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It is widely assumed that corporate America plays an important role in crafting
business-friendly environmental policies in Congress. But scholars have found that
business’s legislative fortunes vary, depending on the breadth and cohesiveness of the
business coalition as well as the salience of the environmental problem. On the one hand,
the broader and more cohesive the business coalition, the better able its members are to
fend off costly regulations (Vogel 1989, 1996). On the other hand, the more salient the
issue, the less able even a unified business coalition is to dictate the goals and form of
regulation (Smith 2000). Recognition of these realities shapes the lobbying strategies of
both business and environmental interests, and the interaction among those strategies in
turn affects the legislative debate.
In this essay I argue that when faced with a newly identified environmental
problem, affected businesses respond by trying to prevent the issue from becoming
widely salient and thereby deter Congress from addressing it. They do this by using
outside lobbying to (1) undermine the scientific basis for environmentalists’ causal story
and (2) redirect attention to the costs of policy. The business community is not
monolithic, however, and increasing scientific certainty as well as environmentalists’
campaigns affect senior managers’ perceptions of the costs and benefits of regulation
differently. Over time, some companies may begin to perceive that regulation is
inevitable, and perhaps even beneficial, and therefore redirect their energy from
preventing regulation to ensuring Congress enacts policies that suit them. The legislative
debate, in turn, reflects this interplay among science, environmental activism, and
business lobbying: efforts by a unified business coalition to prevent a newly identified
environmental problem from becoming salient initially discourage risk-averse legislators
from addressing it. If environmentalists succeed in fracturing the business coalition,
however, Congress is likely to shift its focus to designing rules that provide the flexibility
and regulatory certainty that business desires.
To illustrate this argument, I trace the evolution of the fossil fuel, utility, and auto
industries’ efforts to influence the legislative debate over climate change. This case
offers a prime opportunity to observe the tactics business adopts in response to the
identification of a new, high-stakes environmental problem. In addition, because
Convention