Is democracy getting in the way of saving the planet? | Kate Aronoff | The Guardian - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...n-the-way-of-saving-the-planet
democracy climate change politics response technocracy authoritarian
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he Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report confirmed this month is that the stable climate many of us grew up with is gone and has been replaced by a fundamentally unstable one.
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Amid a drumbeat of depressing news and decades of inaction, there’s a sort of folk wisdom emerging that liberal democracy might just be too slow to tackle a problem as urgent and massive as the climate crisis
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With a punishingly tiny budget of just 400 gigatonnes of CO2 left to make a decent shot of staying below 1.5C of warming, is it time to give something less democratic a try?
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If a less democratic world is needed to deal with the climate, who are the people who’d like to bring a less democratic world into being?
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The aim is not to reach net zero faster – neither party has laid out workable plans to do so – but to endear climate-conscious voters to an ethno-nationalist cause.
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It’s not just the right, however, that has considered a turn away from democracy for the planet’s sake.
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As much as US and UK liberals have talked up the promise of spreading democracy throughout the world this century, though, many centrists – as the Progressive International’s David Adler wrote in 2018 – are pretty down on democracy itself. Analysing the World Values and the European Values surveys, Adler found that centrists in wealthy countries were less supportive of democracy than their counterparts on either the left or the far right. Less than half of centrists in the US thought elections were essential; only 25% saw civil rights as a critical feature of democracy.
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Actually existing centrist politicians, meanwhile, such as Emmanuel Macron in France, haven’t shown any willingness to address the climate crisis at the speed or scale it demands.
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Openly authoritarian governments hardly fare better. China has rolled out an impressive array of green technologies over the last decade with massive industrial policy. Yet still it continues to prioritise fossil-fuelled growth, with its 14th five-year plan pledging to reduce “emissions intensity” by just 18% through 2025, and the planned opening of 43 new coal-fuelled power stations
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But India, like China, has missed the deadline to update its emissions reduction plan in advance of UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.
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There is simply no class of enlightened technocrats in powerful governments waiting in the wings to save the day.
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A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum,” the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor has argued, “but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.”
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In the less upbeat SSP3, “resurgent nationalism” and “concerns about competitiveness and security” start to emerge as countries go their own way in trying to adapt to and (more rarely) mitigate rising temperatures.
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A best-case scenario detailed in their report by IPCC scientists, Shared Socioeconomic Economic Pathway 1, involves “more inclusive development” and unprecedented collaboration among the world’s governments to manage the global commons
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The best hope in the short term is for a popular front to browbeat the middling centrists who claim to “believe science” into actually acting on it, and beating back the illiberal right accordingly.