Fergus Green

Flows of ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’ are the object of the dominant ‘Emissions Paradigm’ of climate governance. Perhaps surprisingly, fossil fuel-related activities as such are rarely regulated on climate grounds. In response, my research has sought to develop the theoretical foundations and policy architecture for the climate-motivated governance of fossil fuels. This research theme is also concerned with understanding and responding to the political challenges posed by the fossil fuel industrial complex. It engages with theoretical questions concerning norms, ideologies, democratic institutions, social movement activism, business corporations, and policy instruments. This work has benefited from close interaction with a vibrant scholarly and practitioner community working on these issues.

project: anti-fossil fuel norms

This project applies international relations theory on ‘global moral norms’ to analyse the logic and prospects of anti-fossil fuel activism and fossil fuel-restrictive regulation. My 2018 article, “Anti-Fossil Fuel Norms”, published in Climatic Change, has influenced the evolution of both scholarship and activism on this topic. My 2022 article with Harro van Asselt explores how anti-fossil fuel norms are being adopted—and contested—within the UN climate process and wider international climate change regime complex. My 2022 article in Climate Policy argues that the establishment of Fossil Free Zones is an effective means of building such norms.

project: Governing fossil fuels

My 2018 article with Richard Denniss, published in Climatic Change and covered in Vox, explores the political and economic case for policies to restrict fossil fuel supply, which had then been relatively neglected by policymakers and scholars of climate policy. We argue that such policies should be in the climate policy ‘toolkit’ (alongside carbon pricing and other more prominent kinds of climate policies). My commentary in Nature Climate Change discusses the logic of ‘fossil fuel bans’, which are becoming increasingly common, yet have been neglected in scholarship on climate policy. I explore the normative foundations of fossil fuel-restrictive regulation in my book chapter, “The Normative Foundations of Climate Legislation”.

I was a co-author (Chapter 5 on policy options to close the production gap) and research contributor (Chapter 6 on increasing international ambition and action) to the 2019 Production Gap Report, which documents the discrepancy between countries’ planned fossil fuel production and global production levels consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. I also co-authored chapter 4 (“Fostering a Just and Equitable Transition away from Fossil Fuels”) of The Production Gap Report: 2020 Special Report and Chapter 5 (“The critical role of transparency in addressing the production gap”) of the The Production Gap: 2021 Report. My 2022 paper in Global Environmental Politics with Declan Kuch, “Counting carbon or counting coal? Anchoring climate governance in fossil fuel-based accountability frameworks”, explores the benefits and risks of various possible ‘objects’ of supply-side climate governance. We argue that there would be serious risks from anchoring climate governance in fossil fuel reserves, but there is value in a hybrid accountability framework that accounts for fossil fuel infrastructure and production volumes. In my article with Ingrid Robeyns in the Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, we explore “the merits and limits of nationalising the fossil fuel industry” as a means to a just and timely decarbonisation of the fossil fuel sector in wealthy countries.

Project: litigation against fossil fuel projects and companies

Building on my research on fossil fuel governance and my professional experience as a climate lawyer, I have advised NGOs and legal teams in multiple jurisdictions on legal challenges to fossil fuel projects and companies. I acted as an expert witness (pro bono) for Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) in relation to the appeal in the landmark Dutch climate case against Shell, coordinating and co-authoring (with three other experts) a 10-page Expert Letter refuting the factual claims underpinning Shell’s central argument in its appeal against the decision of the Hague District Court (the District Court had found in favour of Milieudefensie and ordered Shell to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions across all activities—including, crucially, emissions from consuming its petroleum products, known as ‘Scope 3’ emissions—by 45% by 2030, relative to 2019 levels). The expert letter was filed in evidence as part of Milieudefensie’s formal response to Shell’s Statement of Appeal in October 2022. The appeal proceedings are ongoing.

Recognising a wide need for NGOs and legal teams challenging fossil fuel projects to have access to the scholarly evidence base on which we drew in our Expert Letter for the Shell case, I co-led a project (with Dr Steve Pye, UCL Energy Institute) to build a curated, online database of open-access scholarly articles to support such litigation, funded by a UCL Grand Challenges project grant, and in partnership with EarthJustice, the Climate Litigation Network, Uplift, and Friends of the Earth UK. REDLINE—Research Database for Litigation against New fossil fuel Extraction—was launched in October 2023 at an event in the UCL Department of Political Science.

