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.
