Climate Politics, featuring Dr Fergus Green

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD (INTRO)

Hello and welcome to Series 3 of The Greatest Good, a UCL Press Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. 

Jeremy Bentham, and 18^th– and 19^th-century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London.

In this series, we focus on the intersection of Bentham’s ideas with current thinking on climate justice, in conversation with leading UCL academics.

DR FERGUS GREEN (INTRO)

The fossil fuel industry is an important player, not just in the production of fossil fuels, but in creating the demand for fossil fuels. And a lot of that is through perversions and corruptions of the democratic process. 

DR FERGUS GREEN

So my name’s Fergus Green, I’m an Associate Professor in the UCL Department of Political Science slash School of Public Policy. 

I work on climate change predominantly and I come at questions of climate change and the low carbon transition from the perspective of political economy, public policy, law and ethics and justice. But my work at the moment really is across three themes. 

So just briefly, the first theme is about fossil fuels and the climate motivated governance of fossil fuels, some of the politics around tackling fossil fuels as such, some of the ethical questions around fossil fuels. 

And then secondly, it’s about a just transition away from fossil fuels, what that ought to look like from a normative perspective, policies for ensuring that these transitions are just and some of the politics of trying to implement those policies. 

The third broad theme of my work looks at how climate change is intersecting with other big contemporary challenges. So I have some work on how inequality fuels climate change and how they can be tackled together. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right, and you talked about a just transition away from fossil fuels. So is the idea that what we call the advanced economy should reduce significantly the amount they consume?

DR FERGUS GREEN

Yeah, so these questions of justice in the transition arise at multiple levels. And I think at one level, it’s a question of justice between countries, certainly as a matter of international law. Governments have essentially enshrined that kind of principle that essentially the rich countries should decarbonise faster and greater as effectively a principle of international climate law. So there is that sort of moral and legal obligation of the rich countries to reduce faster. That’s usually framed in terms of emissions. 

But a number of scholars have also kind of looked at the question of reducing fossil fuel extraction and applied similar kinds of principles but with some additional considerations such as the degree of fossil fuel dependency. 

So there are questions of justice arising there and certainly in my work on fossil fuel production you know I’m focusing largely initially on rich countries – Australia, US, UK, Norway, Canada – these are kind of the big, sort of rich country fossil fuel producers and arguably, yes. they have an obligation to be reducing fossil fuel extraction as well as much faster, and also that can set an important example to other countries, and they could also use their diplomacy to try and persuade and assist other countries as well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And in terms of global trends, are there some countries doing well?

DR FERGUS GREEN 

So in terms of fossil fuel production, it’s probably best to separate between coal and oil and gas. 

So, in terms of coal consumption and coal production, generally the trends are downward – though China is a sort of significant exception there. There are some complexities in the China case that we can potentially explore but, yeah, broadly, sort of outside of East Asia, the story of kind of coal is largely one of reduction in terms of production and consumption. 

Oil and gas: the story generally is in terms of increases in production and consumption broadly speaking though there are some countries there are a number of countries that have committed to stop expanding oil and gas extraction and to wind down extraction in line with the Paris Agreement. 

Those countries have formed an alliance called the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. They include countries like Denmark which did have some you know oil and gas production and is committed to phase it out. 

Arguably the UK could potentially join the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, you know, if it implements some of its current policies. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Those are both small players. 

DR FERGUS GREEN

Yes, so mostly small players currently but also kind of it’s a relatively new organization potentially growing over time. You’ve got to start with the smaller, more willing players if you’re going to have hope to influence the bigger players. 

And I should say, you know, the UK believes in this logic because it set up something called the Powering Past Coal Alliance to focus on the phase out of coal-fired power generation along with Canada. And that organization also started with largely small coal users, but has gradually expanded now includes Germany and the United States. So, there is some potential logic to these kinds of small clubs that can expand. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

What about oil? We’ve got our own oil in the North Sea, and Norway’s extracting oil, but as we know, most of it comes from the Middle East. People are still driving round in their cars. People are still flying – increasingly, it seems. We academics are bad enough, for flying off to conferences here, there and everywhere! I mean, what are the politics here? What ought to be done? 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

So, I think on the demand side, there’s a kind of behavioral and technological set of questions around how we can live well without doing the things that require using oil and gas. 