Decarbonisation—like other policy, technological, economic and cultural changes—if not well managed, creates ‘losers’. The closure of coal-fired power generators and coalmines in many parts of the world is already causing socio-economic disruption and losses to workers, communities, firms and shareholders, for instance. I'm interested in the normative question of when and how societies should provide compensation or other forms of transition assistance to (some of) the ‘losers’ of such changes, as well as associated policy and political-economy questions, such as the institutional determinants and political implications of different kinds of ‘just transition’ strategies. This research engages with foundational questions about how people experience changes in their socio-economic status or well-being over time and how we should think about the ethical significance of such changes. It situates processes of decarbonisation within a wider conversation about contemporary capitalism, socio-economic inequalities, the future of work, and the politics of structural change, and therefore overlaps with my third research theme (discussed below). My ‘just transitions’ work has been supported by multiple research grants—initially a John Monash scholarship and LSE PhD studentship, and, more recently, grants from UKRI/ESRC (JUSTDECARB and AdJUST projects) and the UCL Faculty of Social & Historical Sciences.

Project: the political philosophy of legal change

The normative core of my work on just transitions is being developed via a book project, provisionally entitled Justice in Transition: What We Owe the ‘Losers’ from Legal Change. This book project builds on my PhD research at the LSE, which considers the conditions under which, and the reasons why, governments should provide transition assistance to the ‘losers’ from law reform, and what form such assistance should take. So far, I have published two journal articles on the role of ‘legitimate expectations’ in legal transitions (one article argues they should play a limited role; the earlier article has a methodological focus), as well as an academic book review on the subject.

Paper: the electoral effects of ‘just transition’ policy

Could providing transition assistance to the ‘losers’ from the climate transition help governments build political support for climate policies? I explore this question in my paper co-authored with Diane Bolet and Mikel González-Eguino, “How to Get Coal Country to Vote for Climate Policy: The Effect of a ‘Just Transition Agreement’ on Spanish Election Results”, published in the American Political Science Review. We studied the electoral effect of the Spanish Government’s Just Transition Agreement (JTA), negotiated with unions and coal producers in 2018, which committed to phasing out coalmining while providing financial support to affected workers and public investment in affected municipalities. We find the JTA caused an increase in the incumbent Socialist Party’s vote share in the April 2019 elections in coal municipalities, relative to similar, non-coal municipalities. Our evidence further suggests that unions’ support of the JTA was likely the key causal mechanism. These novel findings have important implications for climate policy/politics, which I elaborate here.

Project: socially just and politically robust decarbonisation (justdecarb)

JUSTDECARB is a multinational, multidisciplinary research project that received joint national funding under the European Joint Programming Initiative—Climate. It brings together leading social science and humanities researchers from four disciplines (philosophy, political science, economics, and law) across four countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Norway, and UK). I am working on the UK part of the project, which received a >£350,000 ESRC grant.

The project aims to fill critical gaps in the knowledge base relating to socially just and politically robust decarbonisation, with a particular focus on inclusive processes and redistributive measures. From this project, I have a paper (with Lukas Meyer) on the philosophy of ‘loss’ under review, and two further papers in progress: one on conflictual climate politics concerning oil and gas production in the UK and Norway (with Guri Bang and Peter Wyckoff); and the other on democracy and climate action, focused on citizens’ assemblies on climate change (with Michele Zadra).

A key policy-oriented output of the project is our report, Just and Robust Transitions to Net Zero: A Framework to Guide National Policy, of which I was a lead author (with Rob Macquarie). Aimed at civil servants but likely to be of interest to other stakeholders engaged in the ‘just transition’ agenda, the report provides guidance on the concepts, methods and instruments to undertake a socially just and politically robust transition to net zero across five key phases of the policy cycle (planning & analysis; public participation & stakeholder engagement; the design of transition assistance policies; implementation; and monitoring & evaluation).

