Too Hot to Handle? The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change

摘要

At the time of writing this review, we have witnessed governments and institutions scrambling with varying degrees of success to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. It is not hard to draw comparisons with another global emergency - namely the climate crisis. In both cases, we have seen a marked reluctance from many of those in positions of power to disrupt the status quo in addressing the situations at hand, even with thousands of lives at risk. In the US, the Trump administration, having rolled back environmental protection laws and withdrawn the nation from the Paris Agreement in the name of the American economy, now contends with the necessity of shuttering the selfsame economy (Baker et al., 2020). Brazil's President Bolsonaro, long dismissive of the value of nature conservation efforts, has come under fire for dismissing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a 'little flu' (Phillips, 2020). While the threat from COVID-19 is immediately apparent to most, that of climate change is no less urgent. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned the world that there is limited time in which to act in order to limit the planet to 1.5°C of warming from preindustrial levels. The consequences of inaction are likely to exacerbate already-documented phenomena such as extreme weather events and ocean acidification (IPCC, 2018). However, as with COVID-19, the global political response to climate change can arguably be characterized as ineffectively slow. Greater action is needed but as Rebecca Willis writes in her recent book Too Hot to Handle? The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change, there is a significant gap between scientific and social perceptions of the issue's severity. In the face of this gap and the ensuing political inertia, what is the best strategy for governing climate change?