The failures of democracies and democratic institutions in meeting climate challenges have led some scholars and activists to question whether democracy is functional at all in this new world. While some scholars and activists claim that democracy’s failures in addressing climate change justify authoritarian governance, these arguments rely on empirical, conceptual, and normative confusions. The authors argue that democracies actually perform better than authoritarian regimes in addressing climate challenges, and possess unique resources for climate action through institutional flexibility, accountability, and information flows. This essay warns that trading away democratic governance for authoritarian control would be a grave mistake, as democracy’s specific strengths become even more critical in times of crisis.
The unprecedented “natural” disasters of the climate age challenge not only individual and community resilience, but institutional resilience too. Governments have been slow to respond to climate change, slow to prevent further damage to our atmosphere, and slow to prepare for what is coming. Democratic governments, it is sometimes said, are worst of all at these tasks. Integrating the immediate economic, social, and political realities of energy production and consumption with complex, science-driven imperatives is a difficult if not impossible challenge, and governments based on wide discussion and free consent are said to be unsuited to it. Indeed, the failures of democracies and democratic institutions in meeting climate challenges have led some scholars and activists to question whether democracy is functional at all in this new world. Some even publicly support authoritarian responses — perhaps temporary, perhaps not — to the climate crisis.
This support is misguided. Democracy in fact possesses unique resources that make it better, not worse, than authoritarianism at dealing with emergencies and crises. Calls for antidemocratic solutions to climate-related problems should be resisted. Energy’s centrality to the climate problem does make for genuine challenges in democratic contexts, but authoritarianism is not the answer. Yet both theory and practice have accustomed us to expect that crises and greater concentrations of power will go hand-in-hand, which may help to explain why authoritarianism appears attractive to some.
Nevertheless, calls for eco-authoritarianism rely on empirical, conceptual, and normative confusions: Claims that authoritarian systems are better at handling climate problems are flawed. They ignore empirical evidence and overrate authoritarianism while underrating democracy. The special resources that democracies and only democracies can bring to bear in the matter of climate change deserve to be spelled out, and the greater (not reduced) salience that democracy’s specific strengths assume in times of crisis and emergency deserves to be more widely appreciated. As we face the road ahead, democracy remains essential. Trading away self-government for the false promise of authoritarian superiority would be a grave mistake.
After a century of consensus that democracy is the least bad political system, the climate challenge has made some doubt this. Certainly, few would call democracy’s climate track record adequate. Even where sustainable energy technologies are commercialized and available, strong but divergent popular sentiments and powerful vested interests can generate polarized gridlock. This complex and perilous situation makes sense if we recognize that we are as enmeshed in our energy situation as we are in capitalism.
Denizens of rich countries have such easy and ample access to energy that we stop noticing the dramatic reorientation of human existence that our energy-intensive lives represent. The long-term decline in the cost of illumination, for example, effectively affords us extra hours in the day. Coal, oil, and gas have vastly reduced labor costs of food and fuel. Fossil-based energy’s ubiquity and reliability can blind us to the depth of the challenge that repowering our society without emitting greenhouse gases presents.
Our current energy system drives our entire built infrastructure and makes deep, far-reaching changes extremely difficult. Take one principal component of that system, the electrical grid. Normally, the grid is the most complicated machine around, instantly and consistently balancing supply and demand. It took a century and more than a trillion dollars to assemble and extend the U.S. grid. Its power lines run more than 190,000 kilometers — a distance nearly five times greater than the circumference of the earth. A taste of what losing just one dimension of this system’s services can do to a community came when winter storms swept Texas in February 2021, causing power outages that contributed to more than two-hundred deaths and cost, by the state comptroller’s estimation, between US$80 and $130 billion. A full-scale collapse of just one of North America’s larger interlocking grids could be catastrophic, and failures in other components of the energy system could grind modern life to a halt. The modern energy system underpins modern society.
These realities undercut the idea that we can draw a neat dividing line between a broad, sustainability-interested demos and a narrow set of oil executives and other fossil capitalists profiting from the exploitation of carbon-intensive fuels. Most individuals and organizations hold property that creates carbon pollution, has market value that depends on continued emissions, or is vulnerable to climate-related impacts. Home and vehicle prices, retirement portfolios, public infrastructure, and private industry are valued as they are because of the services that they provide over time, with some discounting. Shutting down that energy system would scramble those values and leave people scrambling for necessities such as heating and transport as well. Assumptions about energy availability ground whole plans of life around families, work, security, modes of being, and of being together. Respecting the demos means recognizing this lived experience.
