Is Climate Change Policy Incompatible with Democracy?

The United States may soon be backing away from one of the world's most ambitious efforts to fight climate change. President Donald Trump is expected to announce this week his final decision on whether the US will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.

But whatever the decision, and whatever the fallout, the mere suggestion of pulling out has raised a difficult question: How can we build sustainable, long-term climate change policy when every democracy around the world changes leaders, and ideology, every few years? There are a few options, and broad deals like the Paris Agreement might actually be the antidote.

"It's one of the reasons that problems like nuclear arms control and like climate change are so challenging, because of this characteristic of democracy of changing government at regular intervals," said John Holdren, a former senior science advisor to President Barack Obama and a professor at Harvard University. "Our preferred political system—which I continue to think is better than the others—has drawbacks and this is one of them."

Experts have said that the US choosing to withdraw from the Paris Agreement—a process that could take up to four years—doesn't mean a death knell for the deal globally. But it would have consequences, and would also mean a shift in priorities domestically. Without an international treaty to hold us to account, and with climate change not a priority for the current administration, the US could regress on environmental policy.

Holdren and other experts I spoke to said this is an issue that climate change experts have long identified, and the US isn't the only nation that struggles with creative lasting policy changes under a government that is constantly changing hands. Canada spent nearly a decade dragging its feet on climate change policy under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Australia has seen climate change alternate between a top priority and an afterthought as different parties cycled through power. It's a common refrain.

But hearty, multinational treaties like the Paris Agreement may actually be a good example of how to protect our effort to stop climate change from the whims of domestic politics.

"The Paris Agreement anticipated the very possibility that we're seeing now," said John O. Niles, a climate policy expert and the director of the Carbon Institute, a research group that promotes carbon management. "It's a rock and that rock can't be broken by a single government withdrawing. It was designed that way."

Niles, who helped coordinate scientific strategy for more than a dozen nations leading up to the Paris Agreement, told me that this kind of broad, multinational treaty is an example of policy that can withstand the ebb and flow of changing leaders.

Polls have also shown that the majority of Americans, including most Republicans, do not want to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This grassroots support could have great influence even if our current administration ignores it, according to David Victor, a global policy expert at the University of California San Diego and the author of "Global Warming Gridlock," which looks at roadblocks to diplomatic progress on climate change.

"This is not the only time this has happened," Victor told me. "When the federal government is inactive on a politically-important topic, it becomes politically very popular to focus on it in the states. They swing in the opposite direction."

Victor said state and local governments may very well double-down on climate change policy to mitigate the fallout from the feds, and pointed to California Governor Jerry Brown, who is heading to China next week to discuss climate change policy. Other nations could end up reacting in a similar manner, either stepping up to take the US' place as a global leader, or putting diplomatic pressure on the US if Trump pulls the plug.

Having a congress that is willing to pass strict laws on climate change would make a lot of headway, too (it's not very simple to just overturn a law), and Holdren said voters will have this in mind during the midterms.

None of these strategies are a silver bullet and Victor told me most economists believe the planet overall is going to "under-mitigate and over-adapt," to climate change—meaning we will make some progress, but not enough, and will end up having to deal with the consequences.

"One should hope that on major issues of international collaboration and agreement that the consensus would be maintained from administration to administration," Holdren told me. "But as we all know, that's not necessarily true."

Ultimately, democracy's greatest asset is that it is up to the people to choose our own fate. If the people don't care about climate change, this is where we end up.