuel Majors
with Julian Barg, Thomas Klug, Holly Caggiano, and Madison Lore (database publication)
Deconstructing the ivory tower: the liminal space between margins and centers in climate research
with Zakia Soomauroo and Camille Belmin
Industrial pollution and green economic fitness: A complexity approach
with Maria Enrica Virgillito, Lorenzo Tortora and Angelica Sbardella
Contested voices: an automated text-as-data pipeline to grasp public attention to green hydrogen conflicts in Spain
with Marcel Llavero Pasquina 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.