Shift Key with Robinson Meyer11 Jun 2025

A New Grand Theory of Why Decarbonization Is So Hard

Why has it been so hard for the world to make progress on climate change over the past 30 years? Maybe it’s because we’ve been thinking about the problem wrong. Academics and economists have often framed climate change as a free-rider or collective action problem, one in which countries must agree not to emit greenhouse gases and abuse the public commons. But maybe the better way to understand climate action is as a fight that generates winners and losers, defined primarily by who owns what.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Jessica Green, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. She calls for “radical pragmatism” in climate action and an “asset revaluation”-focused view of the climate problem. Green is the author of the forthcoming book Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.

Mentioned:

Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change, by Jessica Green, Jeff Colgan, and Thomas Hale

Tax Policy Is Climate Policy by Jessica Green

Why Carbon Pricing Falls Short, by Jesse Jenkins

Jesse’s 2014 article on asset specificity and climate change

Jesse’s downshift; Rob’s downshift.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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