The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: Autocracies Are Bad for the Climate
Dear Diary. If anyone tried to pin a label on this Climate Guy, I would be a Democratic Socialist. The models for societies that work best for most populations come from northern Europe from Britain westward through France and Germany into Finland, which for all intents and purposes democratic socialist countries. From what I know, people are happiest in these countries with good social safety nets, great educational systems, and retirement plans at a decent early age.
Apparently social democratic countries are also best for our climate because they can come together for climate treaties and develop mitigation policies much better than autocracies. Would be kings can issue good climate policies then yank them out of existence on a whim or when fossil fuel interests get to them through corruption. China is good for the climate now but could falter due to coal interests soon. I don’t know of any benevolent dictators, do you? And then there is Trump.
For a good summary on why authoritarian are bad for the environment, read the following Clean Technica article:
Midjourney generated image of bubbles of greenhouse gases over the earth.
Climate Action — Are Democracies Better Than Autocracies?
7/19/2025 Steve Hanley
“I don’t believe what I read in the papers. They’re just out to capture my dime.” Paul Simon wrote that lyric long before the digital revolution destroyed print media. Despite his warning, I occasionally find articles in mainstream media sources that pique my interest and may be of interest to readers. Here’s an example. This week, The Guardian ran a piece on climate action and the role autocratic governments play — and will continue to play — in preventing a fully fledged climate meltdown that could endanger the lives of billions.
The story was written by Fiona Harvey, the environment editor for The Guardian, who begins with this question: “When it comes to the climate crisis, how do you negotiate with an autocracy?”
Harvey writes that the majority of climate killing emissions come from countries that are autocratic. In most cases, the primary source of income to prop up those autocracies is derived from extracting and selling fossil fuels. Asking those regimes to do the right thing is like asking them to commit political suicide. It would be like asking Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to forego the income they derive from social media. In other words, don’t hold your breath.
Of the 20 fossil fuel companies with the biggest carbon output globally, 16 are state-owned and were responsible for 52 percent of global emissions in 2023. That means they are accountable only to the governments that own them. The worst offender is Russia. Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser in the Clinton administration, says methane leaks from oil and gas production in that country are some of the worst in the world.
The Russian government, quite frankly, doesn’t care a flying fig leaf. Guided by the whims of its lunatic leader, it has refused to take any action to reduce those leaks even though doing so would be highly profitable. “They have insanely high fugitive methane emissions from their hydrocarbon production, and they have very little incentive to prevent it,” he said. Today, Russia is far and away the biggest source of climate disinformation online.
Are Democracies Better At Addressing Climate Change?
Clearly, any plan to address climate change at the global level means negotiating with autocratic governments. “When we were negotiating, I was not really thinking about where these governments came on the scale of democracy,” Todd Stern, the US chief negotiator in the Obama administration, told Harvey. He was directly involved in the negotiations that led to the Paris climate Accords in 2015.
“The carbon majors [of all kinds] are keeping the world hooked on fossil fuels, with no plans to slow production,” said Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who presided over the 2015 Paris summit. “While states drag their heels on their Paris agreement commitments, state-owned companies are dominating global emissions — ignoring the desperate needs of their citizens.”
Ana Toni is the chief executive of COP30 in Brazil. She told Harvey, “Climate is a topic that we can only solve in a multilateral way. And in that multilateral way, we have democracies and we have countries that have different political systems. We need to bring all of them along.” But Paul Bledsoe is less sanguine. “[Russia and Saudi Arabia], and other petrostates, have gotten away with their morbid resource dependence, which is terribly harmful for the planet,” he said.
Some believe that being a state-owned corporation, or operating within an authoritarian country, or under a populist leader, does not prevent companies with high emissions from embracing environmental progressiveness. Francis Fukuyama, a scholar of political systems and author of The End of History, is one of them. He says authoritarian states hold all the levers of power and can simply order their companies to shift to low-carbon technology. “If an authoritarian state wants to move on climate policy, whether for mitigation [cutting emissions] or adaptation, it can do so more easily because it does not face the kinds of entrenched interest groups that democracies deal with.”
China & Climate Action
China is offered as a good example of how an authoritarian state can pivot away from fossil fuels to embrace a low-carbon future. It is now the world’s biggest producer of renewable energy, and has the most exports of electric vehicles, solar panels, and other components of low-carbon technology. Harvey writes that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, credits the far-sightedness of China’s leadership for the transformation.
“You can have a situation in which an autocracy decides that this is the right thing to do because it’s existential, and I think China decided to do that. I don’t believe that the nature of that autocracy necessarily stands in the way of being a responsible climate citizen. And I don’t think that we should be too proud that democracies are doing everything right.”
