Are dictatorships better than democracies at fighting climate change?

IT IS NOT just that Asia accounts for the greatest proportion of the world’s carbon emissions, with China the biggest emitter, India the third-biggest, and Japan, South Korea and Indonesia all among the top dozen. Asians are also the most vulnerable to climate catastrophe, with melting Tibetan glaciers, less predictable rains upon which its farmers depend, and fiercer storms and rising sea levels threatening huge, sinking megacities such as Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai and Shanghai.

By and large, national governments in Asia acknowledge the challenge. A baneful exception is Australia, whose conservative government is running away from climate commitments. Its failure to show the way in cutting emissions has only reinforced an argument which, increasingly, Asian environmentalists as well as self-serving autocrats make: that a crisis as severe (if man-made) as rising temperatures can be mitigated only by the firm smack of authoritarian rule. Democracies huff and puff and, prey to vested interests and voters’ distaste for hard choices, ultimately shirk the task.

America under President Donald Trump, who wants to pull out of the Paris agreement, underscores the case. Global leadership on climate falls, by default, to China. The Communist Party first baked climate change into planning in 1990. The policy output has been prolific. It includes a national climate-change programme and a renewable-energy law. By 2017 China had cut the carbon dioxide emitted per unit of GDP by 46% compared with 2005, three years ahead of schedule. It says 20% of its energy will come from non-fossil sources by 2030.

The choices China makes will be critical if the world has a chance of keeping temperature rises to no more than 1.5°C. Above all, coal use needs to fall sharply—easy improvements to date in carbon efficiency are not enough. Yet for all that China is far and away the biggest manufacturer and user of solar technology, it remains the hungriest user of coal. After a two-year pause in breaking ground for new coal-fired power stations, last year China began the construction of 28GW of new capacity. The total capacity under construction, 235GW, will boost Chinese coal power by a quarter. As for the Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to boost Chinese prestige abroad by helping countries build infrastructure, a quarter of its energy projects are coal-fired stations. The 136 belt-and-road countries account for 28% of global carbon emissions. Without decarbonisation, that ratio would rocket to 66% by 2050, according to a study backed by Tsinghua University.

Authoritarian environmentalism, then, may excel at producing policies but be no better than democratic environmentalism at producing good outcomes—and probably worse. Policy driven by bureaucratic and technocratic elites, with almost no input, monitoring or modification from those who make up civil society, has real drawbacks: think of the provincial governments in China that lie about their coal-use figures and of the supposedly clean, China-backed hydropower projects on South-East Asia’s giant rivers that are wreaking havoc with fish and water flows.

Meanwhile, even corrupt, messy India can get some things done. For three years in a row, it has invested more in renewable energy than in fossil fuels—helped by a sharp rise in coal taxes and steep falls in the price of solar power (plus 300 sunny days a year). Power not generated by fossil fuels should reach 60% of the total by 2030.

India is a paragon neither of democracy nor of environmentalism. Yet non-governmental and other independent civic groups piping up about the environment are surely better than the mandated silence in China. And even peccant democracies like Australia’s can change course. As it is, state-level governments have ambitious renewables targets, while nine-tenths of Australians say the federal government’s climate policy is not good enough.

If governments don’t go after climate, climate will go after them. When Cyclone Nargis killed an estimated 140,000 people in Myanmar in 2008, the lying incompetence of the junta that ran the country at the time hastened its demise. When Communist leaders in China deal with natural disasters, such as the huge earthquake in Sichuan days after Nargis, they know their legitimacy is on the line. Climate is going to test many states in Asia to destruction, but authoritarian ones most of all.

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