We can certainly get around on the ground in terms of ground transport pretty well without oil and gas. We have public transport, we have electric vehicles, you know we can shift our behavior, we can design cities better so that they’re more mixed-use areas, we need to travel smaller distances. So there are actually a lot of things that can be done, and there it’s really just sort of about the economics and getting the policies right in order, to sort of incentivize the uptake of these behaviors and technologies. 

In terms of long-haul transport, in terms of shipping and air transport, there it’s harder. There, it’s more about the research and development of the technologies and so on and of course behavioural changes and that’s politically challenging. 

So there’s kind of more work to be done there. 

We need to be also reducing supply because supply and demand interact dynamically, right? And, you know, ultimately, one of the main levers that we have in terms of shifting behavior and incentivizing new technology is the price and, you know, economists have been saying for years we need carbon pricing, and the idea of carbon pricing is essentially to push up the cost of carbon intensive processes. 

The supply of fossil fuels shapes the price of fossil fuels as well and so if you’re building out a lot of fossil fuel production you’re lowering the price which is working completely contrary to your aims of carbon pricing to raise the price of fossil fuels and so we ought to also be restricting the supply of fossil fuels, because that will send a price signal to change behaviour and to change technology. And so this is one of the reasons, and there are some others, why we also, I would argue, ought to tackle the supply of fossil fuels.

And so, if we look at in the UK, for example, in the UK it’s a declining basin so already fossil fuel production rates and employment in the industry are declining, but the government – the previous government certainly still was issuing new licenses to explore for oil and gas, and also still giving consent to produce in licensed fields. Whereas the current government has committed to end new oil and gas exploration, and there is currently a debate about issuing consent to produce in already licensed fields like the big Rosebank field. 

And so I have argued, and my research has sort of looked at ways in which and the reasons why the government should, you know, for instance not just not issue new licenses but also not issue new production consent, and this has to do with kind of the need to phase down; the fact that we’re a rich country, we should go first, be an early mover and that also setting an example to other countries. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So mainly… Because you could affect demand, let’s say, for instance by increasing taxes on aviation fuel and petrol. That would not be popular. And the other problem is, is that it means the rich can afford it. 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

You’re absolutely right. So, this is one of the key challenges in terms of climate mitigation generally, right? Is that one of the key levers to get climate mitigation is to increase the costs of carbon intensive activities. And carbon intensive activities tend to be like household necessities for a lot of people to some extent. And they’re around energy and they’re around food and, you know, electricity and mobility. 

So yeah, it is politically challenging, but there are kind of various alternative policies and strategies that governments have tried that can be more popular, for instance, sort of green industrial policies. 

So, for instance, the US Inflation Reduction Act under Biden was all about sort of stimulating the supply of infrastructure for low carbon technologies. And so essentially bringing the costs down by the government subsidizing them, and then they become cheaper for, you know, for consumers than fossil fuel incumbents. So, there are different options that can change the sort of political feasibility of climate policies. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah, because I mean, you said your third element you were interested in was in part to do with climate change and democracy. 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Absolutely, yeah. And democracy and inequality and climate, I think these are sort of three really important intersecting issues. And I think governments that want to tackle climate change, but try to do so through a very narrow, what I’ve called ‘carbon centric’ approach, that just deals with sort of emissions and the price of emissions tend to struggle politically, right? And so it’s difficult politically to isolate climate change from other broader challenges that people face, whether it be sort of poverty or economic insecurity – even a kind of struggling middle class, right? 

And so I think it’s really important to design policies that sort of effectively tackle climate change alongside economic inequalities, alongside people’s concerns about household budgets and so on. And that can be partly through the design of the policy, like I explained before. 