The Captivating Narrative of “Elite Capture”
Narratives of elite capture are nonetheless appealing because they simplify the problem, remove personal responsibility, and have the appearance of truth: If a tiny, powerful energy elite is controlling the climate agenda and the world of fossil fuels from behind the scenes, then we, the people’s vanguard, need only seize control and teach the people their true interest. This is one channel through which the siren song of authoritarian approaches to climate makes itself heard. A strong vanguard can crush corruption in an interest-infested democracy and make the people see. Narratives such as these ignore the consequential and deeply felt ways in which broad swaths of the population fear action against climate change.
Like most narratives with grip, elite capture enjoys credence because it is partly true. Do carbon elites seek to shield their own interests by using their power in undemocratic ways? Of course they do. For some, the prospect of a shift away from the fossil-fuel–dependent status quo is an existential threat. The oil industry is an obvious example, but not the only one. Firms that want to resist switching to net-zero ways of doing business may invoke “free-market” ideology, fund parties and candidates sympathetic to their interests, try to “greenwash” themselves by striking eco-sensitive poses, pay climate-change deniers, seek to capture regulatory agencies, or (at the cruder end of things) just start handing out bribes. Using elite and mass channels, they act as we expect economic elites under any regime type to act when under threat: They try to translate economic power into political power. Matto Mildenberger’s cross-national analysis of the constraints on what democratic societies have done about the climate notes that carbon polluters typically enjoy “double representation,” with interests on both the right (industry) and the left (labor unions) ready to help polluters improve their “access to climate policy design.”1
In sum, if people have reasons to embrace climate action, they also have reasons to resist it. Elites in particular do not want to lose a status quo which they dominate, and have multiple levers of power to help them act on their fears. Democracies, given their preponderance of veto players and susceptibility to disinformation, might not seem equal to the political challenge of addressing climate change.
Another layer of difficulty facing democratic climate action is the dominance of economistic thinking associated with neoliberalism. This school of thought frames carbon pollution as what economists call an “externality,” an imposition of unpriced harms on others. The classic economic solution to externalities is to require their internalization. What was off the books must go on the books: If the polluter makes the community bear costs in the form of negative health impacts, greater hazard risks, higher insurance premiums, more public money spent on cleanups, and so on, then the polluter must pay more for its emissions. Making emissions more expensive — “pricing in” the externalities, as economists say — should drive emission reductions. Under this framework, carbon taxes or emissions-trading systems seem the efficient climate solution. Yet carbon pricing has proved politically unpalatable, as its repeated failures in U.S. jurisdictions show. And even when it has been enacted, carbon pricing has often failed to take a big bite out of emissions, with the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (begun in 2005) forming a happy exception.
The empirical concerns roused by these political tensions and policy failures are only amplified when we consider democratic theory. Elisabeth Ellis argues that environmental problems “throw conventional democratic theory’s inherent tensions into sharp relief,” and present “democratic theory with three crucial challenges: paternalism, irreversibility, and scope problems.”2 The paternalism challenge arises when environmental problems have “right answers” that the demos nonetheless refuses to accept. Irreversibility is the looming “point of no return”: Once an ecosystem is destroyed, a species goes extinct, or a tipping point arrives, things cannot be undone. Decisions made today affect generations that follow. Scope conditions refer to misalignments between where decisions are made and where their impacts are most sharply felt. Carbon pollution and its effects respect no borders.
Because we are as enmeshed in the energy system as we are in capitalism, a life free of fossil fuels is hard for many to conceive and embrace. Because solving technical challenges also requires solving democratic challenges, and because elites can capture democratic institutions, switching democratic societies to climate-positive policies is an uphill fight.
Authoritarian Temptations
In the face of democracy’s problems, two narratives drive eco-authoritarian temptations. First, when a sense of urgency about the climate confronts the complexities of politics, it becomes easy to blame democratic intransigence. Would not a government less encumbered by the demands of discussion and consent get the climate job done faster? This narrative identifies the problem as the lack of unitary, focused power capable of evading democratic checks and balances.
Second, if elite capture drives democracies’ climate failures, this can feed one of authoritarianism’s classic legitimation narratives: The good and noble people want climate action (even if they do not know it yet), but greedy, nefarious fossil-fuel companies with politicians in their pockets are blocking progress. To fight shady elite power, the people need a champion, a leader who can take strong action in their name and thereby further their true interest. This narrative identifies the problem as diseased institutions that must be cut off.
