Dictators v Democrats: Terra Firma
Freedom Needs a Living World
Democracy and the rights and liberties it brings are key to societal happiness and individual fulfilment.
Democracy thrives on prosperity. But in pursuing this and taking people out of poverty and into economic, positive freedom, we've grown addicted to tools that now imperil our survival, chiefly: fossil fuels. Like painkillers taken beyond need, they once brought relief; now, they prolong the harm.
It is a widely acknowledged truth that climate change is real and is an ever-present danger to humanity. It is, in fact, the most pressing crisis of our age, and we are now in the key moment.
The consequences we are seeing today are increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, including droughts, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires, which profoundly impact resource availability and economic stability: prosperity.
Our struggle to turn back climate change is being actively hindered by actors who, for whatever reason, do not wish for us to break free of our addiction to burning.
These are the oil barons and their friends. As Timothy Snyder describes them: “Hydrocarbon oligarchy, particularly in relation to fossil fuels, poses a significant threat to democracy. It concentrates wealth, limits conversations, and hampers progress towards a sustainable future.”
The threats posed to democracy by climate change and the degradation of the environment take many forms:
A crisis in legitimacy. If democracies fail to address environmental degradation, they will lose public trust and the people will withdraw the granted legitimacy as they suffer under a failing world.
Migration and social tensions. Population movements forced by climate change are already taking place, and we are already seeing the consequences of these with the rise of social tensions and far-right, anti-democratic movements in established democracies.
Economic disruption. As stated above: democracy requires prosperity. In poverty, people find it much harder to be involved in political life, or they are drawn to anti-democratic extremes.
Authoritarian opportunity. Authoritarians thrive on crisis and deprivation; environmental collapse provides both in spades.
War. As resources grow scarce or climatic conditions create economic tension, political tension between nations will most assuredly follow, and with that, conflict.
Intergenerational justice. Our children will judge us for what we do now. Democracy is dependent for legitimacy on building a better life for our children. When we forget that, we divorce ourselves from responsibility and, therefore, democracy.
So, what is to be done?
This project, Dictators v Democrats, has always been aimed at walking a line between journalism and activism. I want to show people that democracy is under threat, how it is threatened, and show them that it is worth fighting for.
But you cannot have liberty on a dying world.
Nor can you have liberty on a world restricted by our mistakes, a world in which humanity’s last hopes live in arcologies - enclosed, man-made enviroments, reliant on technologies to keep us alive as we are shut off from a planet we have ruined.
Finally, you cannot have liberty in a system where hyper-wealthy individuals are actively sabotaging the future of our children, born today. These children will have no part in this fight, but they will live in the world that wins.
The Triptych We Need
Snyder talks of three interconnected sources. In much the same way that a fire requires heat, oxygen, and fuel, democracy requires freedom, security, and sustainability.
Freedom
Freedom, positive (the freedom to) and negative (the freedom from), are of course as key to democracy as oxygen is to the fire. Non-free people, who divorce themselves from the future of society, who the Nobel Prize-winning human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk describes as “Population,” cannot be democratic, as they have no stake in the future; it is all 'above them'. Matviichuk describes those who take an active role as “Citizens.”
She says: “There are countries that have a large population, but few citizens. What do I mean? A person becomes a citizen when the scope of his/her responsibility begins to extend beyond the threshold of his/her own apartment. Population and citizens are how the state sees the role of a person and how a person sees his/her role in this state.”
Democracy requires citizens. It is much harder to be a free citizen in a society that is suffering from increased floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and resource war. It becomes impossible when the pressures of these lead to democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism.
Matviichuk adds: “Living in fear produces a certain way of thinking — 'I am an ordinary person, I have no influence on anything...'. And this is such a simple way of survival that people use in authoritarian and totalitarian societies.”
Security
We must be steadfast in defending our democracy and our world.
It is an oft-used quote from one of democracy’s great defenders (despite his many faults and failures), Sir Winston Churchill: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
It is perhaps a bit lazy to use this quote, but it is so often repeated because it is true.
It being true, we must realise that when forces come to destroy democracy, we cannot be tolerant of them. We cannot give them equal time or our indulgence, as they would take that generosity and turn it back on us as a weapon.
These forces are more than just those that I cite in the opening of Why We Fight: autocratic states, techno-aristocrats, religious fundamentalists, and populist demagogues.
Climate change is another such force.
There are those who are making it worse and hindering our efforts to fight it. They are a threat to our world and a threat to our freedom. They must be stopped.
Sustainability
This can only last if we make it strong enough to last. If we build this house out of paper and heat it with coal, it will burn. We must build this house of stone and heat it with sustainable and renewable energies, which are bountiful.
Our 20th-century democracy, as wonderful as it has been in many ways, is unfortunately built of paper and fuelled by coal. It is burning.
We can change this, and we must, by putting out the fire and building anew of stone. By helping others around the world to build and develop sustainably, with technologies that will not destroy the, often wonderful and beautiful, natural world that they have.
This is not a selfless act. We cannot fight climate change alone; we must help others, even in states which are non-democratic, to become sustainable. This can be done without legitimising their regimes.
The CO₂ does not distinguish between ideology or border as it warms our world.
Only with freedom, security, and sustainability can democracy survive and thrive. Only by saving the planet can any of us have any future, let alone a free one.
Terra Firma
To that end, I will be including a new section: Dictators v Democrats: Terra Firma
Here I will be tracking the battle to save the planet from climate change, environmental collapse, and those who are exacerbating them.
High trust society needs cheap energy, and democracy needs a high trust society. To reduce global co2 output significantly, to improve human health outcomes, to aid in reducing populations to sustainable levels (which happens naturally over the long term), to get to a high trust democratic post-scarcity society globally, we have to bridge where we are now by moving as many people as possible from low energy biofuels to natural gas, while we develop and deploy small modular reactors (SMRs) in parallel and work towards fusion, both of which enables generating hydrogen sustainably. That's absolutely key. Our rare earth minerals are finite and we are using huge quantities in the stupidity of electric cars, and solar solutions when we could be lifting people out of poverty, reducing co2 and environmental damage by switching them to natural gas. Just run some of the numbers through AI if you don't believe me. Here's a short example of the impact of low energy fuels on the worlds poor; https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8ccd6709-c342-4fd0-a898-d2df76017431 Natural gas could change that but it's a bridge, we have to go nuclear in parallel.