And it can also be through complimentary policies that address economic inequality. So I do think it’s important to address those things together. 

On the democracy side, one of the things that I haven’t really mentioned yet, but I think is really important to mention in terms of the reasons why we continue to expand fossil fuel production is the role that fossil fuel companies and the fossil fuel industry have played in creating the technological, social, ideological, political conditions for policies that lead to the expansion of fossil fuel production, consumption, and investment. And they’ve played an outsized role through their lobbying, through their campaign donations, through the way that they influence the revolving door between fossil fuel companies and governments and staffers and political parties, write their way through to the fossil fuel industry’s role in producing children’s storybooks that sort of glorify fossil fuels and their attempts to shape culture through advertising and so on. 

So, you know, the fossil fuel industry is also an important kind of player, not just in terms of its role in the production of fossil fuels, but in terms of creating the demand for fossil fuels as well. And a lot of that is through kind of perversions and corruptions of the democratic process. And so if we have better, more responsive democracy where there’s less corporate money and corporate influence over democracy, people have a greater say and greater input, then I think we’re more likely to get the combinations of climate and economic and social policies that can tackle these issues together. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So do you mean that these companies are getting at, if that’s the right word, politicians at the top level?

DR FERGUS GREEN

Well, absolutely. We have plenty of evidence of that, yeah. And they do that in multiple ways. 

So, there’s lobbying over policies and that’s not just opposition to climate policies, but you know, we’ve got to remember we have massive fossil fuel subsidies, we have negative carbon prices in a lot of countries, essentially governments are subsidizing fossil fuel production and or consumption. And so, you know, there’s a lot of fossil fuel industry lobbying that goes into those subsidies, as well as the kind of broader, facilitative environment for fossil fuel expansion.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So how do they do that in terms, how do they subsidize? 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

So, a lot of it’s done through fiscal policy. So for instance, governments might have tax write-offs for fossil fuel investments or sort of direct payments, there’s various mechanisms. But there’s been a lot of work, particularly the OECD has done a lot of work on calculating fossil fuel subsidies. 

The IMF has also done some work in this area. So that’s quite a sort of well known. problem we’re spending, depending on the measures you use, at least tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars a year globally on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. 

So a lot of the fossil fuel political influence is not just objecting to or obstructing climate policy, it’s actively expanding fossil fuels.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I mean that’s quite shocking actually, I think. I certainly didn’t realize that. 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Yeah, well I mean these are huge and powerful companies and obviously fossil energy is an enabler of kind of imperatives of the state in terms of economic growth. There have been long been close historical links between the fossil fuel industry and the state. 

Think about the sort of the role of fossil fuels in the military, the role of the military in supporting you know fossil fuel development, whether it’s through the US military it’s supporting the sea lines of supply for oil around the world. 

So there are huge like entanglements you know between the fossil fuel industry and in the state, in multiple parts of the state, as well as, you know, lobbying. 

There are a lot of countries have state-owned oil companies and so on, right? So they’re directly a part of the state. 

And then you have these more subtle forms of influence, like the revolving doors, you know, with fossil fuel companies hiring government staffers and then going back into government and so on. So you have a lot of that. 

And then you have a lot of the advertising public relations and influence campaigns that start, you know, in early childhood where fossil fuel industry is trying to sort of normalize and legitimize their role in society. They sponsor sporting clubs and sporting events, right? We see these are the tactics that industries use to kind of maintain their social license to operate and seem like normal organizations.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I’m thinking of oil-producing countries, as well, buying football clubs.

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Absolutely, absolutely. And this is not coincidental. This is part of a tried-and-tested set of corporate strategies that are used across industries to build social license to operate of industries that are harmful. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And I understand that you’re interested in the way that populism works in this respect. I mean, how would you distinguish between democracy and populism?

