What’s Wrong With Our Environmental Politics?
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Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live. Welcome. It is Thanksgiving week here in the United States, and I should say up front, I'm grateful to have a loyal and super smart audience on this platform. I love hosting the show. And one reason is that you actually expect us to dive deep into the global issues that matter. And that's what we love doing.

This podcast is free, of course, but if you subscribe to FP, there is a lot else in the magazine that I think might be of interest. And as always, you can use the code FPLIVE for a big discount on your first year of membership. Join us. So on to today's episode. This one is a little bit philosophical. It's about climate change and climate policy, but with a bit of a twist.

First, is democracy compatible with the climate action that scientists say we need? Is democracy even adequate as a system of governance? I realize that sounds crazy, but it's an important question and one that a lot of people around the world wonder about. If politics is too slow for the change that we need, what options are left?

Well, one option, and I'm by no means endorsing this option, is radicalism. Several groups around the world have risen up that seek to protest with varying degrees of extreme action in the hope of pressuring governments to do more. The question is whether that approach moves the needle at all or whether it backfires.

Well, as it happens, there is a great book out this year that compares these two pathways. The incremental, frustrating progress in climate policy that is achieved through democratic means but is full of trade-offs, contrasted with the more radical attempts to disrupt public infrastructure to jolt governments into doing more, which works.

Well, the book is called Climate Radicals. Why our environmental politics isn't working. The book compares strategies of achieving environmental progress in Germany and the United States.

And it also so happens that the author is a colleague and a friend, and his name is Cameron Abadi. He's a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and is also the co-host of Ones and Twos, FP's podcast with the economic historian, Adam Tooze. As always, you can write us at live at foreignpolicy.com. We love hearing from you. Let's dive in. Cam, welcome to FP Live. Thanks very much for having me.

So first of all, congrats on the book. I'm guessing you're now getting a lot more sleep these days now that it's done. Well, you know, still juggling two young kids at home. So different reasons for sleeping less than I'd like. But yes, point taken. So let's start with this then. Who or what exactly is a climate radical? Give us an example. So I define climate radicals as anyone who

searching or hoping to solve the problem of climate change outside our normal democratic politics. Our normal democratic politics as structured by elections, the debates around elections and the debates in legislatures like parliaments that then pass laws.

That obviously is the heart of our democratic politics, but outside of that, there are a lot of people frustrated with the lack of progress that those democratic pathways are offering, and they are trying to coerce progress through other means. And so the examples I cite, I particularly look at the movement in Germany, which has a very diverse group of radicals of different kinds,

and they include groups like Let's de Generacion. These are

These are the last generation, right? The last generation is what that translates to. And these are people who regularly in Germany basically blockade streets, blockade infrastructure, airports. They're trying to make social life on a daily sense, on a daily level, unlivable for the country because they believe that politics as it currently stands is

making the natural environment unlivable for everyone. And so they're trying to force the political system into making more drastic steps.

And Cam, there's sort of an escalatory ladder of protest here, right? So on the milder front, for example, you have Fridays for Future, which is sort of inspired by Greta Thunberg. You've got The Last Generation, which you just mentioned. And then you've got groups that basically have plans to attack fossil fuel infrastructure. So ecoterrorism. That's right. You know, the range is from street demonstrations, right?

There are movements that involve hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets of all ages trying to demonstrate to the government their dissatisfaction with the current pace of climate policy. That has been very successful at bringing people out to the streets but has not been successful in producing new types of climate policy.

Germany, like every other democratic country in the world, is failing to meet its climate targets. And so in the face of that,

You have other groups pushing for more extreme measures. And those include the blockades I just mentioned. But then, yes, also sabotage. I mean, this is increasingly a method that activists are turning towards because they feel they have no other choice. They point to the scientific facts at play in climate policy. They say the clock is ticking on the goals that all countries have set.

And they say that sabotage is one way of sort of coercing change, basically trying to make the current fossil fuel infrastructure unusable or unprofitable directly. And so, yeah, that is a method that is increasingly in use. And again, the activists feel they have no choice but to turn to that. And Cam, one of the things I liked about your book was that you didn't really put your thumb on the scale in terms of your take

on whether these groups are crazy or effective and partly because you're recognizing the moral force of what they're trying to do, which is feeling like the world needs to do a lot more on climate policy and it isn't, and that democracy as usual isn't working. But one thing I'm curious about is, I mentioned that there's an escalatory ladder where when smaller protests

don't work, you go bigger and bigger and bigger, all the way leading up to the kinds of eco-terrorism that you were just describing. Is there any understanding on their part that even that isn't working? And therefore, is that worth it? Should they stop? Yeah. I mean, to get to your first point about how I try to describe these movements in my book, I do think it's important to say that this turn to radicalism

is on one hand entirely rational, right? It's rational in the sense that the progress is insufficient with respect to the goals that our own political systems have set. So to the extent that this is our goal, and it's a goal that our scientists describe as being necessary to meet, right? That that's the premise of our climate targets.