Both narratives invite populist-to-authoritarian responses. These can range in gravity from (at the lighter end) symbolic declarations of climate emergency through actual, legal declarations of temporary states of emergency to (at the heaviest end) calls for permanent state-of-emergency powers.
The most tentative versions call for symbolic (not legal) declarations of climate emergency. Climate activists have made declarations hinge moments in rhetoric: A declaration creates a with-us-or-against-us frame that pressures leaders, while giving activists an emotionally and rationally concordant outlet. For those who see democracy’s climate problem as “elites distorting facts,” symbolic declarations provide an easy and satisfying victory over those elites, while educating people about their true interest.
A promise that is semi-coerced from the lips of politicians may, in the wash of politics, have little ultimate impact. And climate politics in this populist frame may prepare the ground for eco-authoritarian responses to climate problems. Whatever may be the wisdom or effects of official declarations about the climate emergency, when leaders are called on to issue them, they find it hard to say no. As of this writing in late 2024, fully 2,364 governments at various levels have declared climate emergencies.
For some, such symbolic wins are far from enough. Instead, democracy’s failings require a stronger, more sustained remedy: climate action by executive diktat grounded in formal emergency powers. “Climate change requires immediate action,” argues law professor Mark Nevitt, “and emergency legal authorities provide immediate, substantive authority that can address the current climate crisis. . . . Traditional legal authorities and a ‘business as usual approach’ will not be enough.”3 Still others advocate the wholesale rejection of democratic governance. Andreas Malm, who is intentionally provocative but far from alone, announces the demise of social-democratic hopes and wants a revolutionary Leninist response to climate catastrophe:
Social democracy works on the assumption that time is on our side. There must be plenty of it. Then one can move slowly towards the good society, step after incremental step, without having to clash head-on with the class enemy and break up its power; it will rather leak away in drips. But if catastrophe strikes, and if it is the status quo that produces it, then the reformist calendar is shredded.4
Others see authoritarian governance as a regrettable but necessary next step. Climate change promises political catastrophe, asserts Ross Mittiga, and this justifies any means reasonably believed useful to avert it — short of causing some other catastrophe. In failing to prevent climate change, democracy has lost its “foundational” legitimacy — the basic legitimacy that comes from protecting life — and recovering this may require an authoritarian turn.5
Mittiga alleges authoritarian successes in climate-change mitigation and contrasts these with democracy’s record of failures in the same field. He believes that, given the mortal dangers and small time window involved, if “adhering to . . . [rights and freedoms] proves incompatible with responding effectively to the climate crisis, then political legitimacy may require adopting a more authoritarian approach.”6 He wants rule by experts — a climate epistocracy — who would have formal power to limit climate-skeptical speech and prevent people with unorthodox climate views from holding office. Notably, Mittiga suggests that among the useful climate policies authoritarian government would make possible are those “limiting reproduction.”7
Given democracies’ climate failures, and the wide currency accorded populist narratives that cast “big oil” against “the people,” it is unsurprising that some look with favor on the idea of climate authoritarianism. The environmental movement, after all, has long dallied with authoritarian practices, perhaps most troublingly regarding population. When Science (the prestigious peer-reviewed weekly of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) published Garrett Hardin’s influential but flawed “Tragedy of the Commons” essay in 1968, its subheadings included “Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable,” rendering transparent the authoritarian leanings of Hardin’s ethics.8 Paul and Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb that same year, and the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth followed in 1972.9 After being exposed to these arguments, the rocket scientist Song Jian pushed for China’s one-child policy, arguing that without it the country would fall into a Malthusian disaster.10 Yet China’s decreased fertility rate is better explained by economic growth, while the one-child policy’s human costs — forced abortions and sterilizations — are well known. Mittiga’s nod to population controls has a strong(man) pedigree.
Resisting Authoritarian Sirens
There are strong reasons to resist the siren songs of climate authoritarianism, whether they call for temporary “emergency” rule or more lasting control. While the climate crisis surely demands attention, the authoritarians rely on multiple confusions. They conflate “crisis” with “emergency” and confuse the idea of democratically declaring a legal emergency with authoritarian governance. Moreover, they ignore the empirical evidence that undercuts claims of authoritarian efficacy. There is no reason to doubt the seriousness or the imminence of the climate situation, but there is ample reason to doubt that authoritarianism can be the right answer to it.
