JP Sapinski

JP grew up in Montreal and moved to Victoria six years ago to study at UVic. He is currently in the last stage of his PhD in sociology. In his work, he looks at how the corporate sector has been organizing over the last twenty-five years in response to the emergence of the issue of global warming on the political agenda. He uses social network analysis tools to map out the relations between the global corporate elite and the field of climate politics, with a special focus on climate and environmental policy-planning organizations that are located at the interface between corporations and politics.

Doing this, he seeks to understand how the corporate sector shapes climate policies and the way the problem of global warming is framed and addressed (or not) through market-based approaches such as carbon trading. This work is part of a broader project to understand the metabolic relationship that exists between human societies and the environment from which they get their subsistence, and the rift that the industrial capitalist economy creates within that relationship as a consequence of the growth imperative at the heart of capitalism.