Climate policy strategies and corporate mobilisation in the European Union

Abstract Climate policy remains inadequate even among leaders like the European Union. This is largely due to opposition from fossil fuel producers and heavy industrial sectors that are existentially threatened by decarbonisation. The rise of green industrial policy promises to advance climate policy by reducing this opposition and mobilising corporate supporters. But can climate policy strategies actually shift the balance of interest group mobilisation among expected winners and losers simply by using different policy instruments? I theorise that policy strategies (de)mobilise corporate interests through regulatory targeting. Corporations directly targeted by a proposed policy are more likely to lobby because of policy-specific informational advantages and more certain and immediate impacts. Compared to traditional climate policies that impose direct costs on fossil fuels, green industrial policies should therefore demobilise high-carbon firms and mobilise their low-carbon counterparts. I collect and code novel data on all corporate responses to online consultations in European Union climate and energy policy from 2017 to 2022. Dyadic regression analyses confirm that low-carbon sectors lobby mostly on green industrial policies while high-carbon sectors mobilise more around traditional climate policies, and that stakeholders are more likely to lobby when directly targeted by policies. These results document that climate policies can indeed determine climate politics, a finding that has implications for other policy areas characterised by business conflict and for interest group scholarship more broadly.