Mittiga and other advocates of climate authoritarianism charge that climate failures undermine democratic legitimacy. Authoritarian governance — because presumed more effective — seems more legitimate. But in truth, authoritarian climate failures are worse.
Oddly, Mittiga acknowledges this in a footnote on the first page of his August 2022 American Political Science Review article. He cites research which shows that democracies do more than authoritarian states to combat climate change. Each of the four articles he lists provides evidence that democracies — particularly those low on corruption — are livelier than nondemocracies when it comes to acting against or mitigating climate change.11 This makes slow climate action in democracies no less frustrating, but it undermines any attempt to claim that authoritarianism is preferable.
The reply might come back: “Systems are not the point; it is not authoritarianism as such that counts, but rather who is in charge. The right person holding the reins of power would make the difference.” But how is power to find its way into the “right” hands? Climate activists disagree among themselves over what is needed, and the stakes would be high: There are eco-fascists and green anarchists who see mass death or the end of the world order as a cleansing moment, a consummation devoutly to be wished.12 Will the climate-crisis measures decreed by our new authoritarian ruler include selective depopulation? Genocide and breeding programs might be feared as threats coming from the right, but the left is hardly free of its own hatreds and tendencies to primitivism.
But even if we could install the dictator of our choice, what guarantee would there be that this dictator could keep power? A moment later, people with other ideas of what humanity desperately needs would be at work to seize that power. Without constitutional democracy as a buffer, contests over power become literally existential. Democracy grasps that (to paraphrase what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said about feelings) “no power is final.” Liberal-democratic systems exist to keep the ongoing struggle for power peaceful and lawful rather than bloody and chaotic.
No good evidence suggests that regimes with authoritarian characteristics are better at climate response — and even if they are, climate sirens neglect at our common peril the importance of constitutional democracies as managers of political temporality: Democracies facilitate politics as a continuing process. There is always the next election, the next policy round, judicial review and appeal, more time. Politics, power, and policy keep moving, lowering the stakes of competing visions of the good.
Authoritarians aspire to be the ultimate government, the last power, so they barricade themselves: controlling information flows, silencing not only enemies but even supporters. Even where these methods work and secure the regime, they insulate leaders from feedback that is critical (in both senses). Policies are adopted in ignorance and without sufficient scrutiny, and they fail. Where these security measures do not work, we find a negative spiral of competing claims of ultimacy. Political contestation over climate policy will not stop with the achievement of concentrated power. It will just grow bloodier. Any politics of ultimacy is ultimately a politics of death.
What if authoritarian climate governance is temporary, however? Does that offer a way around the problem? Since all constitutional democracies have emergency powers, why not use these to confront climate change, while keeping democracy on the simmer? This is what Nevitt suggests. Using formal constitutional or statutory emergency powers would add needed firepower to the executive, in this view, and would do so without risking full-scale authoritarian rule.
This approach faces myriad problems. Notably, emergency powers are justified — often the law makes this explicit — only when strictly necessary. And they are necessary only when situations are: 1) urgent and dangerous, making a response necessary; and 2) sudden and temporary, meaning that normal legislation is impossible or inappropriate (measures must be implemented on an emergency basis). Legal emergency powers exist to fill occasional gaps: They allow states to rapidly protect public safety using means not normally available. So even if the climate challenge meets the first criterion, it may fail the second. The climate situation is urgent and dangerous, but it is not sudden and temporary. There is time to make laws. Thus the climate authoritarians’ rejection of normal governance due to the climate situation is based not on a belief that democracy cannot do this, but on a belief that it will not do this. Absent the necessity criterion, this is at heart a refusal of democracy.
Furthermore, those who advocate the use of emergency powers to confront the climate crisis forget that — contrary to caricatures of emergency popularized by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and the literary theorist Giorgio Agamben — emergency powers are actually managed by every branch of government, not just the executive. In law and practice, emergency powers make action nimble only within webs of formal and informal accountability: Formally, legislative consent is normally required, and judicial oversight comes into play in various ways. Democratic deliberation remains in an emergency; only its order changes: Act first, then deliberate to ratify and review. Requirements that the government state reasons for its actions are not obliterated by emergency. Emergency measures are thus subject to informal constraints of public approval or condemnation. Questions will be asked and, ultimately, voters will decide.