you know, that failure is something that is rational to respond to with urgency. So that's what these activists are doing. I try to understand it from their perspective and that's that in some narrow sense that does seem to me rational. But then you get to the next point that I think you were also just describing, which is that these methods are not producing progress themselves. In fact, they're producing democratic backlash. If you look at the specifics in the case of Germany,

you know, climate policy has become less popular. Although there is a consensus in Germany that climate policy is important, it has become less of a priority in the politics as these movements have gotten more and more active.

Yeah, and I want to come back to what it's done to the German government, especially. But before we get there, I want to contrast all of this with the United States. So, you know, as our listeners and viewers know, the Biden administration did, in fact, put in place a significant climate change legislation, at least in comparative historical terms in America. But as we know, it is full of trade-offs.

And more than that, it was so politically difficult that they ended up calling it the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, which of course it had little to do with. What is your sense of, because this is also a big part of your book as a contrast, what is your sense of how

That has worked out in contrast, given that there isn't the same or similar movement in the United States to use mass protests as a means of action. Yeah, you're right to say that I look at the United States as a contrast to Germany. It's an interesting contrast because the United States does not have a consensus on climate change. As we all know, watching US politics, you have one party that

you know, essentially denies that climate change is real and denies the science behind it. And yet, and yet, the United States has passed the most significant climate legislation of any democracy in the world. And that paradox is, I think, an interesting and instructive one to look at.

So how did the United States pass this law? The law, as I guess one would expect in a democracy, is completely characterized by this approach that the Obama administration referred to as all of the above energy policy. Another way of describing that is it has all carrots and no sticks. That is to say it has...

It completely incentivizes energy of all kinds from renewables, including types of fossil fuel generation in the form of natural gas.

etc. And so it doesn't try to take anything away from anyone in the United States. Instead, it provided a tremendous amount of money to all sorts of actors. And that legislative process basically got fossil fuel companies on board that otherwise used to protest any kinds of significant climate legislation.

Quietly, they were actually lobbying for the passage of this law. And if you look at the current state of the climate politics with the incoming Trump administration, you see it's fossil fuel companies that are outspoken about wanting to keep the law in place. Right. And so this approach managed to create a coalition that ranged from fossil fuel companies all the way to activist groups. So there are also activist groups in the United States.

But they did not object to this law. They actually endorsed it despite all of these compromises. Yeah. And to your point, the CEO of ExxonMobil was on TV recently saying he doesn't want Trump to pull out of the Paris climate accords. But all of this raises a bigger question. And that is that, you know,

Is the way forward when you look at these two contrasting models, Germany and the United States, and there are other models and we can get to those later, but is the way forward to put in place incentives basically that gets corporate actors to change their behavior so much so that if you have a leader, for example, like President Trump, who has said that he doesn't think man-made climate change is something he's going to care about that much.

that you have policies and incentives that endure even when you have changes of government? Yeah, I think this approach that the United States has had, which is to incentivize and precisely not to take anything away from anyone

has offered the most promising way forward in the sense that, as you mentioned, it's not an accident that the Trump administration has not talked a lot about climate policy. It has not talked a lot about trying to go out of its way to revoke all of the measures in this climate law. In fact, you had 16 Republican congressmen

during the presidential campaign write a letter to the Speaker of the House pleading to keep the law in place because the spending is happening in Republican districts. Mm-hmm.

And so this approach, I think, in a way has depoliticized climate policy in the United States and allowed it to continue despite this change in government. We'll see the details once the Trump administration comes into place. But I think the very fact that climate policy was not playing a huge role in the presidential campaign itself

was a huge success of its own. I think that actually deserves some recognition. The fact that it was not politicized in the campaign as much as it was four years ago, frankly. Maybe that is its own success, and we'll see how it works under the Trump administration.

So in a sense, the best climate politics is to keep it out of politics. There is actually an interesting link across everything we've been discussing. So Trump, the United States, Trump gets elected and then the German government basically falls. Explain that. Yeah, I mean, this German government, this is, I think, an important link and it bears on climate policy because for the past three years, this German government has struggled with

questions relating to the budget. And this had a direct link to climate policy because the ambition, the hope was to spend on climate policy over the past three years. There's a Green Party in the German government. The biggest Green Party in the world is in Germany. And it was elected with significant numbers in the last election and with very ambitious plans. And when push came to shove, when it came to actually implementing those ideas,

There was then a lot of objections about where that money should come from. So when it came to actually finding the money or spending the money, and in Germany that means having to save money elsewhere, there were a lot of objections to that. And raising taxes was always obviously a touchy issue in Germany, like elsewhere, for climate policy.

