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Boiling Point
Fighting Climate Change in an Authoritarian Age
00:29:18
What’s a greater threat to humanity: climate change, or the potential collapse of democracy? In this episode, Sammy Roth speaks with geography professor James McCarthy, who’s studied how authoritarianism and environmental destruction can be deeply intertwined.
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- [00:01]
James McCarthy
This is an LA Times Studios podcast.
- [00:08]
Sami Roth
My name is Sami Roth and I'm the climate columnist for the Los Angeles Times. This is Boiling Point. I've spent a long time writing that the climate climate crisis is the greatest threat facing humanity. But These days, in 2025, I'm starting to wonder if that's still true. Experts say that President Trump is pushing the United States, the most powerful country in the world, from democracy towards authoritarianism. Is that not a bigger threat than climate change? Even just practically speaking? How are we ever going to deal with climate change if American democracy fails? But maybe there are connections between authoritarianism and climate destruction. Maybe these two threats are in some ways the same threat. James McCarthy thinks so. He's a professor of geography at Clark University in Massachusetts, and in 2019, he edited a special issue of the Annals of the American association of Geographers titled Environmental Governance in a Populist Authoritarian Era. There were more than 30 academic articles, and the best summary I can give you is from McCarthy's introduction, where he summarizes the many connections that he and other experts see between authoritarianism and environmental politics. According to McCarthy, those connections include, and I quote, the ways in which populist and authoritarian politics and regimes often arise directly from tensions between rural and urban areas, exploit national natural resources to buy political support and underwrite their political agenda, attack environmental protections and activists to give extractive capital free rein, and eliminate or attack environmental data and science in a post truth era. That is a lot to unpack, and we're going to do it on this week's podcast with James McCarthy as our guest. This is a heavy topic, but solutions and paths forward are a big part of it, and we're going to talk about those, too. Here we go. James, thank you very much for being with us on the Boiling Point podcast.
- [02:29]
James McCarthy
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [02:31]
Sami Roth
Yeah. James, these articles are so. I mean, I wish I'd had time to read all of them, but I got through the six that we talked about, including yours. This must have been really interesting to edit.
- [02:43]
James McCarthy
It was really interesting to edit, and I will say that that collection came out in 2019, and I really, really hoped that at the time we were seeing sort of the high watermark of this authoritarian populist turn, and obviously that didn't happen. And here we are six years later. So unfortunately it turns out to be quite relevant again.
- [03:07]
Sami Roth
It's interesting that you say that you thought you were hoping that we were at the high point of authoritarianism then six years ago. I think maybe to ground this Conversation. So the the title of this special issue of Annals of the American association of Geographers that you edited, the title was Environmental Governance in a Populist Authoritarian Era. Maybe define authoritarian era. What defines that to you? Why would you describe what's happening as authoritarianism?
- [03:35]
James McCarthy
Well, so we can think about. There are a lot of definitions of authoritarianism out there, but some of the common features that I think we certainly see are centralizing political control in a single strong political leader or small group. Group Overturning the formal rule of law and informal norms of governance in the name of that making criticism or dissent impossible by demonizing, criminalizing and punishing critics and dissenters promising simple, often violent answers to complex problems. And that's sort of contrasted with bureaucracies and laws and rules which follow given procedures. And that's often now somehow portrayed as weak or ineffectual and justifying all of that in terms of the good of the nation. And then the last thing I would say is that's often paired, particularly these days, with a kind of isolationism, so withdrawing from international agreements and accords and treaties and so forth. So, you know, that's a quick answer. We could talk about all those things, but that's a quick definition of authoritarianism, I guess.
- [04:45]
Sami Roth
One of the authors of one of these papers quoted Hannah Arendt from the Origins of Totalitarianism. She wrote, the ideal subject of totalitarian rul is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, that is the reality of experience and the distinction between true and false, that is the standards of thought, no longer exist. And I thought that was so interesting and so relevant just because, as we're seeing now with the Trump administration, and this was what this particular paper was focused on. But I mean, the denial of scientific fact having to do with climate change, the firing of scientists, the gutting of research having to do with climate and the environment. So much of that seems very part and parcel of the description of authoritarianism that you're giving and that description from Hannah Arendt of how authoritarianism or totalitarianism takes root, I just, I don't know. I'm curious your thoughts, because to me, that just seemed a very good breakdown of why these two topics are so related.
