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Category: Project

Description: This paper analyses the corporate hegemonic structures of power underlying the project of climate capitalism. Its promoters present climate capitalism as an emerging regime of accumulation founded on carbon markets and the ecological modernization of production, that could replace the prevalent carboniferous capitalist regime and provide a deeply needed reduction of carbon emissions. I empirically map out the network of corporate-funded policy-planning organizations participating in climate capitalist knowledge production and mobilization to critically appraise the possibility of such a transition. I find that these policy-planning organizations are positioned to play a crucial role as intermediaries between regional and sectoral corporate interests, and that they crucially link between energy and financial firms. However, energy-finance linkages are sparse, and I also find a relatively thin network carried by a small number of individual capitalists from the fossil fuel and nuclear sectors. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that a strong climate capitalist bloc is emerging.