Even in an emergency, formal and informal accountability work together to facilitate what David Dyzenhaus calls the “rule of law project.”13 These safeguards are precisely what differentiate emergency powers in constitutional democracies from authoritarianism. To use emergency powers to circumvent the rule of law (formal and informal) is to seek authoritarian rule, not emergency democratic governance.
It is inherently antidemocratic to wield emergency powers to bypass the will of the people, however misguided one might believe the people to be. Those who urge the use of legal emergency powers to bypass democratic dithering are ignoring the lessons of Weimar. Driven to their wits’ end by democratic policy failures, the leaders of post–World War I Germany’s Weimar Republic repeatedly invoked emergency presidential powers. Authoritarian methods of making policy came to seem so normal — and democracy so discredited — that the way was smoothed for Hitler to have emergency powers supplant constitutional safeguards once the Reichstag burned on 27 February 1933. At the Nazis’ urging, President Paul von Hindenburg issued his “Reichstag Fire Decree” the next day suspending key civil liberties and basic democratic rights. The path to Hitler’s complete takeover of power was clear.
Normalizing emergency powers to get around democratic failures is not only wrong in itself, but opens the door to more trouble. The state’s imposing emergency powers are supposed to be locked away for emergencies. To normalize these powers is akin to leaving a loaded gun on the table. Anyone with a cause may pick it up. Today, the powers serve our cause, but whose might they serve tomorrow?
“Surely,” some might retort, “the climate situation is urgent. People need to wake up.” This is the rationale behind the movement for jurisdictions and organizations to declare “climate emergencies.” The aim is rhetorical: to shock the public into action. This tactic generates vast confusion to limited and often negative effect.14 Symbolic climate-emergency declarations are precisely that. They call the climate situation an emergency, but typically do not originate from the proper authorities and lack legal substance. Having two things called “declarations of emergency” — one of which means that a government can lock you up and seize your property while the other merely tries to draw your attention to a serious issue — is unwise.
Even if the rhetoric of emergency does make some citizens pay attention, its frequent use risks reducing the shock factor that governments need for safety compliance when the climate-change–fed forest fire jumps the road or the storm-flooded river tops its banks. Climate challenges are going to be with us for a long time, and in shifting, possibly hard-to-predict forms. Habituating people to climate-emergency rhetoric will make dealing with climate dangers harder and risk more deaths and damage. Already, citizens resist wildfire-evacuation orders, claiming that these constitute abuses of state power. Normalizing emergency talk is a strategic error with deadly consequences.
Of those who insist that the climate situation really is an emergency and that we must respond to it as such, we ask: Is it? Certainly, the climate situation poses a huge and urgent threat to lives and ways of life, both ours and those of other species. But this use of emergency conflates its legal concept with the rhetorical concept of crisis. It is easy to fall into the major mistake of assuming that an emergency differs from a crisis only in degree, with the former being merely a graver form of the latter. While urgency and moral importance are key ingredients of crisis rhetoric, they are necessary but not sufficient ingredients of a public emergency.
First, emergency in the politically salient sense is a technical and legal construct, while crises are always rhetorical constructs. A crisis is built in two steps. First, a threat to key values is designated. That humans want to live on earth in comfort, civility, and relative safety renders the climate challenge a crisis. Second, a turning point is designated. Change is a constant, but a crisis is a point of no return, a fork in the road: One way leads back to order, the other heads off a cliff. As the fork in the road draws closer, crisis talk can serve a purpose by seeding discomfort, urgency, and tension. The looming precipice demands action now. The crisis frame constructs the moment as the last turn, the last chance, the last change.
Anyone can construct a crisis rhetorically. Then, a rhetorically constructed crisis may persist in the absence of decision, in the absence of action, even in the absence of any possibility for decision or action. Action may be urgently required, but, for a range of reasons, does not happen: The crisis is too complex, or the tools are there but not the political will. Sometimes, inaction can be due to political disagreements over values.
Emergency is different. In the legal sense, an emergency comes into being only through a decision made by the appropriate authority, plus a proclamation that meets specific legal criteria. A crisis might be compared to a declaration of love, while an emergency is like a marriage contract. The first imparts a moral understanding of a situation and can set up moral duties. The second alters powers and constraints by law.
