Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change

Virtually everyone agrees that climate change is an emergency of unprecedented scale and urgency. But there is growing debate over what governance structures are best suited to addressing it. This debate is commonly framed as one between a more "authoritarian" approach, associated above all with China, and a more "democratic" one, associated with the US and the EU. This essay challenges this way of conceptualizing our political possibilities, and argues that our best hope for mitigating the climate emergency is likely to involve embracing a politics that is at once more democratic and more authoritarian.