A No Kings Day Demand For Climate Action And Democracy Protections – CleanTechnica

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On No Kings Day, it’s important to stand up for the social safety programs we have come to depend on. There’s the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for children and low income folks. Medicare and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act so lots of people have access to health care. Veteran Affairs programs for those who have risked their lives for our nation. Immigrants’ right to due process so people who flee their dangerous homelands can be safe and contribute to the US economy. The First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and peaceable assembly.

And, as importantly, we must also speak out loudly for the right to a healthy planet. President Donald Trump, the man who would be King, doesn’t care that the planet is growing hotter. His policies are diminishing our country’s ability to fight the hottest temperatures recorded in contemporary history. His policies pollute our planet, alienate our allies who have endorsed the Paris Agreement, and threaten our democracy.

On No King’s Day, we must fight for our climate, which affects nearly every aspect of our lives. Climate change has impacts on our food sources and our transport infrastructure. On what clothes we wear and where — and if — we go on vacation. On how we breathe and where we can live.

Climate change reaches into our livelihoods, our health, and our future.

Why a Democracy Struggles with Climate Action

Why must we fight against Trump and for climate action on this No Kings Day of protests?

The Founding Fathers believed that placing ultimate authority in one person, like a king, could easily lead to tyranny. They envisioned a system where power was shared and limited, so no individual or group could dominate the government. Instead of an elected monarch, they design a government with checks and balances, limited presidential terms, and real legislative power in Congress. The result was a republic.

Representative democracy, as it has evolved since the nineteenth century, relies on the principle that governments are elected to serve the interests of the voters within a national constituency who are living at the current moment. Today’s climate crisis is an existential threat that the Founding Fathers did not envision. A warming world and environmental degradation are affecting every ecosystem on the planet, and the combination will certainly have deleterious effects on future human beings.

So the climate crisis is both contemporary and situated in a hard-to-envision distant time.

A strong executive branch can move the US from a cyclical fossil fuel extraction, production, consumption, and pollution model to one in which we transition to renewable energy at a methodical pace now and for the future. Emissions will tumble with that different energy paradigm.

We need to acknowledge that environmental degradation partially results from consumption patterns. The items we love to purchase so happily have embedded emissions due to trade across the globalized economy, and everyone from corporations to individual consumers needs to be held accountable for the emissions they consume. Once the cost outweighs the pleasure, consumption will shift to low emissions products and services.

Effective climate action in our democracy requires consistent policies. Serious renewable energy infrastructure investors need much more than the TACO approach to trade (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) — an on-again, off-again series of tariffs. Tariffs create challenges for companies that rely on importing materials or products in the short term and for longer term planning for new production facilities.

Autocracy in Conflict with Democracy

How can a strong leader who believes in democracy help us to fight back against the climate crisis?

It’s not the guy currently in the White House, who, in a post on the social media platform he owns, compared himself to a king. “LONG LIVE THE KING!” he yelled. (Doesn’t he know all caps on the Internet means shouting? Or maybe he does...)

We need a president who can carefully but assertively connect extreme weather events with climate change and associated administration mitigation policies. Those connections need to be outlined in a way that makes transparent the steps being taken this year, but it will be important as well to track how today’s climate actions are designed to secure a healthy, safe, and stable future national life.

The transition to a net zero United States is going to be years in the making and will cross generations. It is necessarily interconnected with democracy. Our president can’t avoid climate-related problems: they must stand firm and articulate, step-by-step, how the US will devote the appropriate resources to fight for a better tomorrow. This problem-solution method brings a vigor, energy, and confidence to climate action consensus building.

Apart from its constitutional value to citizens, democracy has elements that present essential advantages to climate policy design and administration. Voices across multiple constituent groups can inform policymaking, so that significant shifts in domestic industrial, economic, and trade policies realign with geopolitical and geo-economic interests. The checks-and-balances of branches built into the US democracy can hold its elected representatives accountable for implementing climate policies. Popular civic sentiment can be mustered with clear and explicit media messaging and a free flow of information.

Climate change is a complex issue with many nuances. Domestic climate policy has global social and political implications. We need a president who sees beyond the self and transactional approaches to policy and, instead, creates capacity for US institutional learning about climate, its effects, and our collective ability to rise up and defeat it.

We cannot have a wannabe King pretending to lead the country in the face of our enormous climate challenges. We need to call upon our republic to reject this US president. We also need to reinvigorate our democracy so that our economy runs on renewable energy and saves the quality of life we want for our families today and tomorrow.

Final Thoughts for No Kings Day

(with apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley)

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Trump, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Resources for No Kings Day

Want to learn more about the intersection of democracy and the climate crisis? Here are some good resources for you.

“Democracy’s Climate Problem: Beyond the Bounds of Territory and Time,” by Heather Grabbe

“Democracy and the Challenge of Climate Change,” an International IDEA Discussion Paper

“Autocracy vs. Democracy: Climate Edition,” from the Carnegie Endowment

“Why Climate Action Demands Democracy,” from the Journal of Democracy

Featured image: “crown” by trainjason, CC BY 2.0 license.