As noted above, an emergency requires a finding, by the proper authorities, of necessity. A public emergency is defined in part by the impossibility of addressing the situation through ordinary means together with a reasonable chance that the situation can be addressed if the government resorts to special legal means. This criterion of necessity is an inherent part of the law of emergencies.
To justify emergency powers, one must have a reasonable expectation that the declaration could make a difference, and that the jurisdiction declaring the emergency intends to act using those powers. That not all public threats, not all crises, are public emergencies is not a statement about their relative seriousness. Rather, it reflects the reality that not all threats require invoking the extraordinary public powers that a state of emergency enables.
Consider what all this means for climate authoritarianism. Those who seek emergency action, whether in the short or long term, must justify the shift to emergency powers by claiming a reasonable expectation that the shift might prove effective. To establish reasonableness, we would need evidence that, for instance, the complexities of energy production, distribution, and use can be managed by means of emergency powers with a degree of effectiveness that cannot be obtained using ordinary governmental powers. Furthermore, because climate is global, any solutions could well depend on the whole world (or very large parts of it) pulling in the same direction together. To beat climate change, energy policy must shift broadly: No single state’s resort to authoritarian climate governance could be justified on grounds of necessity unless all states (or at least key ones) took this route.
This criterion of necessity means that emergency — and yet more so, climate authoritarianism — cannot be justified where there is time to make laws normally. The temporal boundaries of emergency are defined by functional necessity. But a crisis need have no temporal boundaries at all: It is a permanently elastic thing that can exist apart from any possibility of, never mind any need for, a resolution. Crisis rhetorically constructs the problem, to which emergency is only sometimes a partial solution. It does not follow from the fact that there is a climate crisis that there is a climate emergency.
The Least Bad System
But what of the real challenges that democracy faces in addressing the climate situation? Here it is important to emphasize not only that the charges against democracy have been overstated, but that democracy brings unique and substantial resources which will be critical to climate-change mitigation and adaptation. Highlighting these features is especially timely given the growing clamor of complaints that both populists and technocrats are voicing against constitutional democracy.
Recall Ellis’s charge that environmental politics brings to the fore democracies’ most troubling features: paternalism, irreversibility, and jurisdictional spillover. Paternalism is found in the assumption that environmental problems have “right” answers that the public rejects. But environmental policies do not produce outcomes by fiat. Instead, policies must be implemented in a complex and uncertain world. Even successful policies are imperfect. The U.S. Endangered Species Act is reasonably seen as making extinctions less likely, yet anywhere from four to as many as twenty-six listed species have gone extinct despite the law’s protections.15 The actions of protecting habitat, spending money on monitoring, and setting penalties give no guarantee because externalities, ecological complexities, and competing priorities remain constraints. Policy affects outcomes, but does not dictate them. This is true not only under democracy, but under authoritarian rule as well. No matter how concentrated a leader’s power, giving an order may not make it so.
Further, the paternalism charge overlooks the nature of models. Consider claims that “the science” demands net-zero emissions by 2050. First, this claim overlooks the matter of confidence intervals. Every model has them. Is there a 66 percent chance or a 99 percent chance that a given level of emissions will leave warming below a 1.5-degree target by a given date? The answer matters. Moreover, probability models cannot directly dictate what to do next. Even models that do offer recommendations usually present broad-gauge “least-cost” solutions that are shaped by embedded assumptions about technologies and economic responses. We can debate whether to pursue one emissions level or another, but if we settle on an outcome then we must deliberate about the thousand possible paths toward that goal, and weigh how each path will affect and be affected by competing needs.
Second comes Ellis’s concern about irreversibility. But irreversibility is hardly unique to environmental policy under democracy. Many policy choices create irreversible outcomes — traffic policies, health programs, and military actions can all lead to deaths, for example. In one sense, every policy choice, every action, is irreversible. Any claim that we can put things back the way they were will depend on how one defines the scope and unit of change as well as what one means by “before” and “after.”
Ellis’s third concern — the pervasiveness of spillovers in environmental politics — is especially challenging for democracies. Dictatorships might present a clearer chain of authority than democratic states, but boundary issues and principal-agent problems still rear their heads under nondemocratic conditions.16 What’s more, these layers of authority in democracy can be harnessed for good too.
Ellis’s concern is as follows: Often, a jurisdiction with authority to decide will underestimate a project’s total benefits because they accrue far beyond that jurisdiction’s borders. This is an increasingly thorny problem with clean-energy projects: They benefit everyone by mitigating climate change, but can saddle host communities with outsized costs. Strong “not in my backyard” reactions, often voiced at local-government meetings, can delay projects.
One mooted solution is to bypass local officials and residents to speed approvals. Advocates argue that policymakers responsible for broader territories can more reasonably and rapidly weigh pros and cons. In some cases, the argument goes, the need to quickly build climate-mitigating infrastructure outweighs the loss of local voice, participation, and democratic procedures. Moreover, it is pointed out, those who speak the most to local-council meetings are rarely representative of the communities themselves. Handing decisions to a larger jurisdiction more fully reflects a more relevant public.
Regardless of any particular reform’s merits, engagement with people on the ground is necessary. Where projects fail to engage locals, leaders cannot learn from local knowledge and experience, build genuine bottom-up support, and may court backlash and policy failure. Even if certain projects move faster, the clean-energy transition in general may be slowed: Remove public council meetings from the chain, and locals with concerns will go to courts, which have their own delays and backlogs. Meanwhile, other communities may anticipate the shutdown of open participatory channels by devising alternative ways to stall future projects. Climate-emergency rhetoric notwithstanding, mitigation is a marathon not a sprint, so finding the best overall pacing matters.
How to fairly allocate decarbonization’s costs and benefits is a real concern. Ellis rightly underlines the challenge of managing this in a democratic fashion. Antidemocratic decisionmaking cannot resolve these conflicts. Tossing democracy overboard to save time may ultimately cost time. Democracy facilitates the sustained public engagement and buy-in that lasting solutions must have on their side.
Genuine local buy-in is also important because, especially in climate contexts, local knowledge matters. When trying to build, shape, adapt, and respond, knowledge of local topography, wildlife, culture, history, and capacities — individual and collective — can make the difference between success and failure.
Access to local knowledge requires institutional flexibility and responsiveness when things go wrong. A case from the Canadian province of British Columbia is illustrative. In 2015, B.C.’s efforts to deal with wildfires sidelined local expertise. Indigenous elders and children were mistreated as well. The Tsilhqot’in Nation pressed for accountability. Holding what the Supreme Court of Canada in a landmark 2014 ruling called “Aboriginal title” to a significant portion of their traditional territory,17 and having lived on this land for millennia, Tsilhqot’in people had managed their share of wildfires. The Tsilhqot’in Nation’s insistence on holding the provincial government to account helped to open the way for a new approach to emergency management, with partnership among jurisdictions the key.18
Partnerships among First Nations, municipalities, and regions can match specific emergency powers to the jurisdiction best able to exercise them. For example, local people may have a superior grasp of how to make and carry out evacuation plans, or how to manage fire in local pockets of forest. But provincial officials may be best placed to move emergency supplies to where they are most needed throughout the province. Under this legislation, deliberation, debate, and communication take place well in advance. Plans are already agreed on and practiced, and if novel plans are needed, relationships are in place to promote trust among jurisdictions in the moment of sharpest need. This dissipates the usual argument about the necessity for urgent action without deliberation.
Might barriers to effective climate policies be not so much democracy problems as complex jurisdictional problems? What are the spillovers that rightfully concern Ellis, if not issues of misaligned jurisdiction? At every level (prevention, mitigation, emergency response, and recovery), climate problems often reflect the complex difficulties that different jurisdictions face as they try to make their respective efforts mesh in pursuit of the common good. Perhaps the best answer — though it will be far from simple — will be to encourage institutions to be more flexible, and to find creative ways to harness rather than suppress the complexities they must navigate. And as the B.C. case shows, it may be possible to harness jurisdictional opportunities without the need to change older constitutions and the jurisdictional power hoarding that they often underwrite. While the B.C. approach is new and untested, it promises to set a good example of how accountability and institutional flexibility — governance virtues in which democracies specialize — may lead to the best responses to swiftly changing climate challenges.
Another point in favor of democracy is that it encourages the information flows that leaders need to develop fair and effective policies in changing circumstances. Once the information flows, moreover, only democracy actively incentivizes accountability and responsiveness, including through institutional flexibility. Authoritarian systems, by contrast, often shape action via simplified, quantitative measures that players can game. The lack of accountability makes individuals, communities, and other values beyond the regime’s immediate priorities more liable to be crushed or cast aside in the name of broader aims.