- [05:50]
James McCarthy
I guess I'll take a step back and I'll say that one of the things that a couple of things that motivated that collection and you see it's, you know, about it has research papers from the intersection looking at the intersections of environmental governance and authoritarianism all around the world. So thinking about this from the US Perspective, I think one of the things that it's always really important to keep in mind is first, Trump is a symptom, not a cause. And second, the US Is not exceptional here. So we really need to understand Trump and Trumpism and what this administration is doing right now in the context of a really, truly global turn towards authoritarian and populist politics over the past really couple of decades. So that's one thing. I think the second thing starting to go to your question about what's specific about the environment here, is I do think that the environment, and not only climate change, but especially climate change, is sort of especially relevant here. So in other words, it's not just that, well, this is an authoritarian regime, so they're taking authoritarian approaches to education, to health care, to trade policy, whatever. And so of course, they're taking an authoritarian approach to environmental governance as well. I think that there is something really particular about the challenges that thinking about the environment places on their political economic agenda and their governance agenda that make it really important to do what you're describing of actively constructing ignorance that way. In other words, you have to actually remove the data because the data contradicts some of your claims so powerfully.
- [07:41]
Sami Roth
Another comment that you make pretty high up in your sort of overview paper here that I think is interesting. You write that environmental issues, movements and politics can and must be central to resistance against authoritarian and reactionist populist politics. Why and how can environmentalism be central to resistance?
- [07:59]
James McCarthy
Well, for at least two reasons, I would say. One is that obviously when we're talking about issues like climate change and other environmental issues at that scale, the loss of biodiversity at a global scale, for example, we are actually talking about the future livability of the globe. And so if we don't actually mount an effective resistance on some of those fronts, then, you know, there are real questions about what sorts of futures we and our descendants can look forward to and what our society looks like. The second reason, and sort of related to that, is that I think, and I hope I believe that people can see their own self interest in environmental protection, whatever else you think about these politics, politics. Sometimes when we see people trying to resist the current authoritarian turn in politics, it's often about asking people to do the right thing because it's the right thing, not necessarily because they have some immediate stake in it. You know, we might say, well, it's wrong to treat other people that way, but if we, you know, deport people with unusual cruelty or something like that or, you know, we don't insist on stopping bombing campaigns in other parts of the world, maybe it doesn't immediately change my day to day life. When it comes to environmental protections, we're talking about toxins and other kinds of poisons that we are potentially exposed to. When we talk about climate change being unchecked, we're talking about increased risks of wildfires or floods, damaging or destroying our own houses and communities and so forth. And so I think that there is a way in which people can see their own self interest in protecting their environments.
- [09:56]
Sami Roth
One of the ideas in several of these papers that I found the most illuminating was that even though a lot of Trump's rhetoric, and I'll add here that just your point very well taken, that you made, that Trump is a symptom, not a disease, which I think goes under the radar a lot, but the Trump rhetoric about environmental rhetoric about populism, that, you know, we're rolling back these regulations for you, for the people to put you back to work for the miners, it seems very, you know, even, even if there may be some short term economic benefits that it is, it is ultimately in larger service of these long term goals of serving corporate interests.
- [10:39]
James McCarthy
Yes, I think that's absolutely correct. If you want to understand the appeal of authoritarian and populist politics in a lot of places around the world in the past couple decades, and for that matter, in a lot of ways, if you want to understand the appeal of Bernie Sanders, I think you need to look back to. And then if you want to understand the particular role of the environment in this, you need to look back to just before the neoliberal era. So basically kind of between the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s is sort of the high watermark of the modern environmental movement in the United States. It's when there's first a movement that calls itself environmentalism. And in retrospect, you know, from our current perspectives, it's shocking how successful it is. It's absolutely shocking. Like most of the big federal environmental laws that we have on the books are passed in that decade and it's.
- [11:32]
Sami Roth
Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act.
- [11:35]
James McCarthy
Yeah, you could just go on and on. Yeah, most of the big ones, Endangered Species act, you know, all of them are passed in that kind of decade, mid-1960s to mid-1970s or so. It's when the Environmental Protection Agency is created by Richard Nixon, you amazingly have bipartisan consensus. You have both parties competing to be more pro environment in some ways. And these things diffuse or they're pushed out in some ways. So again, this isn't just the US all around the world, you have bureaucracies, created agencies. And I think it is fair to say that Congress probably didn't fully appreciate all of the implications of that wave of legislation that they were passing as it then gradually got implemented via regulations. Okay, so that's one big thing in that decade. So moving forward, obviously we need to look at how neoliberalism plays out. And the basic premise of neoliberalism in many ways is that if we leave everything to the market, everyone will be better off. The rising tide will lift all boats. And so there's a push to liberalize everything, Liberalize trade, reduce tariff barriers, sign free trade agreements, lower borders, in various ways, deregulate everything. It arguably it delivered in some ways. Decades of neoliberalism definitely delivered huge growth in total wealth, but of course it was incredibly unequally distributed. So it also delivered in many places, deindustrialization, stagnant incomes, growing debt, growing inequality. We all know all that. So you do see a genuine desire over the past couple of decades growing for a real alternative to this. And so in that context, you can see the appeal of someone saying, look, I'm going to come in, I'm going to institute tariffs, I'm going to make our border stronger. I'm going to say our nation comes first. We don't worry about what's good for the global economy as a whole. We worry about what's best for our given country. And so I think in many ways a lot of the mass appeal of this kind of populist, authoritarian turn is understandable in that sense. However, what we need to also look at is that most of what Trump and his counterparts in other countries are actually doing, as opposed to what they say they're doing, can really better be understood as continuation and deepening of the neoliberal project in the sense that they are clearly putting the interests of corporations and the very wealthy ahead of the interests of working class people or any, you know, very general sense of the long term public good. But it is telling that they keep coming back to this project of we have to roll back environmental regulations.
