Climate change is an urgent problem facing governments around the world. It is proceeding relentlessly and threatens many disruptive impacts: heat stress, flooding in some places and droughts in others, extreme weather, new patterns of disease, ecosystem degradation, and more. Costs of infrastructure, health care, and insurance will rise; supply chains will be disrupted; food costs will rise; worker productivity will fall; and societies will face multiple traumas. Even a 2°C increase over pre-industrial temperatures will be disruptive, although that is the goal adopted at the Paris Conference of the Parties in 2015 and remains the goal of the international community.
Moreover, reducing emissions demands transformative change in fundamental social and economic systems. The most significant changes will be in global energy systems, which affect transport, electricity generation, industry, and buildings. Yet agricultural production and livestock, indeed the foundations of food systems, will be affected as well. In brief, climate change threatens the systems that have delivered prosperity to much, though not all, of the world. The problem is that there is not much time. Cutting emissions to the required levels by mid-century means they should have peaked last year and fallen nearly in half by 2030. This is not happening. Why are governments unable to make the required changes in social and economic systems to avoid these serious impacts?
This book aims to answer that question. It presents a thoughtful, insightful analysis of the politics of climate mitigation under different political pathways. It is primarily an explanation of why liberal democracies have such a difficult time, but it sheds light on other systems as well. The strength is attention to the politics of climate mitigation and to the barriers in liberal democracies. The trilemma of the title refers to “the inescapable trade-off between sustaining economic growth, maintaining democratic legitimacy, and delivering effective climate action” (p. 1). Even successful governments perform two of these tasks, but not all three. The challenge for democracies is to overcome distributive politics. The answer, again for democracies, is to get away from elite-driven policies and build a broad, urban–rural coalition that unites the middle and working classes. This would enable the liberal democracies to rebuild the planning capacities lost under the governing philosophy of neo-liberalism. An endeavor that is especially challenging when, in a “neoliberal era, growth has become increasingly unequal and exclusionary” (p. 21). Inequalities in the benefits of growth make it difficult to sustain democratic legitimacy.
This book is a healthy corrective for criticisms that have been levied against the global climate process in recent years. The process built around annual conferences could be improved; there is always room for improvement. The primary responsibility for the modest progress to date in meeting the two-degree target coming out of the Paris Accord lies with nation-states. They are the ones making commitments, designing national policies and strategies, and not cutting emissions rapidly enough. Without a global sovereign, nation-states determine the future of climate policy. Yet, as this book explains, those holding political power in liberal democracies have an interest in maintaining the status quo, including the voters who fear job losses or high energy costs. If the global community had a century or more to reduce emissions, there would be hope. But our time is limited. As the authors put it: “The era of gradualism is over” (p. 1).
The book outlines three “pathways” or scenarios for climate policy. The first is the liberal status quo. This applies to liberal democracies. It includes a diverse set of political systems, from the parliamentary ones like the United Kingdom to the state-action-friendly Scandinavian nations, which tend to do relatively well in climate rankings. It also includes countries like the United States and Australia that have politically powerful fossil fuel industries. These countries have been inconsistent in mitigation policies, as evidenced by the recent actions of President Donald Trump in the United States. Time matters for mitigation; liberal democracies are not built for rapid change. They give priority to “economic expansion, corporate profits, and electoral responsiveness over ecological survival” (p. 26). Liberal democracies reflect existing distributions of power and find it difficult to engage in rapid transformations. They suffer from “deep structural carbon lock-in” (p. 18).
Another pathway is the big, green state. China is the exemplar, and, to a lesser degree, Vietnam, Singapore, and Middle East petro-states. They are able to use “centralized, technocratic state power to drive rapid decarbonization” (p. 3). Unconstrained by electoral pressures, they link an expansion in renewables to a geopolitical economic growth strategy. This is what China has done, and its success has been the cause of much writing extolling the virtues of authoritarian systems in reducing emissions that lead to climate change. Big green states are able to force change in energy systems, transport, and agriculture to expand renewables. Yet China still relies heavily on coal power. Even there, an expansion in renewables is layered on top of an existing fossil fuel-based energy system, as is the case in liberal democracies. China is not actually decarbonizing.
A third scenario examined is degrowth. The authors regard this as politically infeasible because economic growth is the basis of democratic legitimacy in democracies. Yet the authors view degrowth as an effective, scientifically sound climate mitigation strategy if it were feasible.
I have a quibble with the discussion of degrowth. I agree that it is politically infeasible; it is the basis for political legitimacy in political systems. Voters, investors, firms, and policymakers expect growth. Much of the democratic backsliding around the world is linked to slow growth rates and, the authors argue persuasively, to an unequal distribution of the benefits when growth does occur. Yet if economic scale were to contract, say, by 40% in rich countries, even that alone would fall short of what is needed to achieve the 2% Celsius Paris target. In addition to reducing GDP, countries still have to transform energy systems and much of agriculture and industry. The two-degree target cannot be achieved by degrowth without big transformations.
A strength of this book is the attention given to politics. Much writing on climate action and regime characteristics ignores or denies the role of politics. This is especially true of calls for authoritarian governance to respond to a so-called state of war caused by the need to confront the climate crisis. Just how that transition to authoritarianism would occur, how it would sustain legitimacy, and whether it would even push for emission reductions is ignored. Another strength is attention to inequality, in distributing the benefits of growth as well as inequities in the solutions. Many problems experienced in stronger democracies are linked to economic and social inequity and resentment. Furthermore, the wealthy cause more climate change than the less well-heeled. The authors assemble revealing numbers to support this claim: the top 10% of the income distribution causes half of all emissions; the bottom 50% is responsible for only 10%.
Yet the most compelling evidence relates to the perceptions of climate action advocates and their solutions. It is not just the fossil fuel industry that resists efforts to reduce emissions. It is voters as well, particularly low-income groups, who would, they think, bear the brunt of the costs of emissions reductions: higher energy prices, lost jobs in the fossil fuel sector and those depending on it, and higher transport costs.
The book is much stronger on diagnosis than on solutions. The solutions lie in assembling a durable political coalition that brings together the middle and working classes across urban and rural areas. This, of course, is what center-left parties in liberal democracies have been trying to do for years. With this kind of political coalition, it will be possible for liberal democracies to “rebuild state capacity, restore economic planning, and confront the concentrated power of capital” (p. 126). The source of the problem lies with politics, as do the solutions. But these solutions are hard to come by.
This is one of the best books on the politics of climate change written to date. It offers a compelling critique of liberal democracies and of the calls for authoritarian solutions. It should be read by all students of climate mitigation. As a diagnosis, it is impressive. As a source of ideas about solutions, it is less satisfying. But we always knew, or should have known, that it would not be easy.
