Over the last two decades, business actors have received growing attention in global environmental politics. In the context of climate change, scholars have demonstrated the capacity of business actors to directly shape outcomes at the national, international, and transnational levels. However, very little work has focused exclusively on business actors in the coal and utility industries. This is surprising, given that resistance from these industries could delay or even derail government attempts to address climate change. Accordingly, this article focuses directly on the preferences of business actors in the coal and utility industries. Drawing on interviews with executives across the US energy sector, it considers business preferences on two of the most important attempts by the Obama administration to limit emissions from coal: the Waxman-Markey bill and the Clean Power Plan. In doing so, it provides new insights about the preferences of these actors and the divisions within these industries that could be exploited by policy-makers and activists seeking to enact climate change regulations.

Different theoretical perspectives ask different questions about state behavior in international negotiations. For example, are governments moved by domestic political pressures? Are transnational networks influencing state behavior? Or do international regimes affect state decisions? However, these questions are almost always considered in the context of an individual negotiation outcome. Indeed, very little work has been undertaken on how these factors vary over time (the temporal dimension of international negotiations). This article addresses the temporal dimension by considering the role of the US across almost a decade of the international climate change negotiations. Drawing on an empirical data set based on elite interviews, this article suggests three factors that need to be taken into account by existing theoretical frameworks in order to capture the observed fluctuations in the behavior of state actors in a prolonged international negotiation, and explains why they matter.