When COP30 – the global climate negotiation conference that convened in Belem, Brazil, last November – ended without an agreement on phasing out fossil fuels, Jessica Green wasn’t surprised. She had more or less predicted it. 

Having followed international climate negotiations and politics for more than a decade, Green, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, knew that the structures and procedures of such meetings, known as Conferences of the Parties, or COP, made it almost impossible to arrive at such an agreement. In fact, she had just published a book to make that precise point. 

In “Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them” (Princeton University Press 2025), Green argues that fossil fuel companies recognized early on that action on climate change posed an existential threat to their interests. So with remarkable cunning and determination, they misdirected our attention and energies. It was British Petroleum, for example, that came up with the idea of the “carbon footprint.” And soon enough, instead of working to eliminate fossil fuels, we, both as individuals and as policymakers, began measuring our footprints, weighing how many tons of emissions we created and produced, and creating complex methods to manage those tons.

To get international climate politics back on track, we have to understand how measuring carbon emissions became the fossil fuel companies’ way to avoid action on climate change. 

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

YCC: Let’s start with that title. What do you mean by existential politics? When do politics become existential?

Green: Some livelihoods, some companies, some countries even, will cease to exist – because they will be completely devalued or destroyed, either by climate policy or by the effects of the climate crisis. The politics are existential because the stakes are incredibly high.

YCC: Who are the different kinds of asset owners in this political contest?

Green: The book presents a model of how we can think about the winners and losers under climate change. I talk about three different categories: fossil asset owners, green asset owners, and vulnerable asset owners. 

Fossil asset owners are the engines of the fossil fuel economy: fossil fuel companies, but also companies that rely on fossil fuels, like heavy industry or mining or transportation.

Green asset owners are those that will underpin the new green economy, the producers and assemblers of renewable energy, and clean technologies, including transportation.

The vulnerable asset owners are the people who own assets that will increasingly be threatened or destroyed by climate change: homeowners, businesses, and governments that own infrastructure that will be destroyed by extreme weather events. 

YCC: So the politics are existential because, in the case of a small island state, the country could be wiped out by rising sea levels. On the other hand, a vigorous solution to climate change could wipe out the assets of fossil fuel companies. You say that one of these three actors is way more prepared to fight this battle than the others.

Green: Yes, this is a David versus Goliath kind of story between fossil asset owners and green asset owners, and that’s because governments have been pumping money into the fossil fuel industry for decades. There was a time when we were worried about whether there would be enough oil and gas. So governments spent a lot of time and built a vast institutional infrastructure. We’ve not put money into developing green asset owners in the same way. There is a profound mismatch in the political and economic power of these two sets of asset owners.

YCC: Plus, the fossil fuel companies have known that they were fighting this battle for 50 years or more.

Green: Yes. Other social scientists have shown that fossil fuel companies knew about the greenhouse effect many, many decades ago, and yet they continued to extract oil and pump CO2 into the atmosphere.

YCC: In fact, you say at one point that their obstructionism has been the key driver of climate politics.

Green: This book was born out of the frustration that the common framing for understanding climate change is as a collective action problem. But the three decades of multilateral climate cooperation shows that that’s not actually the case. Right? Countries are not willing to [work] together because fossil asset owners have been pushing very hard to obstruct or slow walk the progress towards decarbonization.

YCC: We’ll come back to that. Another critical distinction in your book is that between managing tons and devaluing or revaluing assets. What’s the importance of this distinction? 

Green: In this collective action frame, the idea is that we need to reduce emissions. Now, emissions are important, but they are not the cause of climate change. The cause of climate change is the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. But instead of focusing on the fundamental root cause, we’ve been focused on the interim product, emissions.

“Managing tons” is what countries and fossil asset owners could agree upon. So in the multilateral process, we focus on emissions. We need to measure them, we need to buy and sell them, and through those processes, we say to ourselves, we can reduce our emissions.

But what I show in the book is that managing tons is an extremely narrow and technical understanding of the problem of climate change. And so it is subject to gaming by actors who don’t really have an interest in reducing their use of fossil fuels or their supply of fossil fuels.

YCC: Could you give us some examples of “managing tons?” 

Green: The book looks at three different versions of managing tons. [The first is carbon pricing.] The second is cap and trade, which is a form of carbon pricing. And the third is this idea of net zero. All of them require that we measure greenhouse gas emissions so that we can balance the books. Offsets are the most obvious form of this because the idea of an offset is “It’s OK if I emit as long as I pay someone else not to emit.” But it turns out that measuring that amount of not emitting is a very complicated process. 

At some point, though, we have to ask ourselves, is this the best use of our time, especially since our time is so limited? It makes sense for fossil asset owners to say, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna spend all of our time calculating our emissions. We’re gonna be net zero. Don’t worry, guys, we got this under control.” 

