“What's the worst that could happen?” Perceptions of physical, financial, reputational, and policy risk in the United Kingdom's low-carbon industrial transition

Rapid decarbonisation of not only energy systems but also industrial systems has become an urgent technical and policy priority. However, national pace is often slow, for many reasons, including the obduracy of large technical systems, uncertainty, and resistance from incumbents. The required transition involves overturning extremely well-entrenched means of carbon intensive manufacturing and production. It also involves a vast number and range of actors, who grapple with physical, reputational, financial, business and policy risks. Drawn from a wider corpus of qualitative expert interviews (n = 96) with participants primarily from industry, government and academia, this article seeks to make both empirical and conceptual contributions on risk as well as policy. It finds that it is not only corporate actors who deploy various tactics, including hedging and waterboarding, while attempting to manage the risks surrounding industrial decarbonisation, but also policymakers. This hedging, in particular, often leads to increased risk elsewhere in the system. Industrial decarbonisation becomes a process of transferring risks across actor group, space or time, but never fully eliminating them. • Provides a rich set of various perspectives on various kinds of risk faced by actors in industrial decarbonisation • Introduces a provisional concept for understanding how risk is (re)distributed by various actors - the Waterbed Effect • Suggests further work on how conceptions of risk might be further explored and conceptualised.