China’s current climate policies are characterized by regional disparities, phased targets, and diverse implementation tools, which inevitably increase uncertainty in the formulation and execution of these policies. Such uncertainty not only affects firms’ expected returns and investment decisions but may also induce structural distortions in resource allocation, thereby altering firms’ capital operation logic and financial behavior. However, existing literature has primarily focused on the impact of climate policy uncertainty on financial risks, corporate investment, and innovation, with relatively insufficient attention paid to its effect on corporate financialization, especially the phenomenon of “shifting from the real to the virtual economy” within the industrial sector. Using a sample of China’s A?share listed industrial companies from 2012 to 2023, this study measures climate policy fluctuation by employing the climate policy uncertainty index constructed by Ma et al. (2023) and systematically investigates the impact of climate policy uncertainty on the financialization of industrial enterprises through a multiple fixed?effects model. The findings reveal that higher climate policy uncertainty leads to a stronger tendency toward financialization in industrial enterprises. This effect is particularly pronounced in enterprises with a lower proportion of female executives, greater managerial concern about climate issues, poor ESG performance, more intense industry competition, and in non-state-owned enterprises. Climate policy uncertainty promotes financialization in industrial enterprises through several mechanisms: heightened risk aversion, crowding-out effects on the real economy, and increased agency costs. However, a firm’s risk-bearing capacity can mitigate the influence of climate policy uncertainty on financialization. Further analysis reveals that under climate policy uncertainty, firms’ holdings of financial assets result from both precautionary and speculative motives, with the precautionary motive outweighing the speculative one. Compared with existing studies, this paper makes three main contributions: First, it examines the intrinsic link between climate governance and corporate financialization from the novel perspective of climate policy uncertainty, thereby extending the research frontier on the relationship between macro?policy uncertainty and micro?firm behavior. Second, it systematically unveils the underlying mechanisms through which climate policy uncertainty affects corporate financialization from three dimensions—risk aversion, real?economy crowding?out, and agency cost escalation. This provides new insights into the drivers of financialization decisions in industrial firms under such uncertainty. Third, it conducts an in?depth analysis of the heterogeneous effects of climate policy uncertainty, further revealing its differential impacts on the financialization of industrial firms, thereby providing new pathways to prevent industrial enterprises from “shifting from the real to the virtual economy”. This research reveals the underlying logic of industrial firms’ financialization under climate policy uncertainty. The findings provide empirical support and a theoretical basis for the government to optimize the design and implementation of climate policies, prevent capital from “shifting from the real to the virtual economy”, and promote the sustainable and healthy development of enterprises.