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If ever there was an individual permanently stationed at the intersection of democracy and climate change in the public consciousness, it’s probably former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
In 2006, the documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” showcased Gore’s efforts to educate people about the reality and consequences of global warming, featuring a slide show of information on climate change that Gore estimated he had presented to worldwide audiences more than 1,000 times at that point.
It was, by all accounts, a huge success. It premiered at Sundance Film Festival. After that, it held openings in New York City as well as Los Angeles. It won two Academy Awards and became the 11th-highest grossing documentary film to date, pulling in $24 million at U.S. box offices and another $26 million internationally.
However, it did not inspire the same kind of action as the vice president hoped to see in order to slow global warming.
Sixteen years later, Gore is still at it, making public appearances to try to motivate action against climate change and all the havoc it will — and at this point already has — wreak around the world in the form of stronger storms, larger wildfires, exacerbated droughts and flooding, deadly temperatures and stressed agricultural systems.
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Last week, Arizona State University held its inaugural conference on “Democracy and Climate Change,” hosting two full days of panel discussions on topics ranging from how the U.S. Constitution influences climate action, to the challenge of fake news, to the necessary role of Indigenous communities in policy decisions. Gore was the keynote speaker on Tuesday night via Zoom. (All talks can be viewed on ASU’s YouTube channel. Conference website.)
“I’m not just here to talk with you. I’m here because you are the best. We need you desperately,” Gore said to more than 200 people who gathered on campus and online for his talk. “As you know, we have all the solutions that we need to act now to reduce emissions, transition into cleaner energy, improve lives, and communities around the globe,” Gore said. We can win this fight.
Democracy is hindered by distractions, diversions and money
Gore said that political will is an inherent renewable resource. He was trying to convince listeners they have a significant role to play in a democratic approach towards climate solutions.
He said, “It’s almost as if we could flip a switch, so we can do it.”
It sounds easy enough. But one obstacle to successful climate action Gore said he has witnessed over the decades is a lack of commitment, focused effort and confidence among members of the general public that they can make a meaningful difference. This widespread apathy made it easy for misinformation to be spread and private interests to take advantage.
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Gore stated, “We live within a culture that is mass distraction, where people don’t feel as though it’s their time to participate in democracy and are overwhelmed with the amount of trivial info designed to grab their attention.” “And when ordinary citizens are disengaged from democracy, moneyed interest are quick to step in to fill that gap when it comes to climate crisis.”
Gore stated that money’s corrupting role in politics has negatively impacted the political process. The vast majority of Americans support expanding infrastructure for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. However, the transition away fossil fuels is not supported by the majority. Reports from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have repeatedly said is essential, has been slow.
The IPCC has the latest information:Climate experts believe the world is at “a crossroads”, but offer hope through concrete actions
So what is standing in the way of democracy doing what it is supposed to do to represent demands of the majority by adopting aggressive climate action?
Panelists at the ASU’s conference about democracy and climate change last Wednesday suggested that it could be the U.S. Constitution.
Is the U.S. Constitution holding back climate action?
The U.S. Constitution is the strongest in the entire world and has protected democracy for over 200 years. Stefanie Lindquist, a professor at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and executive director of the Center for Constitutional Design, who moderated a panel at ASU’s conference last week titled “Is the Constitution the problem?”
It’s also one of the most difficult constitutions in the world to amend.
The rigidity of the U.S. Constitution can both be a boon as well as a burden when it comes to environmental issues. One, federal regulation has protected access and water quality, national parks, and the persistence biodiversity in ways that developers, corporations, or monied interests have not always appreciated.
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But when it comes to global emergencies like pandemics and climate change, aspects of our constitutional system can sometimes stand in the way of timely action.
The electoral college, for example, can mean that rural states with strong oil interests but relatively low populations have outsized representation in Congress. Campaign finance rules that permit unrestricted, anonymous donations can enable fossil fuel tycoons to buy political influence and stifle change, according to Troy Rule, also a professor in ASU’s College of Law who participated on a related panel last week.
“We have all of these different elements of our constitutional system and pretty much everyone agrees all of those things are valuable,” Rule said. “They’ve proven valuable for 200 years. They can, however, be a hindrance to climate change in certain ways.
Richard Revesz, a professor at the New York University School of Law and director of the American Law Institute, said during last Tuesday’s panel that the elephant in the room is something that “is not really a constitutional doctrine, but is informed by constitutional ideas.”
Revesz stated, “The current real threat to climate change regulation has something that we have never considered serious until a few years back, the major questions doctrine.”
It has to do with Congress limiting the amount of regulatory power that any one governmental agency has over things like greenhouse gas emissions. Lindquist explained that the current Supreme Court has been reluctant to grant any agency the additional influence it needs to mandate things like carbon cuts or vaccines.
“What the court might say is ‘agency, you are taking on a major problem and there is no way congress, however broad they wrote the statute, could have contemplated your acting in such a broad and far-reaching way,'” she said. “For an agency to act on those problems requires a very specific mandate and most agencies don’t have that mandate.”
With a two-thirds vote required, the probability of a constitutional amendment to address climate change passing is “slim to none.” Over the course of U.S. history, only 17 constitutional amendments have passed. But state constitutions, Lindquist says, “get amended all the time.”
Therein lies a democratic opportunity for climate change mitigation.
Enacting change might be more of a local and a private fight
Climate action, which has not historically been a top priority for conservative states who favor state governance over federal control, may be something of a “state’s rights” issue.
Experts at ASU’s conference last week pointed out that, because local elections happen more often than national elections and state constitutions are easier to amend, political turnover and change that matches the urgency of the climate crisis might be more possible at the local level — if residents get involved and demand it.
“Linking democracy to climate change is not just a random linkage,” Lindquist said. “Because climate change is a long term problem that unfolds incrementally over years, one of the challenges with democracy is that we elect people for short terms, two or four years.”
Rule, who has authored books on wind and solar power, says Arizona has a huge opportunity to pursue renewable energy independence if it can get organized to vote state officials aligned with local fossil-fuel-based utility companies out of office.
Rule stated that Arizona could use its solar resources, which are some among the best in this world, if they only had the will to. “The photons of the sun fall all day on Arizona for free.”
Another panelist, Michael Vandenbergh, encouraged conference attendees to bypass limitations of the U.S. Constitution by supporting companies that make progressive climate choices.
“It will be very difficult for expansive interpretations of existing statutory authority to survive Supreme Court review for the foreseeable future,” said Vandenbergh, who is chair of the Vanderbilt University Law School and directs the Climate Change Research Network. “So what I want is to suggest that there are other ways to get past this.”
He sees positive, voluntary change happening in the corporate world, with some companies choosing to adopt climate-forward, sustainable practices because it’s what their customers demand, which makes it profitable.
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As a career politician and one of the earliest and most earnest voices in the climate fight, Al Gore might be the first to say that not all problems can be solved on the national stage. He held the office of Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001, but made insufficient progress on one of his signature issues.
Had Gore not narrowly lost the 2000 presidential race to George W. Bush in the electoral college (though he won the popular vote), the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere might be lower today. But constitutional obstacles to climate action highlighted by experts at ASU last week suggest there would have been challenges regardless.
The good news, advocates say, is that domestic progress is not all about federal action. States play a role, as do education and public engagement in the democratic process. Gore and the IPCC were both in 2007 jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
Since then, he hasn’t stopped trying for you to be recruited.
Joan Meiners is the Climate News and Storytelling Reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral. She earned her Ph.D. in Ecology before becoming a journalist. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at [email protected].
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