YCC: So you’re arguing that the goal should be for us to just reduce the value of fossil fuel assets. Instead, we’ve set up this Rube Goldberg mechanism for reducing emissions, which could reduce the burning of fossil fuels, but it’s easy to game that mechanism and postpone the reductions again and again and again, which is what the fossil fuel companies have been doing.

Green: Right. Maybe it made sense to do a cap-and-trade system 40 years ago, which could have enhanced efficiency or helped promote some fuel-switching, but we’ve kicked the can too far down the road for that kind of incrementalism. We need rapid action, and those two things are incommensurate. Measuring tons is not going to get us the rapid decarbonization that we need at this point in the climate crisis.

YCC: How much of this is willful self-deception or manipulated misinformation?

Green: On one level, it’s impossible to know that, right? Because you can’t be sure what people’s motivations are, even if they claim that they’re honest about them.

I suspect it’s a mix of things, right? They are clearly actors who are making lots of money from extracting and using fossil fuels, and they have a vested interest in continuing that behavior.

And there may be some who think this is a necessary evil, that if we make this money, then we can figure out how to decarbonize. To me, however, having watched climate policy for so long, there just isn’t the empirical evidence to support the idea that these are solutions.

YCC: Before we turn to what you see as the solution, let’s talk about the constraints you set for yourself. You refer to yourself as a radical pragmatist. What does that mean?

Green: Well, I’m trained as a scholar of international relations. I came up in a time when international institutions were proliferating and working pretty well in a lot of ways. I don’t think we have time for a remaking of the world order.

Without too much heavy lifting, however, we can do some things that are radical – in the sense that they get to the root of the problem, which is the power and obstructionism of fossil asset owners – but that are also pragmatic because we don’t have to reinvent the entire system.

YCC: You say that there are two things we can do. What’s the first one?

Green: If the climate crisis is a problem of this unequal power between fossil and green asset owners, then what you need to do is figure out how to even the playing field. And the two ways you do that are by constraining the power of fossil asset owners, which is obviously the really hard one, and building up the power of green asset owners. 

And so, what I look at in the book are some ways that we can think about other international institutions that help maintain the entrenched economic power of fossil asset owners. One of those is tax law, which is very arcane but also extremely important, because when big corporations don’t pay their taxes, they maintain their wealth and they spread that wealth to their shareholders. We know that extreme wealth is associated with carbon emissions, so the more we can chip away at that, the more we can chip away at the power of these asset owners to maintain the status quo. 

YCC: On this point, you say, the international minimum tax promoted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, could be a good start. The other side of the equation is promoting green industry, the growth of green assets, and you’re in favor of green industrial policy. Please explain.

Green: Industrial policy basically means making investments in your own economy in ways that support decarbonization. The big challenge is for governments to figure out what they want to prioritize, what their comparative advantages are, and that’s not necessarily a straightforward process. So in the book, I offer some principles for thinking about the problem, but there’s no one-size-fits-all green industrial policy. 

What is clear, however, is, first, tariffs are not going to get us to decarbonization. There are certainly problems with unfettered free trade, but there are also good reasons for it. Second, we have to think about the labor piece. We are going to need a lot more people in the trades to actually build and maintain all of these new technologies.

YCC: Right. At the end of last year, we witnessed the COP30 conference in Brazil. How does this latest meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change illustrate the points you’re trying to make in your book? 

Green: It seems that one of the key items was whether or not there was going to be a reference to phasing out or phasing down the use of fossil fuels. There was a nonofficial decision to start a process, a road map, to phasing out fossil fuels, but that is not signed. That’s not within the multilateral process. 

The COP can be a place where countries get together and share best practices. They can gather data about their emissions and talk about adaptation, and maybe even do some financing. But the COP is not the place where countries are going to actually talk about the transition away from fossil fuels. The COP cannot be an engine for decarbonization [because] you have a system that depends on true consensus [and thus is susceptible to obstruction], and so managing tons became a very convenient way to sidestep that problem.

YCC: Trump enters your book in the final pages.

Green: Right. Because I finished the book in December 2024.

YCC: Are things going as badly as you expected? 

Green: Hmm. We already knew he was anti-climate. He withdrew from the Paris Agreement before; he did it again this time – not surprising. More worrisome is the way he decimated the capacity of the federal government to do anything. We’re not even collecting climate data anymore. That’s a huge problem. Then there’s his decision to double down on fossil fuels. That’s becoming a geopolitical issue – because some countries are trying to transition, and others are trying NOT to transition. That’s a major cleavage in world politics right now, one that can be very destabilizing. And when your bedfellows are Saudi Arabia and Russia, that’s not so great.

YCC: Thank you for sharing this sobering vision of climate politics.