UKERC Co-Director Caroline Kuzemko talks about her new book, ‘Climate Politics Can’t Live with It, Can’t Mitigate without It’, on this episode of Sustainability Matters Now.
Caroline has spent 15 years researching how policy drives or fails to drive emissions reduction in the energy sector, and her central argument is striking: we cannot separate climate policy from climate politics, yet we keep trying to.
Caroline explains why treating climate change as a purely technical problem is not just intellectually incomplete but practically dangerous. When integrated assessment models assume a universal carbon price will drive decarbonisation, they paper over the real political tensions that determine whether policy succeeds or fails.
She explores whose voices have historically been left out of climate decision-making, from the most climate-vulnerable communities in the Global South to workers in fossil fuel regions facing job losses, and why those omissions have costs we are now living with.
She also shares examples of where climate politics has actually worked: sub-national governments in Spain that phased out coal smoothly enough to be re-elected, and Aberdeen’s emerging model of transferring North Sea skills into offshore wind.
This is a conversation about strategy, power, and what it takes to keep climate action on political agendas for the decades it will need to stay there.