Much research has been done on whether autocracies or democracies are more likely to take action on climate change, and the results are unclear, according to Ross Mittiga, an associate professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London. “There is no strong evidence that democracies are better or worse equipped to address the climate crisis than non-democratic regimes,” he said. “Of the top emitters, some are democratic, others are not, but all are failing to do the minimum needed to avert catastrophe.”
That last part is the most important. Despite all the hoopla, chest thumping, and truckloads of good intentions, none of the state or corporate actors responsible for degrading the Earth’s environment — humanity’s most precious resources — are doing the hard work needed to prevent a global disaster. As a species, we are like someone standing on a railroad track and being mesmerized by the dazzle of the headlight as a train bears down on us.
In democracies, the theory is that popular protests can affect political decisions. Google claims, “The right to peaceful assembly is a fundamental human right that allows individuals to gather together and express, promote, pursue, and defend their ideas. It’s a cornerstone of democratic societies and enables collective action, protest, and participation in public life. This right is recognized internationally and enshrined in various legal frameworks, including the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
Well, maybe. If you live in the US or the UK today, do you feel empowered to join in protest movements? Do the people of Los Angeles feel empowered by the presence of US Marines and National Guard troops? Those nations claim to be democracies, but are they? Did the protesters at Standing Rock get a full measure of First Amendment protection? These are questions that are disturbing but essential to ask.
Earth Day
Economist Nicholas Stern directed Harvey’s attention to the first Earth Day demonstrations in the US. They took place on April 12, 1970, and motivated an estimated 20 million people to participate. Within a few years, the US had a Clean Air Act, a Clean Water Act, and an Environmental Protection Agency, all brought about during the administration of Richard Nixon — a Republican. Now, all have been “gutted by the Republican president, Donald Trump,” Harvey writes. So much for the blessings of democracy.
Thomas Piketty, the French economist and author of several critiques of capitalism, goes further. “We definitely need social protest and popular pressure to deliver climate action. But formal democracy is not enough: we need equal voice, effective democratic participation, mass mobilization and powerful collective organisations to curb money interests and to promote ambitious platforms of institutional transformation. This is how we were able to achieve substantial progress in social, economic and political equality in the past two centuries.”
Much depends on the economic situation of the country involved, adds Thomas Stern. “Russia and Saudi Arabia are best understood in taking their position as people with direct vested interests, rather than necessarily to do with democracy or autocracy. We have to, as political economists, understand vested interests.”
The Decision Making Process
With an autocracy, there is no way of knowing quite how or why a decision has been made or whether it will be made again, Harvey writes. “China has pledged to produce a new national plan on emissions before the COP 30 UN climate summit in November. That single document will do more than any other political decision this year to determine whether the world can hold global heating to safe limits.” But Chinese officials are under strict orders not to talk about it. “The plan is all in Xi Jinping’s head at the moment,” one COP veteran said. “We are finding that no one [in government] will talk about it.”
Harvey says China could double down on its huge investment in renewables, or Xi could listen to the strong vested interests of the coal sector, deeply embedded in China’s economy and polity. “I would not rule out a return to coal,” said Li Shuo, the director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Harvey reports that Canada and Australia both elected centrist leaders this year in free and fair elections. Each of those leaders has pledged allegiance to the climate cause, but are actively pursuing fossil fuel expansion. “Japan, the UK and the EU are are also still hooked on fossil fuels despite fine words and targets. The UK, where Labour was elected pledging to end new North Sea oil and gas licences, is considering giving the go-ahead to the vast Rosebank oilfield on the technicality that it was already within the planning system,” Harvey says.
“Democracies are more hypocritical,” said Jayati Ghosh, an Indian development economist and professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts. “The problem with democracies is that capital can exert much more pressure than any other stakeholder.” Vera Songwe, a Cameroonian economist and executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, says governments can find ways of working together with a common motive. “We must try to meet countries where they are. Everyone is looking for growth and we must be able to demonstrate that green growth is possible.”
Growth
There’s that word — growth. Everybody wants growth. We want raises every year. We want our children to have a better future. We want out retirement accounts to grow. We want a bigger car, a larger house, and to maximize shareholder value. If there is a takeaway from Fiona Harvey’s piece in The Guardian, it is that growth is a more compelling narrative than survival.
In the name of growth, we will extract and burn every available molecule of fossil fuel that can be found anywhere on the planet. We will celebrate the melting of glacier and polar ice caps because of the new fossil fuel deposits we will find when they are gone.
We as humans are genetically predisposed to ignore long-term threats and focus on short-term gains. Whether we live in an autocracy or democracy ultimately makes little difference. If we can’t see the danger of the onrushing train, if we are incapable of taking preventive action, we will perish. Whether we die in an autocratic country or a democratic one will make no difference. We will be dead and the Earth will breathe a sigh of relief when we are gone. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
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Here are more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Tuesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)