Carbon capture: the rise of the influence of Australia and Canada on climate negotiations

In this paper, we explore the emergence of an alliance between Australia and Canada, an alliance that helped to derail climate change negotiations at two international meetings in 2013. We hypothesise that carbon-based industries create policy ties to national governments in order to forestall regulation, using negotiators to create a global policy corral (Barley, 2010). We use three events in 2009 that increased risks to carbon-based industries as a natural experiment: the change in the US presidency, the onset of the Great Recession and the sudden rise in Chinese investment in photovoltaics. Using panel data, we create a model for the impact of social, political and environmental factors and for the changing influence of industries. We find that the correlation between national carbon assets and climate policy increases in these two countries after 2009, suggesting that corporate interests were able to incorporate these governments into new international policy corrals.