- [14:32]
Sami Roth
Point well taken. Because the coal mines, you know, coal mining jobs keep drying up even as, you know, if they coal plants open, companies are going to be able to continue extracting some profit from these things. But it's not like they're saving the coal mining industry. Some of the energy companies are going to continue to extract some profits from these plants. But at the end of the day, these people are still going to need to find new lines of work or something different is going to have to happen. It's not like we're going to outcompete. It's not like coal is the energy source of the future. They haven't changed that.
- [15:02]
James McCarthy
Right. And sorry, one other piece that's important in all that sort of. In those intervening decades, I think the right was very successful in basically telling people that their incomes were stagnating or that, you know, inequality was increasing or they were even losing their jobs because of environmental regulations. And I don't think that's true. They were. That was. Those things were happening because they were being exposed to more direct competition with more producers in more places around the world after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the somewhat end of the Cold War and so forth and, you know, outsourcing of production and all that. And of course, there is massive automation and mechanization going on. I mean, that's what happened to the coal jobs.
- [15:55]
Sami Roth
We'll be back after a quick break. You write in your paper, mounting awareness of climate change, even when the latter is consciously denied, might contribute to a generalized sense of insecurity and instability that can find expression in populist and nationalist sentiments. I mean, basically the idea that even if you're a climate denier, it's not an authoritarian figure, a populist like Trump might be able to exploit that fear. Or, oh, the world is getting more dangerous. Things are scary, weather is bad, migrants perhaps are pouring across borders for reasons that are related to climate, like extreme drought or crop failure. Is not that Trump is gonna say that it's because of climate and use that increasingly unstable world to grasp and hold onto power. I mean, that's a real phenomenon that's starting to play out, isn't it?
- [16:50]
James McCarthy
Yes, absolutely. And I think it's one of the things that interests me the most in this domain and also frightens me the most. But it's also someplace where I think that there is at least some political potential in that. I don't know, maybe I'm naive. I think that better explanations of reality do sort of have an edge in the long run. But as we look at climate change clearly increasing, I do think that it creates or feeds into this pervasive sense of anxiety about the future. And some of that's economic, some of it's social, some of it has other dynamics. But I do think that this growing sense of anxiety, fear, uncertainty about the future is fueled in part by awareness of mounting climate change. Whether that awareness is conscious or unconscious. And so I think it's really interesting. So I think there are maybe three potential political responses to that that we are worth thinking about. So one is if we say climate change really does represent a sort of serious challenge to the capitalist world economy and to the Order, we can think of it as kind of a planetary scale collective action problem. So if we go back just a little bit, historically, in many ways, the sort of international climate change bureaucracy, the UNFCCC, the annual COPs, that's the United Nation originally. Yeah. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Yeah, sorry, the annual cops, the annual conference of the parties trying to hammer out agreements like the Paris agreement, the ipcc, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to provide scientific information to policymakers about climate change. In many ways, those were sort of the existing post war order's response to the challenge of climate change. And the basic idea was let the neoliberal order do its work, let it use market mechanisms. We can find ways to price this in. We can find ways to maintain stability even as we deal with climate change. Things don't have to change that much. And unfortunately, I think we have to be honest and say that those efforts have very, very largely failed. The IPCC has produced tremendous scientific knowledge about climate change, which has been largely ignored by policymakers. And we're going on 30 years of the annual COP meetings and we haven't reduced emissions at a global scale at all. They continue to climb.
- [19:28]
Sami Roth
In fact, few things annoy me more than when politicians, even good politic, harp on about Trump got out of Paris. We need to get back into Paris. That's not the point. The point is to do something about it, actually take action on climate. Paris was aspiration anyway. Go on. Yes.
- [19:43]
James McCarthy
Okay, so one political vision is you kind of let the existing international order try to manage it. The second thing that has a lot of appeal for some people, and I think you alluded to this earlier, is some people see some kind of hope in authoritarian environmental governance. Maybe liberal democracies really aren't up to the job. But if you look at a country like China, which has the ability to engage in incredibly centralized planning, mobilize resources on a huge scale, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't have to worry about being voted out of power in the next election. And when you look at what China's been able to do in things like industrialization, urbanization, large scale renewable energy research and deployment and so forth, some people look at that and say, well, maybe that's the model, maybe an authoritarian government could.
