Call it climate democracy

Call it post-holiday malaise or just the encroaching darkness as we approach midwinter, but I found myself staring into the void more than usual this week. My most fervent wish was to have more time to spend making art, and that got me thinking. A futuristic society of abundance where all people can spend more time making art and building community has been a hot topic over the last few years as AI and other generative technologies have proliferated. It's a beautiful idea, there's no question, but it is difficult to see how our current trajectory could take us there. Most dismiss the idea as utopian and impractical. People assume that the world will always function as it does now when history shows us that couldn't be further from the truth.

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Change is the constant

The idea that our current paradigms of economy or governance are somehow the pinnacle of effectiveness and will therefore continue on forever is ludicrous. Democracy is just an old idea made new again, after all. Why shouldn't a new system emerge, or a new version of an old system? It is difficult to imagine or desire the degree of monumental change this would imply because it's so fundamentally disruptive to our individual narratives. The brain shies away from such thoughts as a protective measure.

I felt this kind of mental aversion while listening to Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky make his case for why free will does not exist. The implications of his theory are tremendous, but also somewhat crushing in their existential determinism. He asserts that our actions are the product of our sum total of influences, but the line between science and philosophy in this realm is very blurry. Advances in our understanding of time could render this hypothesis moot - do we live in Einstein's block universe, or are we riding along the arrow of time? Likewise, a shudder of horror gripped me as I absorbed the myriad ways our democracy could fail while listening to this recent episode of TED Radio Hour. We are locked in a struggle for our democratic freedoms without even realizing it, and winning this struggle could not be more essential to climate action.

Climate capitalism

There is a fundamental tension between the need to build a lot of things to meet the climate challenge, the rights of those who will be impacted, and the flow of capital that must be mobilized. In our current financial paradigm we rely heavily on private capital to meet these challenges, and implicit in this choice is that we finance these investments by allowing the extraction of profits. That power dynamic has become entrenched (see also this piece by Ari Peskoe that I can't stop thinking about) but capitalism and democracy have not always had this relationship. No one can accuse Eisenhower of being a communist, but under his watch, the US Interstate Highway system was built in the 1950s using federal funds. It seems the power balance of democracy over capitalism inverted somewhere along the way through the 1970s and 1980s, and in more recent years has intensified. We let the system get hijacked. Consumers and ratepayers will be on the hook for trillions of dollars to finance climate solutions while a small minority reaps huge profits.

In recent appearances on Zero and Drilled: Messy Conversations author and special envoy Ashkat Rathi proposes a form of climate capitalism to mobilize the power of private sector investment to decarbonize developing countries. He argues that various policy mechanisms that reduce investment risk will be more effective in redistributing wealth than punitive and weakly-binding international agreements. Rather than leaning heavily on grants or "loss and damage" remittances from developed nations, a suite of financial tools would attract more private sector investment in climate-related projects that would otherwise be profitable if not for the risk associated with investment in developing nations. When you hear folks talk about risk-adjusted returns, this is what they mean. Investors who want to generate cash in a country with higher currency or political risk demand higher returns as compensation. We'll be hearing a lot about loss and damage and the difficulties of climate action for developing nations this week as COP 28 unfolds. I wrote a piece earlier in the summer about this year's COP 28 deliberations that you should check out here.

Power of the public

Climate capitalism of the sort proposed by Rathi requires effective democracy. It has lately become trendy in some corners of the climate community to YIMBY so hard they seem to lose the thread completely (see this LA Times piece making the rounds). Academic proposals like this one from researchers at Vanderbilt and UC Santa Barbara offer a blandly reasonable argument for permitting and consent compromises that ignore the opportunities for exploitation and abuse they would present. Community stakeholders are seen by most project developers as obstacles, not allies. Finding ways to get groups of people to work together and want the same thing is hard, I understand that. But how do people not also see that doing this work creates a tenfold benefit by reinforcing democratic institutions?

If we do not act now, collectively, to stop the consolidation of power and capital from further undermining our democracy, we will lose the battle and the war. I think about the urgency of this threat all the time. Even more than climate change, it is the thing that keeps me up at night. My mind is consumed by that tension: the need to build a lot of things to meet the climate challenge, the rights of those who will be impacted, and the flow of capital that must be mobilized. My deepest conviction is that any further disenfranchisement of our citizens threatens to push us over the edge, and the solution instead lies in the direction of radical inclusion and empowerment. What could be more empowering, motivating, and inspirational than stewarding a historic public investment to safeguard our future? Leaning into that collective power can tip the scales to a more balanced and equitable dynamic that both stabilizes and evolves our public institutions.