Democracy and Climate

A distinguished group of senior climate activists convened in Denver in late April, and drafted the attached appeal concerning the critical link between climate and saving our democracy. It is an excellent manifesto and I have signed on. If you agree and wish to sign as well, please send your name and affiliation to [email protected].   Thank you.  T

What’s Really at Stake in 2024

In a word, everything. A potentially violent insurrectionist movement threatens to undo our democracy. Its leaders have repeatedly said so, and we have good reasons to believe them. But an even larger existential danger is on our doorstep: searing heat, massive storms, and floods in some places, dust, fire, and drought elsewhere threaten to force tens of millions of Americans to permanently flee their homes.

Both the assault on democracy and climate chaos are on the ballot in 2024. These transcendent issues are actually one converging crisis that threatens to destroy our common future. 

The crisis of democracy began in a war against government that has metastasized into an assault on the institutions of democracy that aims to undo the American Constitutional order. If successful, it will destroy much of the institutional capacity and political will necessary to deal with a rapidly destabilizing global climate. Further, it will squander time that we do not have. Whether and how we respond to the crisis of democracy will determine whether we can manage the long emergency of climate change.

Even in the best case scenarios, heat, rising seas, drought, fire, larger storms, floods, and millions of climate refugees fleeing newly uninhabitable places will stress governments at all levels increasing conflicts over water, food, resources, and land. Such conflicts will become the daily reality pushing already overstressed domestic and international institutions to the breaking point. This less predictable, hotter, and more chaotic climate, calls for significant changes in government, politics, law, media, and economy. What needs to be done? Obviously a lot, starting with the election of 2024.

Too many people here and elsewhere have given up on democracy, hoping that authoritarian leaders will prove tougher and more effective. History shows, however, that authoritarian leaders maintain power by violence, corruption, and lies, not by solving complex long-term problems like climate change.

The case for democracy, on the other hand, is anchored in the beliefs that “we the people” have an unalienable right to say how we are governed, by whom, and to what ends, and that no one can be trusted with unchecked power. The climate crisis adds another: without an engaged, competent, and supportive citizenry, no government can cope with the full effects of a destabilizing climate. In other words, we must rely on the creativity, energy, and patriotism of the wider public. We have done it before. In World War II, for example, by voting for the kind of leadership necessary to defeat Fascism and by volunteering, sacrificing, creating, saving, and fighting.

Is our democracy up to the long-term challenge of climate change? As presently constituted, the answer is “not likely.” The reasons are many beginning with flaws in our politics, economy, media, and in a Constitution that grants neither rights nor protections of due process to future generations who will bear the full weight of climate chaos. It protects property but not those things we hold in common and in trust including climate stability and biological diversity.

Further, the founders created a limited democracy as an adjunct to a commercial republic, not as its central organizing principle. The results include a corporate dominated economy, inequality, a political system that thwarts farsighted collective actions, and a widening chasm between what most Americans want and the policies, regulations, and laws they get. The bridge that ought to connect public preferences and public policy has become a toll bridge accessible only to a few. Climate chaos and inequality are not anomalies but predictable outcomes of the rules of a fossil fuel powered economy that has overrun the common good. 

Presently we have no blueprint for democracy and governance adequate to the scope, scale, and duration of the long emergency ahead. Democracy’s future will unfold on a different, hotter, and more capricious Earth, greatly complicating already difficult challenges. Our long-term task is to build a better and more just democracy because—imperfections acknowledged—it is humankind’s finest achievement and our best hope for the future. A more just, inclusive, and sustainable future, however, requires that we create a more robust and resilient democracy. Drawing on what W.E.B. Dubois described as “a mighty reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed” and intelligence latent in neighborhoods, communities, cities, states, and entire nations, we believe that we can and that we will.

But time is short and “There is such a thing as being too late” as Martin Luther King warned. The elections of 2024 may well be our last best hope to extend the hard won gains of democracy to our grandchildren and theirs, and to begin the great transition to a fair, secure, and more democratic and durable world.

What’s at stake in 2024? Nothing less than the peoples’ right to shape a just, decent, and democratic future on a habitable Earth. 

Signatures: