Democracy and the Climate

Turns out Germany and America couldn't sustain their sustainable policies

In one of those quirks of timing history throws out now and then, Germany’s traffic-light coalition collapsed on the same day the Democrats lost the White House. Neither event was caused by climate policies, but in both cases, environmental stances played some role in eroding the government’s viability. And as a result, both countries will soon be led by governments with far less interest in decarbonization than the ones they replace.

In Germany, sky-high energy costs stemming from a botched energy policy is responsible at least in part for the anemic economic performance that created the impossible budget pressures that brought down the coalition. In the U.S., Harris’s long-since-abandoned pledge to ban fracking became an attack line in a million ads against her in energy-producing states. 

I’m less interested in the specifics of U.S. or German climate policy, though, than in the general lesson to be drawn about democracy and the climate. Because the events of last week are a reminder that even in the richest, most advanced, best-able-to-afford-it jurisdictions, leaders who push up energy costs can expect to pay a price.

No more than a reminder, though, because this is something we already knew. Emanuel Macron learned all about this when he tried to raise gas taxes, bringing yellow vests out into France’s streets by the thousands. Justin Trudeau is finding out about this the hard way, as Axe the [Carbon] Tax becomes a conservative rallying cry. Sadiq Khan found out when a revolt against expanding his Ultra Low Emission Vehicle zone in London set off a populist revolt.

No country is so rich that voters like it when you make it more expensive for them to get around.

One upshot is that green leaders make environmental policy in a state of perpetual fear. Go too far, raise costs too much, and you could find yourself out of a job. Their opponents, for their part, see their green commitments as a vulnerability — a flank left open to attack. Throughout the developed world, democracy creates incentives both for green leaders to curtail their decarbonizations ambitions and for their opponents to exact a price for them. Averaged out throughout the rich world, the equilibrium outcome of this game is what we see in the aggregate statistics: slow, gradual, two-steps-forward-one-step-back decarbonization.

And if this is the reality in the rich countries, what hope then for decarbonization in the developing world, where fuel riots are so common that raising energy costs are almost everywhere a “third rail” in politics?

No hope at all.

This, I think, is the deeper lesson we need to take from the events of last week — less the Climate Advocacy Industrial Complex’s laments that big bad Trump is going to back out of the Paris Agreement, and more the structural insight that democracies can’t and won’t yield governments that reliably pursue aggressive decarbonization. 

Internalizing this insight focuses the mind. 

It leaves you with just two alternatives: doomerism, and climate repair.*

The former —really a big old sulk— seems to me morally bankrupt and intellectually indefensible: giving up on the human race is not an acceptable stance for me. 

Which is why I always end up at climate repair: the one thing we can do, can afford to do, to prevent the worst impacts of runaway climate change without asking us to throw democracy on the pyre. It makes us uncomfortable —of course it does!— but I’m convinced we’re going to end up coming around to it, because all the other options are far, far worse.

*ok, granted, you could also advocate for some form of global government, but this is even less politically realistic than the politically unrealistic things it’s pitched as a solution for.