Project: Advancing the understanding of challenges, policy options and measures to achieve a JUST EU energy transition (ADJUST)

AdJUST (2022–2026) is a €4 million Horizon Europe project funded by the European Research Council, consisting of an 11-institution consortium spanning ten European countries and multiple disciplines. The UK portion of the project is funded by UKRI, including a >£250,000 grant awarded to UCL, of which I am the Principal Investigator, with Dr Jared Finnegan is CO-I (Elena Verdolini from CMCC is PI for the consortium as a whole). We are collaborating closely with Dr Marion Dumas at the LSE and postdoctoral researcher, Dr Ben Crawford, on key aspects of the project, including a study of European labour unions’ responses to the climate transition, and a study of national institutional capacities to steer a just transition.

Completed project: Coal Transitions—Research & Dialogue on the future of Coal

From 2016–2018, I was involved in a six-country research project exploring transitional dynamics in the coal sector. I worked with colleagues at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne on the Australian arm of the project. My work in the project resulted in a synthesis article published in Climate Policy (co-authored with Ajay Gambhir) on the ‘who, what, and how’ of transition assistance policy to accompany climate mitigation, a co-authored working paper on the political economy of coal transitions in Australia, and a multi-authored journal article (also published in Climate Policy), which considers the coal transition challenge associated with meeting the Paris Agreement’s aspirational 1.5°C target. I also wrote a policy brief on the prospects of a just transition away from coal in Australia, before the May 2019 federal election.

Pivotal as it is, the just transition agenda focuses only on the ‘losers’ from the low-carbon transition. But the climate crisis is deeply intertwined with pre-existing inequalities, injustices and institutional deficits that condition persistently high emissions. Tackling these together therefore not only the right thing to do; it should help us to tackle climate change. Likewise, because tackling climate change necessitates radical transformations in our systems of provision for energy, mobility, housing and food, and yields multiple “co-benefits” (benefits other than climate mitigation and adaptation), tackling the climate crisis provides opportunities to make faster progress in addressing other societal challenges. These linkages suggest the potential for climate policy to be politically popular, if integrated within a wider progressive agenda that benefits the vast majority of people and shifts costs onto the wealthiest. Such a transformative policy agenda must be underpinned by new values and political ideologies involving new understandings of citizens’ rights and responsibilities—a new social contract, or indeed, a new “eco-social contract”.

My third research theme explores these interconnected drivers of unsustainable capitalism, the opportunities arising from decarbonisation, and the underpinning values needed to realise these opportunities. It engages with theoretical questions concerning wellbeing, inequality, governance, cooperation, democracy, ecological limits, and the social contract.

Project: tackling climate change and inequalities together via “Green new deals”

The dominant climate policy paradigm is a narrow, “carbon-centric” one, according to which mitigating climate change is solely or primarily about reducing net greenhouse gas emissions. But there has been growing recognition in recent years of the multiple linkages between socioeconomic inequalities and rising greenhouse gas emissions. An emerging climate policy paradigm seeks to tackle these challenges, and their root causes, together via “Green New Deal”-style integrative policy programmes. My Perspective article with Noel Healy, published in One Earth, explores the mechanisms by which socio-economic inequalities drive rising emissions, and argues that these linkages establish the “climate case” for Green New Deals. A follow-up article, currently under review, takes a comparative political economy perspective on the recent “second wave” of Green New Deals since 2019.

Project: the non-climate benefits of decarbonisation

For many years I've been interested in understanding the opportunities—beyond avoiding climate change itself—associated with actions and policies to mitigate climate change. These can include dramatic improvements in public health and well-being, technological innovation, increased productivity, and improved environmental amenity. My Grantham Research Institute working paper and LSE public lecture synthesise these benefits and argue that their presence changes the problem structure of international climate cooperation.

Completed Project: Structural change & carbon emissions in china

Since 2014 I have been working with economists to consider the effect of structural change and government policy on the trajectory of China’s carbon dioxide emissions. I guest-edited a special issue of Structural Change & Economic Dynamics on this topic. My 2015-17 work with Lord Stern and others on the implications of structural change for China's emissions peak resulted in two journal articles, a book chapter, a policy paper and extensive media outreach and coverage. A research letter with Zhifu Mi and others argues that China's export-embodied emissions (carbon dioxide emitted in the course of producing exported goods) peaked in 2008, providing further evidence of the beneficial effects of structural economic change within China for the global emissions trajectory.