Climate Change and Capitalists: Interview with Dr. Myles Carroll

From the evolution of Japan's political economy to corporate narratives on carbon neutrality, Dr. Carroll's research uncovers the structures that move Japan

The Marunouchi business district in Tokyo (Image source: Ania Korsunska)

Hey Power Japan readers,

Today I bring you a conversation with Dr. Myles Carroll, Associate Professor at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. I’ll properly introduce him shortly, but in brief, he’s a scholar of Japan’s political economy and, more recently, of Japanese corporate elites’ actions and rhetoric on climate change.

Without further ado, here is our conversation.

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Dr. Myles Carroll is an Associate Professor at Ochanomizu University’s Faculty of Core Research Human Sciences Division in Tokyo, where he teaches courses in the political economy of labor and globalization.

He is also the author of The Making of Modern Japan: Power, Crisis, and the Promise of Transformation (Brill: 2022), a sweeping account of the Japanese political-economic order from the post-war era to the present. In it, he investigates Japan’s political, economic, and social institutions and structures that were at the core of the country’s post-war prosperity, rapid economic growth combined with a high degree of social equality and political stability, as well as the economic stagnation, political shifts, demographic crisis that began in the 1990s.

Dr. Myles Carroll

Turning from his sweeping research on the Japanese political-economic model, Dr. Carroll is focusing his attention on the political and economic dimensions of climate change and the energy transition in Japan. His article titled “Japanese climate capitalism? Toward an understanding of industry’s changing attitudes toward climate change mitigation in Japan” appeared in the journal The Japanese Political Economy in August 2024 and marked his foray into this field.

Asking how Japanese businesses’ attitudes to climate change may be shifting in relation to changing domestic and global political pressures, Dr. Carroll investigates how the public pronouncements of the largest Japanese firms have changed between 2010 and 2022 in five economic sectors that are key to climate mitigation: electric generation, oil and gas, automobiles, consumer electronics, and steel.

We discuss his main findings in our conversation below.

After reading the article, I wanted to speak with Dr. Carroll about his motivations for turning his attention to climate issues, his thoughts about his findings, and the implications and insights about Japan’s climate and energy policymaking.