Democracy is the Enemy of Climate Action
In 1989, the Iron Curtain fell and with it the communist tyranny of the Soviet Union and its client states. Borders opened, people started to travel and we Westerners could have our first real view of what the Red empire was on the inside. We were appalled. Life conditions there were extreme. People stood in line for hours in order to get basic food, the environment was a sham, everything was downtrodden and grey. The more you went East, one felt as if one was in the Middle of Africa minus the weather. A hermetically controlled society where every fart anyone made was controlled just threw its entire environment to the dumpers. That’s what China does today – don’t believe it: Go to a bigger city and take a jog on a normal day. Or drink from one of the rivers. At the same time, the democratic West had cleaned up its sins of the past to a degree our forefathers did not even dream of. Dictators are no environmentalists, they are just tyrants.
According to Foreign Policy, moving “beyond Democracy” towards an authoritarian Chinese system would allow governments to override the climate obstructionism of older voters, but they have concerns about the societal disruption the transition to authoritarianism would cause.