And so this budgetary question came to a head right after the US election and not accidentally because you have President Trump promising to spend less money on Europe's national security. This is the NATO point that Europe doesn't spend enough on its own national security. And all of a sudden, the German government realizes we need to spend money on our own Ukraine policy. We need to spend money to defend ourselves.

And again, this budgetary question came to the fore.

And the German government collapsed because it couldn't agree on how to spend on national security. And the point is, this question about spending money on climate policy will be a bigger and bigger question in the future as Europe needs to spend more on national security. And it's only going to get harder to find that money in the future for Europe. And this collapse of the German government is just one example, I think, of tensions we'll see in European politics in the years ahead.

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You know, so at a philosophical level, you know, the genesis of your book, if I may, you know, was an essay in foreign policy a few years ago in which you were pondering about whether democracy is even compatible with the climate policy that we all need, that the world clearly needs to reduce our usage of fossil fuels and to be cleaner and greener.

But I'm curious where you're at now on that question, because today, I mean, if you look at the countries that have managed to reduce their CO2 emissions per capita, all of them are big, rich, mostly Western democracies. Yes. And again, this goes back to the point about the U.S. example of the IRA. There are plenty of examples of progress. And I don't mean to say that progress isn't real and that progress isn't possible in a

There are plenty of examples of that and plenty of inspiring examples of progress, including the IRA law. But there is a but because even that major climate legislation is not sufficient with respect to the climate goals that the United States has endorsed in the Paris Climate Agreement.

At this point, it's pretty clear that the world is not going to meet the goal of keeping global warming beneath 1.5 degrees Celsius. That is still the stated goal. And yet no country is managing, even the countries that have achieved progress are not managing to be on target for that specific goal. And so there is this tension. The progress is real, but

maybe not sufficient to solve climate change on the timeline we wanted to. I think I'm optimistic we can eventually solve the issue at hand, but it may mean more warming than we wanted. It may mean that we should already be thinking about spending more money on adaptation.

You know, if we talk to experts, they are ready. That's where the expert conversation already is, is about spending money on resilience and adaptation and facing up to the disasters that are going to be involved with global warming. That is inevitable at this point. But I don't think our political conversation has caught up to that expert realization.

So what you just said there basically tells me that countries with more money will have a better chance at adaptation. So they will be able to build, pay for resilience. They will be able to have better systems to manage the floods that are coming, the forest fires that are coming. All those kinds of changes, they will have better defenses.

And it strikes me then that if, you know, I mean, we're already in a world where rich countries are always going to be better off than poor countries. And maybe we always have been historically. But do you think climate radicalism of the kind that you set out to look at in this book, is that going to take off more and more? And are there other countries where it's taking off?

Yeah, I do think that this is, in a narrow way, an irrational response to the situation. This is a failure that is legible. It is predictable. It is being constantly reinforced by our international agreements. I mean, it is a manifest failure. Right now, it's reinforcing the failure to meet the 1.5 degree target. And so, in a sense, this radicalism is, again, I think, an inevitable response to that.

It's localized in a lot of ways in the West. And whether that will affect climate policy in a global sense, I think, is an open question. I mean, I don't know whether radicalism in the developing world is taking off in the same way it is in the West. I think in a lot of ways, the rhetoric in the West about finding the most radical means, which involve often radicalism

abandoning capitalism. It involves degrowth as a movement. In other words, abandoning growth as a goal. This is not a goal that is popular, understandably, elsewhere in the world where development is still such a critical issue. In places where poverty is still

widespread, growth is obviously a priority. My understanding of that side of it, for example, in China, which mostly had protests about a decade ago over environmental pollution, so not so much over climate policy and reducing emissions as much as it was directed towards our rivers are too dirty or the air is unbreathable.

And in some senses, China has fixed part of that problem. Its air is much cleaner than it used to be a decade ago. India, for example, is going through what China went through about 15 years ago, where, you know, the air right now, as we're having this conversation, is unbreathable in New Delhi, a city that I used to live in. You know, you can taste the air. It tastes like metal. The...

particulate matter levels, PM2.5, that's 2.5, I think, micro molecules is the most dangerous form of dirty air you can breathe in. Those particles are through the roof, literally, it's beyond what is measurable.

