EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Transition, hedge, or resist? Understanding political and economic behavior toward decarbonization in the oil and gas industry

Jessica Green, Jennifer Hadden, Thomas Hale and Paasha Mahdavi

Review of International Political Economy, 2022, vol. 29, issue 6, 2036-2063

Abstract: Many oil and gas firms claim they are going green. But are they actually walking the talk? We analyze the political and economic behavior of publicly traded oil majors to understand the degree to which they are decarbonizing. We collect a wide range of firm-level data from 2004 to 2019, including a novel measurement of political behavior based on original coding of corporate earnings calls. Our analysis yields four main findings. First, firms’ political and economic behavior are not necessarily correlated, demonstrating the value of a two-pronged political economy approach to the study of multinational firms. Second, not a single firm is shifting away from fossil fuels during the time frame studied. Changes in business behavior have been relatively modest in scope. The most ambitious firms are engaging in hedging—mitigating risk through diversification rather than moving toward decarbonization. Third, major oil and gas firms meliorate anti-climate political positions between 2010 and 2018. Finally, firms with greater progress towards decarbonization tend to be located in or sell their products in jurisdictions with more stringent environmental regulation, have smaller refining sectors, and be involved in more industry coalitions.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2021.1946708 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:29:y:2022:i:6:p:2036-2063

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rrip20

DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2021.1946708

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Political Economy is currently edited by Gregory Chin, Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Kevin Gallagher, Ilene Grabel and Cornelia Woll

More articles in Review of International Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:29:y:2022:i:6:p:2036-2063