Fighting Climate Change by Rebuilding Democracy

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who knew a thing or two about managing big, complex challenges, is said to have said that the way he approached big problems was by making them bigger. Broadening a problem brings into focus the system in which it is embedded, where creative solutions can be found, and engages the full range of interests that must have a shared stake in any solution. Nowhere is this more true than in the two greatest challenges of our era: climate volatility and democratic degradation.

Each seems nearly insoluble on its own. But they intertwine in crucial and surprising ways in ways that offer new hope. By building on federal funding coming out of recent legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and unleashing the creativity of citizens and localities across the country, we can rebuild the social capital on which democracy depends, adapt in fair ways to the climate volatility we have already baked in for the coming generations, and accelerate the transition to a more sustainable and just world.

Over the past year, the Climate, Democracy, Governance, and Storytelling Pilot at New America has delved into the nature of these two crises and the connections between them, traveling to cities and neighborhoods and convening thinkers and doers of all stripes to consider how we might manage the climate crisis while rebuilding democracy.

The problems are not hard to diagnose. The climate emergency is upon us in obvious ways, with 2023 setting yet another record for the hottest year since records started being kept and extreme floods, storms, temperature swings, and droughts pounding every part of the planet. Democratic dysfunction is no less apparent, with broad swaths of the public showing little trust or confidence in government and huge groups turning away from even the basic democratic tool of voting. As currently constituted, it fails to engage the people it is intended to serve. And their distrust is understandable, with elite interests dominating policymaking, and entrenched bureaucracies struggling to manage complexity. And in the face of generation-spanning climate and other environmental challenges, it utterly ignores the interests of all other life on the planet, not to mention all future human generations. In short, it needs a major overhaul.

In the spirit of “never let a good crisis go to waste,” a variety of governments, communities, and organizations are setting out to respond to the generation-spanning climate crisis with tools that build shared narratives around which people can coalesce and empower them to act on those visions. Our recent convening to celebrate the publication of Democracy in a Hotter Time featured one such story. Citizens in the once-vibrant but now destitute Farish Street area of Jackson, Mississippi (one of the poorest and most segregated Black neighborhoods in the state) have developed and received EPA funding via an NGO, 2C Mississippi, for their own plan for greening the area to combat the growing heat island effect, which they hope will also revitalize the social, economic, and political prospects of the neighborhood.

As that example shows, such action is made possible not just by local leadership, but by federal funding and policy action. Under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and the government’s Justice 40 Initiative, money is starting to flow in substantial quantities for climate mitigation and adaptation, forty percent of which is targeted to historically disadvantaged communities and those who have suffered most from the ravages of the fossil fuel economy, as well as communities facing loss of livelihoods from the shift away from fossil fuels.

And the Farish Street story illustrates a lesson we have taken to heart in our travels and convenings of the past year. The deep engagement of people in Farish Streets everywhere will be essential for not just years but generations to come in the hotter, volatile future that we have already locked in. It will take empowered people at all levels to bring about the desperately needed transformation of energy, food, water, transport, and all the other systems that have been built on a foundation of fossils. And this will have to happen while we all adapt to planetary conditions not seen since our species evolved. Democracy in its broadest sense of deep citizen engagement and empowerment isn’t just a nice-to-have in the hotter times we face – it’s the only way we will get through the climate challenge.