And so the protests that are beginning to form in places like India have a lot more to do with what they can feel. So environmental pollution or other forms of smog and pollution, but they still want growth.

So it's less a case of them wanting to damage public infrastructure or the kinds of sort of eco-terrorism that you've been describing and you've seen firsthand in Germany. But all of this brings me to a big part of the puzzle that we haven't discussed so far, and that's China, which is the world's biggest emitter right now. It has taken significant steps to decarbonize.

It is not a democracy, unlike Germany and the United States. Where does that fit into the compare and contrast modeling you've been thinking about in the process of writing this book? It's an excellent question. And in some ways, I think China is at the heart of what it will mean to solve climate change. It's interesting also in part because China has set the most ambitious goal

of any country in the world in terms of curtailing its emissions. And I don't think it's an accident that it's not a democratic system to set such an ambitious goal. I think it's completely, it aims to be completely net zero in terms of its emissions by 2050. Yeah, I mean, the point is the Xi government has set extremely ambitious goals.

And of course, it's not immune from the same tensions because there are different actors with different material economic interests in China that are going to object to climate policies of various kinds as well. So we'll see how that works in practice. But I think the role that China ultimately plays in terms of global climate policy is in creating and setting the market for renewable energy.

It produces more renewable energy infrastructure than any country in the world. It has subsidized that production. It is exporting now that production. It has made it more affordable to create renewable energy. And it opens a pathway that is open to pathway for thinking about solving climate change problems.

outside the context of international agreements and international negotiation and domestic trade-offs in Europe

Instead, it has driven the price down to the point where it's simply a market consideration of whether to install renewable energy over other kinds of energy and sort of opened a long-term or medium-term pathway for using the price mechanism of the market, which is the unique genius of the capitalist market, to create progress.

left on its own devices, it's going to be slower than the ambitious Paris Agreement goals. But it's a path forward and it's the one that I guess we're on right now, thanks to China and its ambitious policies. You know, the crazy thing here, and everything in this world now seems topsy-turvy, but here you are describing how China is saving capitalism. It is lowering market prices for clean energy.

And moving away from your book a little bit and more towards your day job and my day job, here we are in a global climate where protectionism rules, US-China competition is everywhere.

the overriding topic that dominates geopolitics today. And so you have forces that are being imposed on China, which curtail its ability to help lower those market prices for clean energy that prevent it from exporting its electric vehicles, for example, which are very successful by many accounts. They're cheaper cars,

There are better cars even than you find in Europe and the United States. And so in a sense, you have solutions, but competition bizarrely can get in the way. Yeah, I think this is a fascinating part of the story because it brings us actually back to the IRA, the law that the United States passed. And it's not an accident that in this democratic context, passing legislation,

that is supporting and promoting climate policy in the United States not only involved incentives and spending a lot of money in the U.S., but it also involved

opposing China's rise. The provisions in the law demanded domestic industrial policy in promotion of these climate goals. It precisely- David Schawel: And that's what helped the law get passed as well. David Schawel: It's precisely what made it possible to pass the law. It's what created the support in Congress and in the public. In a certain sense, I think it's even what created the support among leftist activists in the United States who

who believe it's important for the United States to take a leading role on these questions, who believe in the United States' indispensable role in progressive causes. And yet there's a paradox there. And again, it's maybe my own temperament that I'm always sort of drawn to these kinds of tensions and paradoxes, but taken on its own terms,

climate policy and climate goals for their own sake would suggest you should actually be cooperating with China. You should be actually trying to encourage free trade with China as much as possible because it's the exports from China that are cheaper in promotion of renewable energy. And so, you know, taken purely as a climate policy, one would think,

That one should not be promoting the kinds of exclusive industrial policy that the United States pursued in the IRA. But that is just an inevitable tension in democratic politics. You know, it would not have been possible to pass the law absent that, even if it's a complication for climate policy.

Cameron, this is where I have to say, I think both parties in the United States at this point would call you a climate radical for saying that. Cameron Abadi, your book is Climate Radicals. It is fantastic. I hope all of our viewers and listeners read it, buy it. Thanks for joining us, Cam. Thank you very much.

And that was Cameron Abadi, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy, co-host of FP's Ones and Twos podcast, which you must try out, and the author of the terrific new book, Climate Radicals. Lots more ahead in the coming weeks. You can take a look at our website, foreignpolicy.com slash live for all the details. FP Live, the podcast is produced by Rosie Julin and the executive producer of the show is Donna Shuren.

I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time.

And some quirky non-political stories you probably missed. Vilnius, the G-spot of Europe. Nobody knows where it is, but once you find it, it's amazing. The Europeans. New episodes every Thursday.