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Given the geopolitical and climate-driven urgency of phasing out fossil fuels and shifting to a carbon-neutral economy, it is tempting to hand more decision-making power to credentialed experts. Yet whatever advantages a technocratic approach might have would almost certainly be offset by popular resistance and loss of public trust.
NEW HAVEN – The planet is burning. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warnings about the consequences of rising temperatures are becoming increasingly dire. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has set off a race in Europe and elsewhere to achieve energy independence through rapid transformations of the economy.
With decarbonization becoming such an urgent priority, it is tempting to consider political shortcuts. Why not try enlightened despotism or “epistocracy” (rule by experts), picking the best climate scientists and engineers and empowering them to make the decisions for us? Why not embrace the Chinese method of forcing through sweeping changes and swatting away any misguided resistance from below?
In fact, there can be no decarbonization without democratization. As urgent as solutions to climate change have become, so, too, has the need to address the growing disenchantment with democracy. Without rehearsing all the various indicators of democratic disillusionment – from unfavorable public sentiment to the rise of voter abstention and declining trust in elected politicians and public institutions – it is clear that many people now regard democracy as more of a problem than a solution.
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Writing for PS since 2022 2 Commentaries
Hélène Landemore, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, is the author of Open Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2020) and a contributor to the forthcoming book Democracy in a Hotter Time (MIT Press, 2023).
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The existence of a 'global climate crisis' is testable. Is life-expectancy falling worldwide? No, it is rising (rather fast). Are crop yields crashing worldwide? No, they are stable or rising. Are deaths from natural disasters soaring? No, they are declining. Based on the evidence, there is no 'global climate crisis'.
This actually is very ambitious, but do you think it would be practical?
Decarbonization would be easier to accomplish in China, which is a country controlled by a single communist party. The evidence is clear. China was able to raise the living standards of its +1 billion impoverished people faster than India - the largest democracy in the World. Why? A nation under the control of a single party is able to focus better and faster on a strategic national goal than large democracies, like India, one of the largest polluters on Earth. Please, don’t try to mix your democratization agenda with decarbonization; it will complicate and retard progress on climate control, which is an urgent matter that requires all of the countries to act in unison.
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Many argue that the combined effects of the 2008 global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, Sino-American decoupling, and Russia’s war against Ukraine have dealt an irreversible blow to three decades of open trade and burgeoning supply chains. How should policymakers and businesses respond to the apparent demise of globalization, and what new paradigm might replace it?
A toxic mix of mutual distrust and rising nationalism – with Taiwan the immediate flash point – has brought Sino-American relations to their lowest point in decades. While neither China nor the United States appears to want a military conflict, we asked PS commentators whether the two powers might nonetheless stumble into one.
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