Executive Overview
After more than three decades of high-level international summits, legally binding treaties, and intricate market-based mechanisms, the architectural foundation of global climate governance is showing catastrophic signs of structural failure. As global temperatures cross the critical 1.5°C threshold outlined in the Paris Agreement, scholars, policy experts, and regular citizens alike are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: our current approach to managing planetary warming is simply not working.
For the past several years, Dr. Jessica Green, a prominent political scientist and researcher at the University of Toronto, has called for a comprehensive reckoning in global climate governance. In her influential book, Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them, Green systematically dismantles the dominant orthodoxy of international climate policy—an approach she characterizes as "managing tons." This legacy paradigm relies heavily on top-down emission targets, national carbon pricing schemes, cap-and-trade programs, and corporate carbon offsets. According to Green, these tools are fundamentally flawed. Rather than dismantling the fossil fuel economy, they preserve the underlying structural systems that keep carbon extractivism profitable.
In an extensive interview with Corporate Knights managing editor Mark Mann, Green unpacks the deep-seated flaws of the annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP), explains why market offsets have devolved into little more than corporate greenwashing, and articulates a compelling alternative framework known as "radical pragmatism." Moving beyond the paralysis of despair, Green’s framework argues that the global community must shift its focus from pricing carbon to directly dismantling the political power, structural privileges, and economic protections enjoyed by fossil fuel asset owners.
Detailed Chronology: Three Decades of Policy Missteps
To understand how global climate governance arrived at its current impasse, it is necessary to examine the historical trajectory of international environmental diplomacy over the last thirty years.
- 1992 (The Earth Summit): The establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro marked the formal beginning of global climate diplomacy. Countries formally acknowledged human-induced climate change as an existential threat and agreed to pursue stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations. However, the architecture relied heavily on voluntary national communications rather than binding enforcement mechanisms.
- 1997 (The Kyoto Protocol): The Kyoto Protocol introduced legally binding emission reduction targets for developed nations. However, the treaty was fundamentally crippled from its inception by deep domestic political divisions. The United States ultimately refused to ratify the agreement, and by its second commitment period, several other industrialized nations—including Canada—withdrew entirely.
- The Rise of Market Mechanisms (Early 2000s): During the early implementation phases of the Kyoto Protocol, economists and international bureaucrats championed market-based instruments, such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and international carbon offsets. The prevailing theory posited that linking global carbon markets would establish a universal price on carbon, rendering multilateral governance superfluous. In practice, however, these markets became plagued by accounting complexities, numerical manipulation, and systematic underpricing.
- 2005 (The G7 Fossil Fuel Subsidy Pledge): Recognizing that extraction was artificially propped up by state intervention, the G7 made its historic first communiqué pledging to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. Nearly two decades later, these subsidies largely persist, illustrating the profound political inertia protecting the oil and gas sector.
- 2015 (The Paris Agreement): Replacing the top-down mandates of Kyoto, the Paris Agreement shifted to a bottom-up pledge-and-review model centered around Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). While heralded as a diplomatic triumph for securing near-universal participation, the agreement deferred the hardest questions regarding domestic distribution, asset ownership, and economic restructuring.
- Present Day (Overshooting 1.5°C): As global carbon emissions continue to plateau or rise, the international community has officially breached the 1.5°C warming threshold. The annual COP summits have grown increasingly bloated, bureaucratic, and detached from effective enforcement, collapsing under the sheer weight of conflicting national agendas and corporate lobbying.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Illusion of "Managing Tons"
The core critique levied by Dr. Green targets the prevailing technocratic mindset that reduces global climate action to an accounting exercise—the aforementioned "managing tons." For decades, mainstream economists and neoliberal policymakers have insisted that if society can just get the price of carbon right, market forces will naturally redirect capital toward clean energy and green infrastructure.
This approach, however, ignores the hard political reality of pricing carbon high enough to alter systemic behavior. As Green points out, if the true social cost of carbon were accurately calculated—peaked at thousands of dollars per tonne in some jurisdictions—the resulting economic shock would be politically impossible to implement. Consequently, carbon prices are invariably kept artificially low through political compromise, rendering them largely ineffective as decarbonization levers.
