Manuscript available upon request.
Governments have pursued decarbonization through a combination of subsidies for capital and compensation for people. Political scientists have identified the compensation of those who incur losses from climate policies as the the central challenge in building green coalitions. Our critique of this paradigm contends that climate policies aimed at limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius entail transformative change for virtually everyone—while, quite literally, creating a better world. Proposing to move beyond compensating existing preferences, we argue that transformative statecraft reshapes preferences through political mobilization. From this perspective, the depoliticization of economic policymaking—a precondition for good governance in the technocratic paradigm—constitutes a binding constraint on transformative green statecraft. We defend this mobilization-based approach against the objections of manipulation and deprivation of freedom and discuss institutional preconditions for transformative statecraft that is democratic—a state apparatus rendered visible and confronted by countervailing power.