In the post-Mao 1980s, for example, China piled up export-led GDP growth — the system’s top goal — but at enormous costs in pollution, waste, corruption, hidden debts, and falsification. The country has modern devices to gauge air pollution, but officials turn them off when particulates spike, or place them in clean areas. Some local authorities cut power to their areas strategically to hold down emissions numbers, or simply cook the data. Without bottom-up information flows to hold them accountable, local administrators can step on the people while hoodwinking Beijing into believing that things are fine. It is the worst of both worlds: no accountability up or down. Transparency is critical to good policy.
Climate change confronts us with an existential situation. Any successful approach to handling it will have to grapple with those baleful twins, inertia and fear. These are natural responses to massive, unpredictable change. But as the denial wears off — the denial of the merchant who fears lost trade, of the governor who fears lost votes, of the majority who fear the loss of a way of life — only democracy has the proven resources to help citizens sort out how best to balance their interests and address their fears. Imposed solutions without democratic engagement are notoriously fragile.
Finally, one of democracy’s central benefits is that public criticism and free and fair elections give leaders potent, immediate incentives to learn from failure. Democracies far exceed authoritarian regimes at spreading accurate information to decisionmakers. And democratic institutions are flexible enough to change course as circumstances shift. In the climate age, we must defend democracy so that democracy can live to defend us.
NOTES
1. Matto Mildenberger, Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020).
2. Elisabeth Ellis, “Democracy as Constraint and Possibility for Environmental Action,” in Teena Gabrielson et al., eds., Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 506.
3. Mark P. Nevitt, “Is Climate Change a National Emergency?” UC Davis Law Review 55 (December 2021): 595.
4. Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2020), 81.
5. Ross Mittiga, Climate Change as Political Catastrophe: Before Collapse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
6. Ross Mittiga, “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change,” American Political Science Review 116 (August 2022): 998–1011.
7. Mittiga, Climate Change as Political Catastrophe, 67, but see also 50.
8. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons: The Population Problem Has No Technical Solution; It Requires a Fundamental Extension in Morality,” Science, 162 (December 1968): 1243–48.
9. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968); Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe, 1972), https://collections.dartmouth.edu/teitexts/meadows/diplomatic/meadows_ltg-diplomatic.html.
10. Susan Greenhalgh, “Missile Science, Population Science: The Origins of China’s One-Child Policy,” China Quarterly 182 (June 2005): 253–76.
11. The first publication that Mattiga cites is a “critical dialogue” between Frank Biermann and John S. Dryzek over Biermann’s book Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (2014) and the book (also from 2014) Democratizing Global Climate Governance, which Dryzek wrote with Hayley Stevenson. The exchange of book reviews and responses appears on pages 174–78 of the March 2016 issue of Perspectives on Politics. The other publications are: Robert Looney, “Democracy Is the Answer to Climate Change,” Foreign Policy, 1 June 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/01/democracy-is-the-answer-to-climate-change; Marina Povitkina, “The Limits of Democracy in Tackling Climate Change,” Environmental Politics 27 (May 2018): 411–32; and Dan Coby Shahar, “Rejecting Eco-Authoritarianism, Again,” Environmental Values 24 (June 2015): 345–66.
12. Imogen Richards, Callum Jones, and Gearóid Brinn, “Eco-Fascism Online: Conceptualizing Far-Right Actors’ Response to Climate Change on Stormfront,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 18 December 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2022.2156036; Elisa Aaltola, “Green Anarchy: Deep Ecology and Primitivism,” in Benjamin Franks and Matthew Wilson, eds., Anarchism and Moral Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 161.
13. David Dyzenhaus, “The Rule of Law Project,” Harvard Law Review 129 (April 2016): 268–73.
14. James Patterson et al., “The Political Effects of Emergency Frames in Sustainability,” Nature Sustainability 4 (October 2021): 841–50.
15. Noah Greenwald et al., “Extinction and the U.S. Endangered Species Act,” PeerJ, 22 April 2019, https://peerj.com/articles/6803.pdf.
16. Jeremy L. Wallace, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarianism in China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
17. Tsilhqot’in Nation v.British Columbia, 2014 SCC 44, 26 June 2014, https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14246/index.do.
18. Jocelyn Stacey, Crystal Verhaeghe, and Emma Feltes, “Nagwediẑk’an gwaneŝgangu ch’inidẑed ganexwilagh (The Fires Awakened Us): Tsilhqot’in Report on the 2017 Wildfires,” Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia, 2019, https://commons.allard.ubc.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1609&context=fac_pubs.
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