Furthermore, the reliance on carbon offsets has created a dangerous moral hazard. For decades, major corporate emitters have utilized cheap offsets—often priced as low as $5 per tonne—to purchase political cover and project an image of environmental stewardship without fundamentally altering their operational models.
The Failure of Private-Sector Geopolitics
As the energy transition stumbles through linear improvements rather than exponential systemic shifts, questions surrounding carbon dioxide removal (CDR)—such as direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, and large-scale sequestration—have taken center stage. With the 1.5°C threshold breached, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that active carbon removal will be mandatory to address residual emissions (which account for roughly 20% of total emissions in countries like Canada).
However, Green sounds a cautionary note regarding the corporatization of geoengineering and resource extraction. Drawing parallels to modern speculative rushes like deep-sea mining—where private entities manufacture narratives of mineral scarcity to justify environmental destruction—Green questions whether fossil fuel incumbents like Suncor should be trusted to design and profit from the technologies required to clean up their own mess.
Official Statements & Expert Perspectives
The dialogue between Mark Mann and Dr. Jessica Green highlights a profound shift in how political scientists and climate theorists view international institutions. Below are key insights extracted from their comprehensive exchange:
- On the Failure of Climate Summits:
"The COP has grown and grown, with subcommittees, groups and all kinds of things. It is collapsing under its own weight. There are so many moving parts that meaningful participation is very difficult. Even knowing all the things that are happening is challenging for a country with a huge delegation." — Dr. Jessica Green
- On the Myth of Market Solutions:
"Part of the liberal fantasy was that if you build it, they will come. If you make EVs or solar cheap enough, then it will just happen. But it doesn’t work that way… It’s not a technical problem; it’s an economic and political problem." — Dr. Jessica Green
- On Pragmatism Without Destabilizing Capitalism:
"It is not pragmatic or practical to think of the end of capitalism as the solution to climate change, even if that may be the case. We don’t have time for that." — Dr. Jessica Green
- On the Structural Geopolitical Shift:
"Climate is now at the top of the list, even if it’s not called climate. It’s securing minerals and technology for energy security and resilience. It’s about supply chains and economic statecraft. In that sense, the reckoning is already happening." — Dr. Jessica Green
Future Outlook: The Promise of Radical Pragmatism
As traditional multilateral climate governance struggles to enforce accountability—evidenced by nations routinely submitting their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) late or failing to meet them altogether—the path forward requires a stark departure from past orthodoxy.
Dr. Green’s model of "radical pragmatism" offers a viable roadmap through the current geopolitical and ecological impasse. The framework rests on two foundational pillars:
- Radical Intent: The approach is radical because it directly confronts the root cause of climate inaction—the entrenched political and economic power of fossil fuel capital. Rather than attempting to negotiate with polluters via market incentives, policy must actively dismantle the state-sponsored privileges, protections, and subsidies that have safeguarded the oil and gas industry since the post-World War II era.
- Pragmatic Institutionalism: The approach is pragmatic because it rejects utopian fantasies demanding the immediate overthrow of global capitalism, recognizing that humanity simply does not have the luxury of time for sweeping ideological revolutions. Instead, it leverages existing legal, regulatory, and institutional levers to make the production of fossil fuels systematically riskier and more expensive.
The Macroeconomic Horizon
Encouragingly, the broader energy transition is already being re-embedded into the realms of industrial policy, trade security, and economic statecraft. As climate policy increasingly intersects with national security, supply chain resilience, and critical mineral protection, the traditional boundaries separating environmental policy from "high politics" are dissolving.
While the road ahead remains fraught with systemic hurdles—and citizens rightly grapple with the anxieties of economic restructuring and middle-class security—Green’s analysis serves as a vital wake-up call. By abandoning the failed accounting tricks of carbon offsets and shifting focus toward structural supply-side intervention, the global community can move past the stagnation of thirty years of climate diplomacy and finally address the existential crisis at hand.
