Fergus Green

University College London | UCL · Department of Political Science

In February 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio‐Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced into the US Congress a non‐binding resolution for a Green New Deal, with the aim to catalyze policies and programs to rapidly decarbonize the US economy while achieving wider progressive economic, social and environmental goals. This motion sparked widespread...

This perspective paper proposes a new conceptual framework for bottom-up climate mitigation: the Fossil Free Zones (FFZs) framework. The aim of the framework is to facilitate grassroots, goal-driven climate action, and government policy at increasingly higher levels, with a view to ‘tipping’ social systems away from their reliance on fossil fuels....

Recent proposals in the US and elsewhere aim to tackle climate change and socioeconomic inequalities together through a Green New Deal (GND). GND proposals have been criticized by high-profile advocates of carbon-centric climate policies-advocates who do not perceive socioeconomic inequalities to be significant drivers of climate change and who arg...

We explore the desirability of an idea that has not received the attention it deserves by political philosophers: that governments should bring privately-owned fossil fuel companies into public ownership with a view to managing their wind-down in the public interest – often simply referred to as ‘nationalising the fossil fuel industry’. We aim to m...

For decades, the object of international climate governance has been greenhouse gases. The inadequacy of decarbonization based on this system has prompted calls to expand climate governance to include restrictions on fossil fuel supply. Such initiatives could rely on accountability frameworks based on fossil fuel reserves, production, or infrastruc...

The shift of China’s economy since 2013, dubbed the “new normal”, has caused its production and consumption emissions to plateau, with the country seeming to embody the tantalising promise of decoupling its economic growth from carbon emissions. By using multi-region input-output analysis, we find that China’s relative decoupling in the new normal...

We build on the work by Peled and Bonotti to illuminate the impact of linguistic relativity on democratic debate. Peled and Bonotti’s focus is on multilingual societies, and their worry is that ‘unconscious epistemic effects’ can undermine political reasoning between interlocutors who do not share the same native tongue. Our article makes two contr...

Recent years have witnessed a revival of scientific, political and philosophical discourse concerning the notion of ecological limits. This article provides a conceptual overview of descriptive ecological limit claims—i.e. claims that there are real, biophysical limits—and reviews work in political and social philosophy in which such claims form th...

In the original publication of the article, the corresponding author name was inadvertently missed out. The corresponding author name is ‘‘Fergus Green’’. The original article has been corrected.

While the decarbonization of the global economy will bring immense benefits in the aggregate and to many individuals, it will also be disruptive and costly for some, at least in the short term. As these disruptions and costs have become increasingly salient in recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the climate policy community abo...

To advance important social values it is often necessary to change the law. Yet changes in the law create not only ‘winners’, but also ‘losers’. Paradigmatic examples are workers and corporations in the coal industry that are adversely affected by climate change laws. Should governments take steps to avoid or mitigate transitional losses and gains?...

Historically, climate governance initiatives and associated scholarship have all but ignored the potential for “global moral norms” to bring about changes in the political conditions for global climate mitigation. This is surprising, since global moral norms are widely employed—as both a mode of governance and an analytical framework—in other domai...

Proponents of climate change mitigation face difficult choices about which types of policy instrument(s) to pursue. The literature on the comparative evaluation of climate policy instruments has focused overwhelmingly on economic analyses of instruments aimed at restricting demand for greenhouse gas emissions (especially carbon taxes and cap-and-tr...

Until recently, national bans on fossil fuel-related activities were a taboo subject, but they are now becoming increasingly common. The logic of appropriateness that underpins such bans is key to understanding their normative appeal, and to explaining and predicting their proliferation.

Over the past decade, China has entered a "new normal" phase in economic development, with its role in global trade flows changing significantly. This study estimates the driving forces of Chinese export-embodied carbon emissions in the new normal phase, based on environmentally extended multiregional input-output modeling and structural decomposit...

National and global mitigation scenarios consistent with 1.5°C require an early phase-out of coal in major coal-dependent countries, compared to standard technical and economic lifetimes. This appears particularly apparent in the light of recent massive investments in coal power capacity, the significant pipeline of coal power capacity coming onlin...

The aim of this report is to assist policy-makers, climate change negotiators and analysts to understand the domestic constraints and opportunities facing each jurisdiction, and to identify areas of common interest or concern between the three jurisdictions.

Recent scholarly attention to ‘legitimate expectations’ and their role in legal transitions has yielded widely varying principles for distinguishing between legitimate and non-legitimate expectations. This article suggests that methodological reflection may facilitate substantive progress in the debate. Specifically, it proposes and defends the use...

Slowing GDP growth, a structural shift away from heavy industry, and more proactive policies on air pollution and clean energy have caused China's coal use to peak. It seems that economic growth has decoupled from growth in coal consumption.

As China’s government finalises the country’s 13th Five Year Plan for economic development (2016–2020), this article takes stock of recent changes in China’s economy and energy system since the turn of the century, and looks ahead to the likely trajectory of China’s emissions over the next decade. The period 2000–2013, it is now clear, was a distin...

The UK Government is currently reviewing its carbon target for the period 2023-27, the so-called fourth carbon budget. The fourth carbon budget has been criticised for committing the UK to a unilateral, and potentially economically damaging, emissions reductions pathway, the ambition of which is not shared by its international competitors. This pap...

Copenhagen failed to produce an agreement on climate change commensurate with the scale of the problem, highlighting the fundamental weaknesses in the existing UN framework. Progress on a new agreement is agonisingly slow. Weightier commitments by the major emitters are necessary, but calls for ‘greater ambition’ ignore the structural problems embe...