Risking it for coal: business leaders' attitudes to climate change

This thesis explores business leaders’ attitudes to climate change. Situated in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia, participants were interviewed about their views on climate change and climate mitigation policies. As a major coal producing hub and home to the world’s largest coal port, the Hunter Valley is a fitting case study for a nation which has long seen its economic success as inextricably linked to the coal industry. Positioning climate change within Beck’s risk society (1992; 1999; 2009), the thesis explores Beck’s key proposition; that the success of modernisation has turned on humanity, and that this realisation has fundamentally challenged our social institutions. As a result, Beck has argued that we are facing new networks of allegiances. Formulated around our relationship to the particular risks of the second modernity, these allegiances go beyond traditional ‘class’ conflicts and boundaries. Yet Beck has been criticised for discounting the resilience of these power relations, which become difficult to trace in the absence of his own theory of practice. In order to resolve this tension, the thesis turns to Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Wacquant 1993) concept of the field of power as a means of understanding the relational aspects of how participants are responding to climate change. While many participants show indications of a growing awareness and concern about climate change, their ability to respond to these issues is severely limited by a doxic understanding of the economy. Over the period of research, the centre oriented Labor government faced a number of hurdles attempting to implement a price on carbon. While they eventually succeeded in implementing a carbon tax in 2012, this has now been disbanded by the conservative coalition of the Liberal and National parties. By documenting business leaders’ attitudes to climate change over this period, the thesis offers a unique perspective of where business leaders’ converge, and vary, in their attitudes to climate change, and how this impacts more broadly on attempts at climate mitigation.