Book Review: Can Democracy Handle Climate Change?

Fiorino, Daniel J. Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? Polity Press (2018), 160 pp. ISBN: 978-1509523962

By R. S. Deese, Boston University

First a spoiler, and then a confession. Here’s the spoiler: in his book Can Democracy Handle Climate Change? Daniel J. Fiorino, the Director of the Center for Environmental Policy at American University, answers this question with an unambiguous “yes.” In fact, Fiorino makes a persuasive case that democratic governments are probably best equipped to meet the challenge of climate change because they are “less corrupt, foster more innovation, respond better to public needs . . . . and encourage longer-term thinking than occurs in any authoritarian regime” (Fiorino, 113). Now, the confession: the arguments that Fiorino refutes in this book all give me an acute and very unpleasant sense of déjà vu. In fact, whenever I hear someone holding forth on how protecting the environment requires abandoning democracy, I feel like am being forced to watch a terrible rerun from the 1970s. And, just as I expected, Fiorino begins his survey of antidemocratic environmentalism with some of the most prominent thinkers of that period.

During those halcyon days when Richard Nixon was president and Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was still on the paperback shelves at bookstores, a growing number of neo-Malthusian intellectuals made a very public case that environmental protection could only be achieved through the abandonment of individual rights and a bold embrace of authoritarian rule. As Fiorino documents, one of the first prominent environmentalists to part ways with liberal democracy was Garrett Hardin, who argued that the state should take coercive control of human reproduction. Fiorino analyzes the implications of Hardin’s prescription for state control of human reproduction and concludes, “It is hard to imagine coercive measures of this form, on the scale proposed, occurring in modern democracies” (Fiorino, 38). In addition to analyzing the implications of Hardin’s neo-Malthusian authoritarianism, Fiorino surveys other thinkers who toyed with the idea of environmental autocracy, such as the prominent economist Robert Heilbroner, who speculated in his 1974 book An Inquiry into the Human Prospect that democracy might not be capable of adequately addressing the ecological crises and resource disruptions that lay ahead in the next two decades, and could well be replaced by a new kind of autocracy that would combine a “religious” orientation with a “military discipline” in order to ensure a stable socioeconomic order (Fiorino, 38). The political scientist William Ophuls also predicted in his 1977 book Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity that democracy had no conceivable chance of survival in the coming age of overpopulation and resource depletion. He predicted that if human civilization were to endure, it would have to embrace a sort of technocracy, or rule by experts, managed by an elite of “ecological mandarins” (Fiorino, 37).

When he considers more recent thinkers who have cast doubt upon the ability of democracy to weather the mounting crisis of climate change, Fiorino first examines the arguments of the noted ecologist James Lovelock, who speculates that we may have to suspend democracy in order to deal with climate change, just as democracy has sometimes been temporarily suspended during war. Fiorino doubts Lovelock’s claim that such a suspension of democracy could be temporary, because climate change is a deep-rooted and complex process that we can expect will affect us for the foreseeable future: “The problem is that this will be a perpetual war. Climate change will always be with us” (Fiorino, 36). In the face of such a long struggle, authors David Shearman and Joseph Wayne drop any rationalizations about temporarily suspending democracy in their book The Climate Challenge and the Failure of Democracy and appear to embrace the prospect of long-term authoritarianism modeled on the government of Singapore (Fiorino, 41).

In response to these critics and others, Fiorino explains that any regime that suppresses political difference through autocracy will prove too rigid to respond to the unpredictable future that climate change has in store for us. For this reason, “climate change cannot be managed by a denial of politics in favor of some form of ecological technocracy” (Fiorino, 43). And, while advocates of democracy are often labeled as naïve, Fiorino detects a more fatal naiveté behind the calls for ecological authoritarianism that have been with us for half a century now. Critics of democracy, he observes, “seem to envision an idealized, benign, ecological autocracy that places climate action above other social and economic priorities and makes the tough choices that democracies are incapable of making. But what does the evidence tell us? Actual cases of environmental authoritarianism are hard to find” (Fiorino, 53). Fiorino backs up his argument with a very thorough analysis of contemporary governments, in which autocracies lag far behind in controlling greenhouse gas emissions, protecting forests, and advancing renewable energy (Fiorino, 58–61). Revisiting the issue of population growth that sparked the vogue for ecological authoritarianism in the 1970s, Fiorino presents evidence supporting the argument that more civil rights, especially for girls and women, offers a better path to sustainable population and greenhouse gas reductions: “Overcoming barriers to educating girls reduces family size and population growth . . . with potentially 60 billion tons of avoided emissions” (Fiorino, 94).

When one considers broader history of both modern democracy and environmentalism, it is a little bit surprising that so many came to view them as incompatible in the 1970s, and that some continue to do so today. In fact, the book that started the modern environmentalist movement, Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring, serves as a textbook example of the democratic process yielding tangible environmental progress. As an experienced naturalist and a concerned citizen, Rachel Carson used the First Amendment to awaken the public to the dangers posed by the overuse of chlorinated hydrocarbons such as DDT. By offering a detailed critique of the talking points presented by self-proclaimed experts in the chemical industry and at the Department of Agriculture, she ignited a decade-long debate that ended in the elimination of the use of DDT in the United States in the early 1970s. Many naturalists credit the domestic ban on DDT with allowing the recovery of bald eagle populations in North America during the decades the followed. The return of this living symbol of our nation could be perhaps be taken as a sign that a commitment to environmental sustainability and an abiding faith in the institutions of democracy may not be so incompatible as some pessimists have supposed.

While we should never be complacent about our system of government, we should recognize that setting aside our longstanding democratic traditions on the unproven hope that an authoritarian government might be more effective at dealing with climate change presents a tremendous risk, and not only for ourselves. As Fiorino concludes: “Exposing future generations to the harms caused by coercive, corrupt, and self-serving governance on the basis of muddled arguments about the inability of democracy to address climate change would be a colossal mistake” (Fiorino, 116–117). Here he articulates what may be his strongest argument against the recurring temptation to embrace authoritarian rule in the face of a crisis. Democracy, once abandoned, is not easily restored.