Climate Change Will Be Used to Roll Back Democracy Unless the System Changes First

I have written about climate in terms of incentives: the people with the most influence over emissions are the least exposed to the consequences. This is a different worry, and I think it is the more dangerous one, because it concerns what happens after everyone agrees that something must be done.

The Scale of What Is Coming

Take the climate problem at its own word. If the forecasts are even approximately right, the economy will have to become something other than what it is. Not adjusted at the margins, but changed in what it produces, how it moves things, what it lets people buy, and how fast. That is a big deal, and it will require concessions from everyone: from the public, which will lose some of what it is used to, and from business, which will lose some of what it is used to selling.

I am not disputing any of that. I am asking what a political system does when it is handed a mandate of that size.

What Systems Do With Emergencies

The historical record is not ambiguous. Whenever a government has been given a need for immediate action on a large scale, it has used that need to take back liberties that were not the point.

Wars are the standard case. A war requires the mobilisation of an economy and a population, and every war of the last century was accompanied by censorship, surveillance, detention without trial, and the suppression of dissent, none of which were required to win the war and all of which were justified by it. Some were returned afterwards. Many were not. Emergency powers have a way of outliving their emergencies.

Pandemics did the same thing at smaller scale and in living memory. Public-health measures that genuinely needed doing were bundled with measures that needed no doing at all, and the bundling was not accidental: the emergency was the opening, and the opening was used.

This is not a claim about the intentions of any particular government. It is a claim about what the arrangement does. A representative regime is a small group of people with an interest in remaining in charge, and an emergency is the one moment when the public will accept almost anything from them. The temptation is structural, and structural temptations are taken.

Why Climate Is the Worst Case

Climate is worse than a war for this purpose, and I want to be precise about why.

A war ends. There is a day on which the enemy surrenders and the justification for the emergency lapses, and from that day the liberties can at least in principle be demanded back. Climate has no such day. It is a permanent condition requiring permanent management. An emergency that never ends is an emergency power that never lapses.

And the changes climate genuinely requires are changes to consumption, which means changes to what people are permitted to do. That is exactly the territory in which the line between a necessary restriction and an opportunistic one is hardest to draw. Restricting the freedom to buy a very large car may be needed. Restricting the freedom to argue about whether it is needed is not. But once a government is in the business of deciding what you may consume for the good of the planet, the second restriction sits very close to the first, and there will be people in the room arguing that dissent is itself an emission.

The Freedoms That Must Not Be Traded

So here is the distinction I want to hold on to.

There are freedoms that a climate response may legitimately limit: the freedom to burn, to waste, to externalise a cost onto everyone else. Those were never absolute and their limitation is not a loss to democracy.

And there are freedoms whose limitation is a loss to democracy, and which no climate justification can touch: the freedom to speak, to publish, to organise, to argue that the policy is wrong, to vote the policy out. These are not luxuries to be suspended while the adults handle the crisis. They are the only mechanism by which a crisis response can be corrected when it is mistaken, and it will be mistaken, repeatedly, because nobody has managed an economy through a change of this size before.

A system that limits the first kind while leaving the second alone is doing its job. A system that uses the first as cover for the second is doing what systems have always done with emergencies.

What Would Have to Be Different

I do not think the current arrangement can be trusted with this. Not because the people in it are wicked, but because it has failed the same test every previous time, and there is no reason to expect a different result from the same structure.

The property we need is a system of government that lacks the tendency. One in which the people deciding what may be consumed are the same people whose consumption is being decided, so that the restriction stops being something done to the public and becomes something the public does to itself. One in which there is no small group for whom the emergency is an opportunity, because there is no small group.

That is an argument for deciding these questions directly, and it is a different argument from the usual one about legitimacy or wisdom. It is about safety. A public that limits its own consumption cannot use the occasion to silence itself. A government that limits the public's consumption can, and on the evidence, will.

We are going to have to change the economy. I would like us to still be allowed to talk when we are done.