DR FERGUS GREEN 

What I can say is rather than perhaps, rather than that more sort of philosophical question, which I’m probably not the best to speak about – I think what we do see is, because of some of the things we’ve talked about in terms of a lot of climate measures do increase costs for people, at least in the short term – and they’re not accompanied by the other policies that I think are important to address inequality and to ensure people can live well, right? – that climate policy is easy for opposition parties to exploit. 

And what we have seen is that populist plays, particularly right-wing populists, populist parties and figures do exploit this kind of cost of living, potential cost of living impact or actual cost of living impact of climate policies. 

That’s one of the kind of arguments that they make against climate policy. We see that with opposition to net zero in the UK, for instance. Now that’s something that’s not unique to populist parties. Often any even more centrist parties that are opposing climate policy will often highlight the economic costs. It’s sort of an easy argument, but we do see right wing populist actors doing that, particularly stridently. 

The additional kind of populist element that we often see is populism is about sort of ‘us versus them’. And it’s usually about the elite versus the people. So, the more kind of distinctively populist responses and opposition to climate change that we see often highlight these kinds of both that elite versus the people kind of hierarchy and the sort of in-group, out-group culture wars that we see. 

And so, climate change is particularly quite vulnerable to that. It’s something that is agreed at international conferences. It’s extremely complex and technocratic. There’s this whole politics of knowledge around climate change that is very hard to get your head around, and so there’s a lot of sort of university professors and people with credentials pronouncing on what needs to be done and what the science says needs to be done and so on. So, it’s a particularly easy target for the kind of the sort of ‘cosmopolitan elite’, you know, sort of framing that populists often use. 

And then we also see populists putting climate issues in terms of the culture wars as well. And so… and that’s partly about inner city urbanites and cosmopolitans, you know, driving electric vehicles and buying heat pumps, whereas ordinary other people can’t afford that or don’t want that. 

And so, yeah, it is a challenge. And I think it makes it all the more important to have these broad-based strategies that tackle climate action alongside tackling the real issues we have of inequality and a lot of people struggling economically. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Looking at it from Bentham’s point of view, you know, he would say if you want to know why people do what they do, look to interests. You can see that in terms of the big companies who want to make as much money as they can. 

On the other hand, you can say, well, it’s people’s interest to drive their cars and, you know, keep their standard of living high and, you know, go on holiday to Spain. But Bentham also talked a lot about delusion, about how the ruling classes would pretend that something was in the interests of everyone, whereas it was actually just in their own interests. 

And, you know, the way to get people to realize what their true interests were was education. So, what’s the role of the university, in terms of, you know, countering the views that are leading to disaster?

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, this term of interest is an interesting one. I think while people, I think, clearly have relatively objective needs, you know, be that obviously sort of survival and reproduction and, you know, health and nutrition and so on. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Or just being happy 

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Yeah, yeah, exactly. A lot of these needs and those functionings can be supplied in ways, as I said earlier, that either aren’t energy intensive or aren’t fossil fuel intensive. And so, one of the roles of universities is to foster the development of technologies, you know, to meet some of those needs and sort of nourish those functionings, right, without using fossil fuels. 

Another important role of the university, which gets to more your comment about delusion or false consciousness, perhaps as you might call it, is the more sort of critical university faculties, which is to sort of help us to think critically about what it means to live well. 

And that’s, I’m thinking particularly of the humanities in that regard, right? So maybe in order to live well, we don’t necessarily need to go on holidays to Spain every year, right? And maybe there are other ways of living well. 

So I think, you know, that sort of, you know, I haven’t even mentioned the social sciences, which is my main area, but they also have a crucial role in helping us to sort of think through how as a society we might organize our responses to these big challenges, how we can do them economically and how we can sort of maintain social cohesion and how we can do them in a way that’s sort of politically feasible and so on. 

So, I think sort of, you know, I’ve sort of given a broad sweep of sort of science, technology, social sciences and the humanities and some of the key roles, I think that they can play in sort of helping us address. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Yeah, and is that something UCL could be particularly well-suited to further?

DR FERGUS GREEN 

Yeah, absolutely. Very, very well well-suited to further. And I think UCL already has huge strength in a number of those areas. 

