I start reading this book with a sense of relief: Finally, someone who tells it straight, as it is (i.e., as it is, based on social analysis).
This is, of course, not “only” a feeling in the sense of anything fleeting or short-term. Instead, it is a recognition that this course of action is needed in order to start lifting the strains from the situation that I and my fellow climate change researchers think about every day. What is more, the book is written in a very straightforward tone, with clear takeaway messages in almost every subtitle, getting the message across.
Just as Jessica F. Green quickly overviews in the introduction, we are in a climate crisis. With regard to “how to fix” the global climate institutions (part of the book’s subtitle), Green illustrates that the present policy focus on carbon and carbon counting needs to be shifted to one on assets instead. The issue of “why global climate institutions are failing” (part of the subtitle) is thereby made into a social problem rather than a more technical or managerial one. Green suggests that asset owners, of which she details three kinds, need to be placed in focus. The first of these is fossil asset owners: those who stand to gain from fossil use. The second are vulnerable asset owners: those who stand to lose “lives, homes, regions, industries, and eventually, perhaps entire nations” (p. 6). The third are the “green asset owners. They will be the basis of the decarbonized economy” (p. 7, italics in original).
The green asset owners, Green suggests, will be the job creators in areas such as critical minerals, renewable energy, and related infrastructure. To this end, Green suggests, global climate governance should be refocused on “Assets, Not Tons” (p. 13) by getting past the “Obsession with Measuring Greenhouse Gases” (p. 24) and the “Elaborate Distraction” (p. 78) of Net Zero pledges—to instead “Hit’em Where It Hurts” (p. 99). This would be done by focusing on binding regulations and economic instruments; as Green states, tax reform and investment reform are climate policy and trade is the new climate policy frontier (pp. 101, 108, 133). Green also illustrates developments in this orientation, notably in the EU.
The major contribution this book makes, then, is in framing social analysis as front and center in actions on climate. However, having made a similar claim myself (E. Carina H. Keskitalo, The Social Aspects of Environmental and Climate Change. Institutional Dynamics beyond the Linear Model, 2022), I note both potential preconditions for and significant hindrances to this development. A major concern is the fact that in battling the focus on carbon counting, one is also battling the broader logic it is part of (in line with, for instance, Foucauldian governmentalities or institutional logics conceptions, e.g., Patricia. H. Thornton, William Ocasio & Michael Lounsbury, The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure, and Process, 2012). In this logic, science advice to policy—which is what Green is providing—has not been seen foremost as socially based but rather as technical and managerial. This is based on the entrenched linear model of expertise in which science advice is assumed to deal with hard science “facts,” from which politics has been eliminated. While this model has been thoroughly disproven, it has also been described as an “undead” model in that it continues to govern the way science-policy relations are conceived (e.g., Darrin Durant, The undead linear model of expertise. In: Michael Heazle and John Kane (eds.) Policy Legitimacy, Science and Political Authority: Knowledge and Action in Liberal Democracies, 2015).
Suggesting a focus on what is foundationally social analysis thereby also results in battling a host of misconceptions about what science is able to state something about. The upside is that at least some of the bodies that have by now struggled with climate change for a generation have started recognizing these perspectives; this is not least as the “distraction” (akin to the Net Zero pledge “distraction” noted by Green) of voluntary regulation has, unsurprisingly, been shown to be insufficient for provoking large-scale change (e.g., Kathleen Segerson, Voluntary approaches to environmental protection and resource management. Annu. Rev. Resour. Econ., 5(1), 2013).
However, given the book’s social, asset-owner focus, it is somewhat puzzling that it does not direct more attention to the discursive and agenda-setting means (among others) that may be required to shift the situation toward the orientation Green suggests. When discussing what drives asset owners, Green notes that their “interests are driven primarily, but not exclusively by material concerns, though these interests may change over time as technology advances or ideologies shift” (p. 5). Interests, seen here as both material and related to understandings and incentives, are thus a particular sticking point. While we require incentivization based on social analysis of the actors—the asset holders and what incentivizes them—it could thus be argued that we equally crucially require social analysis of how we can get to a point in politics at which these incentives can be put in place. In this regard, change is also a question of how to get incentivization to influence interests through, particularly in the increasingly volatile politics of our time.
While this is a nearly unsolvable question, to my mind, one point might be the question of agency among what Green calls the vulnerable asset owners. As properties are increasingly influenced by storms, flooding, or fire—which become all the more common with climate change—it is the property owners who stand to lose. The issue may thus not only be one of asset owners’ interests but also the fact that many asset owners may not be placed or organized to recognize and act on their material interests—they may perhaps even be assuming a “business-as-usual” that no longer exists (e.g., Kezia Barker, Anaesthetic worlds of denial: “Sleepwalking” through climate catastrophe. In Johannes Glückler, Matthias Garschagen & Robert Panitz (eds). Placing the Future: Understanding Space in the Making of Tomorrow, 2025). There are also lock-in effects in the system, through which green asset owners may be limited by still having to operate within the framework within which fossil owners have risen to prominence. Acting on climate change at the global level thus involves tax and investment reform, as Green suggests, but also multiple other policy arenas and framings in which climate change keeps having to battle other issues to get on the agenda.
Thus, this well-developed monograph still leaves me with the question of how to bring the issue home—in a literal as well as metaphoric sense—to all those who, in fact, have a stake in it. This returns me to the issue of “feeling”: we would need to not only flee from the cloud of climate crisis but instead feel it so strongly that we cannot but act on the real crisis, rather than remaining in the pretend “business-as-usual” world. How to get to a point at which it is possible to mobilize actors—asset owners, who also often overlap with the political sphere—so that instruments such as those suggested here can be applied, remains the far greater than million-dollar question.
