A conversation with Professors Jamie Morgan and Heikki Patomäki on climate governance, inequality, and the political imagination required to confront the planetary crisis. This is an excerpt from our Visions of a Better World episode “The Case for a Global Carbon Tax”.
Can a Global Carbon Tax Save the Planet? What would it take for the world to adopt a global carbon tax — and could such a policy become a meaningful tool for responding to the climate crisis?
In this episode of Visions of a Better World, Max Tallberg and Astrid Aminoff sit down with Jamie Morgan (Leeds Beckett University) and Heikki Patomäki (University of Helsinki), who have collaborated extensively on proposals for a global greenhouse gas tax. The conversation moves from policy mechanics into deeper questions of democratic agency, inequality, and the political imagination needed to confront a planetary-scale crisis.
The mindset problem before the policy problem
Before discussing institutions and taxation, the conversation turned to a more fundamental issue: whether people today feel capable of shaping the future at all.
Heikki Patomäki:
“When you put things like you just did — the non-linear oscillation and how they amplify each other and how these things are connected, the Antarctic ice and all the rest of it — you actually have a kind of a very vivid way of portraying how things are interconnected on a planetary scale. And that requires also planetary political imagination as well. I think the global greenhouse gas tax could be kind of a manifestation of that imagination in place.”
Jamie Morgan:
“How do people feel on the average? They feel powerless. And most of the time they feel dread. It’s not fear. It’s dread. It’s this idea that there’s something inevitable that is coming that I have no agency to affect.”
Morgan suggests that the framing of climate policy itself has contributed to this sense of helplessness:
“People should not be put in the situation where we’re expecting them to afford this. We should be thinking about ways of doing this which make it a community issue, where we are distributing the costs in a realistic manner. But the more we privatize the problem and solutions, the less we think that way. The more we let economists talk about this, the more it becomes an economic problem. But really, this is not an economic problem. Our economies have created it, but it is not an economic problem.”
Patomäki describes climate change primarily as a challenge of institutional and social redesign:
“It’s a social redesign problem.”
He also points to the lack of meaningful democratic structures at the global level:
“In the absence of adequate global institutions where some sort of politics, where there’s political space and some democratic politics can take place — and in the absence of transforming political agency on a world scale — what we have are these movements and parties and so on that are only within the confines of the national states.”
Morgan returns to the psychological dimension of agency:
“You do not have agency until you realize you have it. You can’t use agency you refuse to accept that you have. So it’s a mindset problem before it’s anything else.”
And on the economic models still shaping much of climate policy:
“If you still look at the main models that are being created — these integrated assessment models — what’s the optimal warming they’re estimating? Between 2.7 degrees and 4. That’s what they are saying is optimal based on an economic model. Now, you tell me that that isn’t insane.”
What if we’d chosen a carbon tax thirty years ago?
Max Tallberg: “Earlier in your discussion, you mentioned the previous times when we took the road of emission trading systems. I was wondering — how could or would the world look today if we had chosen the carbon tax instead of emission trading earlier?”
Heikki Patomäki:
“The current system, which is market-based, very much reflects the hegemony of neoliberalism in the world. If something like a global greenhouse gas tax had been established already in the 1990s, it would have indicated a different course of world history, basically toward a more global Keynesian direction.”
Morgan emphasizes that meaningful policy outcomes depend on broader political and institutional conditions:
“At any point in time, there have to be levers to allow you to change the way the world is in order to get the outcomes you would prefer.”
He also highlights the practical challenge of balancing carbon taxation with growing global energy demand:
“You have to decelerate the growth of energy demand in order to allow a disruptive carbon tax to impact in such a way as it can keep pace with changes in energy demand.”
A coalition of the devastated
Astrid Aminoff: “We have these countries in the Global South that have experienced the worst effects already, and it’s only getting worse for them — floods, food scarcity, places becoming uninhabitable. Do you see a future where these countries could come together and implement their own type of carbon tax on the Western countries that caused the problem?”
Jamie Morgan:
“A coalition of the devastated rather than a coalition of the willing.”
Heikki Patomäki:
“It seems to me that the initiative at the moment is not going to come from North America or Europe. Europe is retreating as well.”
Patomäki also points to the importance of large emerging economies such as China and the wider BRICS bloc in any future climate governance framework.
Where would the money go?
A major theme of the discussion was redistribution and democratic governance.
Heikki Patomäki:
“The potential revenues are really huge. If the price is high enough — like $60 per tonne or even $100 per tonne — and if the system was comprehensive, including most of the big emitters, part of the revenues must go to the states that are collecting the tax.”
His proposal also incorporates historical responsibility:
“Those countries that are historically most responsible for the problem could dedicate 70% or 80% of their revenues to a global fund, whereas the poorest countries that have least to do with producing the problem could keep most of their revenues.”
Morgan stresses that any carbon tax would need to be integrated carefully into national energy systems:
“If you are not going to take energy pricing into account and then you introduce a carbon tax which will effectively make energy more expensive, you are going to cause a huge problem.”
Global Keynesianism — and the question of what economies are for
Astrid Aminoff: “I thought that you could have the opportunity to explain one of your favourite subjects — what a global Keynesian approach would be like for future development and economy. And it ties into that, obviously, how degrowth might be a part of that.”
Heikki Patomäki:
“Global Keynesianism is an attempt to think about economic policy and public policy in general in world terms. It means some macroeconomic policy on a global scale, public investments on a global scale, various systems of regulation on a global scale.”
He describes the project as an effort to globalize some of the functions traditionally associated with democratic welfare states.
Morgan returns to the urgency of climate realities already set in motion:
“We’ve already created some of the future already in climate terms. And yet, at the moment, we’re not really dealing with what it is that we’ve already done.”
Hope, urgency, and the species-level “we”
Astrid Aminoff: “If you have any final thoughts where you consider a future that might not be so bad — do you have anything you want to leave us with?”
Heikki Patomäki:
“There’s plenty of hope also about better futures. This is a kind of a necessary phase that we have to overcome.”
Jamie Morgan:
“We need to always be making the argument that we should be doing more, at the same time as just pushing ourselves in the right direction.”
This interview is based on an episode of the Visions of a Better World podcast featuring Jamie Morgan and Heikki Patomäki, hosted by Max Tallberg and Astrid Aminoff.
Jamie Morgan is Professor of Economics at Leeds Beckett University, whose work spans political economy, the philosophy of economics, global governance, critical realism, and climate policy.
Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics and Global Political Economy at the University of Helsinki. His research covers a broad range of themes including economic theory, global political economy, futures studies, and global justice.
Morgan and Patomäki’s new book: Deweaponizing Interdependence
Bringing the Idea of International Clearing Union into the Twenty-First Century, is out now.
The Visions of a Better World Podcast is available on RSS, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and our website.
