In your book ‘Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions are Failing and How to Fix Them’, you argue that policies such as net zero, carbon pricing and offsetting will fail to decarbonize economies and play into the hands of fossil fuel companies. How is that?
The book’s main argument is that we are addressing the wrong problem in the global climate regime. We are too focused on ‘managing tons’ – technical processes such as carbon pricing, offsetting and net zero. Instead, we should be tackling the bigger question: how do we reorient the flow of dollars in the economy to decarbonize our society? For decades, climate change has been seen as a problem to be solved by mitigation through collective action, rather than as a contest between fossil asset owners and green asset owners.