You know, I think, for example, of the role that the health sciences at UCL have sort of played on looking at the health impacts of climate change, because, you know, we talk about people’s interest. 

Well, people also have an interest, let’s not forget in living on a planet that’s habitable for human civilization. And that’s the big problem here, right? Of course, but that’s an interest that’s long-term and shaped by global forces, so we often forget about that. 

But, you know, one of the ways that I think that can be made concrete to people is understanding both the health impacts of climate change and why we want to therefore avoid that or minimize those impacts, but also the health co-benefits of many of the actions we need to decarbonize. 

And so, for instance, you know, we were talking about coal pollution and coal-fired power generation in China earlier. It’s a major source of premature death, illness, and just discomfort is the extent of air pollution. And air pollution is basically typically sort of a co-pollutant with greenhouse gases. It’s caused by, you know, coal-fired power generation and exhaust fumes and so on. And so, China’s efforts to decarbonize, which are quite huge, are partly being driven by the co-benefits of reducing emissions for people’s health and well-being. There’s also industrial strategy aspect to it as well. 

But coming back to UCL, you know, I think it’s been really a world leader, probably the world leader, in sort of looking at the health impacts of climate change and the health co-benefits of climate action. That’s just one example of many of where I think UCL is already a recognized leader. And I think there are also other examples which we’re starting to unearth now, through the Grand Challenge Climate Crisis, of where there are maybe smaller groups that are starting to work on climate change order that are making more niche contributions that we can kind of bring together and work together to actually tackle some of these issues in a multidisciplinary way. 

It would be remiss of me not to give a plug here for my own research group, which is the Climate Politics Cluster, in the Department of Political Science, and we have a really high concentration. We have quite a number of scholars who are working on the politics of climate change and thinking through some of these questions about how we design climate policies, in light of understanding the political implications of those different policies. 

So, how do we design them in a way that governments can tackle climate change and at least maintain their popularity, if not increase their popularity, and then allow them to potentially do bolder things in the future? 

Thinking in a much more politically sophisticated way about climate policy, this is sort of a key theme of the work that we’re doing in the Department of Political Science and our new Masters programme that we’re launching in September this year, 2025. It’s an MSc in climate change policy and politics. 

So, I think that’s just an example of some of the newer activity that’s really happening at UCL, and we’re also working with lots of other parts of UCL on different aspects of climate change to bring the political perspective to some of the other disciplinary perspectives. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, in fact, the political perspective is ultimately probably key. 

DR FERGUS GREEN

We think so! And we think it’s been given insufficient attention globally in terms of the mainstream climate community, in terms of its funding and so on. 

We often roll our eyes when people say, you know, ‘we’ve got the technical solutions, we’ve got the science, we know sort of the economics, and now we just need the political will’. And we sort of roll our eyes because political will is just this sort of black box that no one really understands, as if it just takes some Herculean political leader to come on and say, ‘yes, I’m going to do this no matter what!’ 

But that’s not how politics works. And we actually have a whole discipline of political science that’s dedicated to understanding the political system, political parties and voting behaviour and interest groups and has lots of different theories about how these different groups shape the political agenda or policy outcomes and so on. 

 We’ve looked at the roles of institutions and different democratic institutions, different institutions that affect the way interest groups are organized, and so on. 

So we have actually a huge body of political science work and now a sort of burgeoning, really actually quite mature subfield, of climate politics to understand all of this and I think that our task is to sort of really bring that to bear in terms of policy design, as I’ve said, and also, you know, to sort of raise our flag within these broader discussions so that we’re not just having technical discussions about what the optimal thing to do is or what the science is, you know, the science and the values say we should do. To actually: okay, how can we do it in a way that’s going to work politically? 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I mean, I hope for the sake of all of us, you have some success. 

DR FERGUS GREEN

Thank you, so do we!

Haste: The slow politics of climate urgency edited by Håvard Haarstad, Jakob Grandin, Kristin Kjærås and Eleanor Johnson