Jessica F. Green, "Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them" (Princeton UP, 2025)

New Books in Environmental Studies · Dec 2, 2025 · 25m

It’s no secret that the Paris Agreement and voluntary efforts to address climate change are failing. Governments have spent three decades crafting international rules to manage the climate crisis yet have made little progress on decarbonization. In Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions Are Failing and How to Fix Them (Princeton UP, 2025), Jessica Green explains why this is unsurprising: governments have misdiagnosed the political problem of climate change, focusing relentlessly on measuring, reporting, and trading emissions. This technical approach of “managing tons”…