Kyla Tienhaara is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies and the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University. She’s the author of Green Keynesianism and the Global Financial Crisis and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on the Green New Deal, which is a book that I find absolutely essential for thinking about the potential social benefits of decarbonizing the economy and rethinking growth in our time of climate breakdown.

She’s also one of the few researchers looking closely at the function of Investor State Dispute Settlement as an international legal apparatus that largely protects investors from the pushback they might receive from states. There’s no way I could quickly summarize what this work deciphers, in terms of this obscure global legal structure, which not a lot of people I’ve spoken with have any knowledge about. They might understand in the abstract that there is a system of global capitalism that is protected by the codification of laws that largely protect profits and private investment over the safety or autonomy of communities, but this is the actual system that serves that. And Kyla is uniquely insightful about how it works and what it is set up to prevent.

I wanted to underscore, at the top here, that we engage, in this conversation, with the concepts of utopianism and pragmatism in climate action. That’s no a disclaimer so much as an invitation to ask yourself where you sit in relation to this idea that abolishing fossil energy is utopian. Or to kind of request that you sit with the question of whether it is too much to ask that the economy be democratized or energy be regarded as a source of social wealth rather than a source of capital.

It’s maybe worth thinking, too, about why it is the case that there is legally-binding international law that protects fossil fuel companies from reprisal, but no binding law to protect the planet from the forces that are exacerbating our mounting climate emergency. What history precedes this moment where it is primarily rich countries that benefit from existing laws and international treaties, while poor countries get poorer? And what mechanisms or modes of resistance exist so that we can funnel our collective outrage at these legally sanctioned systems of upholding inequality into something real?