- [20:37]
Sami Roth
It's funny, I have been seeing a lot of laudatory coverage among energy journalists lately of EVs are so much cheaper in China and look how much solar they're building, and we're going to lose the renewable energy race to China. And I'm not criticizing those journalists. None of them are saying, and isn't it great that they have an authoritarian Communist Party that can do all that? But, but a lot of admiration out there for what they're able to accomplish in the energy transition. And you're right, it's because of the government structure they have, which is not something that we would ever want in the United States.
- [21:07]
James McCarthy
Well, I mean, it's not something I would ever want. Maybe it's not something you would ever want, but I think there are sometimes some people who look at it and say, well, if you really want to take, as you were saying earlier, if you really want to take very rapid, decisive, national scale action, you know, so I'm not, I'm not advocating it clearly, but I'm saying that's one of the things on the menu out there. And when we think about the appeal of authoritarianism relative to environmental questions, I think that's part of the conversation.
- [21:39]
Sami Roth
Well, let's get to number three, which I'm hoping is better than one and two.
- [21:41]
James McCarthy
Oh, no, it's much worse. I'm sorry.
- [21:45]
Sami Roth
Oh, I'm sorry.
- [21:46]
James McCarthy
It's much worse. Maybe we can come up with a fourth. But the third one is like what we're actually doing right now in the US with the Trump administration. The third one is basically we put our heads in the sand, we withdraw, we deny the problem, we just put our own national interests first and don't worry about the planet or the globe or international orders. And obviously it's an absurd response because if you're talking about biophysical problems like climate change, you cannot meaningfully address them purely at a national scale. And so I'm sure you're familiar with the Prisoner's dilemma. What we're doing right now is basically having all the countries that are taking this route are taking the worst option in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
- [22:32]
Sami Roth
For those not familiar, Google the Prisoner's Dilemma after this. And if you really feel like it, I'm going to vote for option one. But we just do a better job because it seems way better than options two and three.
- [22:42]
James McCarthy
So, I mean, I do think option four is maybe something like the Green New Deal. We admit that neoliberalism wasn't working, is unfair, unjust, we accept that people have a lot of reasons for objecting to it. And we take a much more deeply social democratic and justice oriented, public good centered approach to energy transition. So that's my fourth and preferred option.
- [23:13]
Sami Roth
One more question. The way we came about to reaching out to you to have this conversation was I did a piece a couple of months ago about, gosh, it was this extremely local issue in Los Angeles, in the Los Angeles area, that the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, which, as you might guess, exists to help administer federal funds for the restoration of Santa Monica Bay in the LA area. They were preemptively cutting out a bunch of climate and environmental justice and DEI related terms from a document that was going to be used and reviewed by the EPA for the solicitation of federal funds because they were afraid that the Trump administration would deny them. And I basically wrote about it as an example of capitulating in advance, which a lot of institutions are doing right now. Universities, law firms, nonprofits, big corporations, et cetera. So to go back to my half in jest, but not really comment about why not option one, but just do a better job. I mean, realistically, when we talk about authoritarianism and climate and the environment, I mean, do you foresee there being any realistic scenario where these companies that had climate commitments, these universities that said they were going to divest, these nonprofits that were committing all this money to clean energy, whatever it is, get a spine and start becoming better actors here?
- [24:38]
James McCarthy
Well, I certainly hope so, is the short answer. I think there's a chance of it. I don't want to stay too local, but since you mentioned a local example, I will say that my institution, Clark University, is launching next fall a new school of climate, Environment and society. And it's something that we started planning and talking about well before Trump was elected this time. But it's something that we think is really making use of our institutional resources and responding to growing undergraduate concern. And we are still going ahead with it. It frankly may be more difficult to get a lot of the federal funding for it that we might have hoped for over the next few years, but we are going ahead with it more generally. I'm in Massachusetts and obviously Harvard's struggle with the Trump administration is in the news every day. I do think, and I hope that that represents a kind of pivot point and that we're seeing a movement. There are certainly, I know every university is talking about this. They are talking with each other about this, even if they have been slower than I would like to come out with some Kind of official united front. Law firms are talking about it. And so I do have hopes on that front. I also have hopes that renewable energy has become, as you mentioned earlier, a big industry. And so there's certainly lobbying in pushback from some big energy firms, including some from outside the US that are talking about billions of dollars in investments and they want certainty for their investments.
- [26:18]
Sami Roth
Yeah, I think it was a Scandinavian firm with Empire Wind, the big offshore wind farm off New York. They somehow got Trump to let them go forward after he tried to stop them.
- [26:29]
James McCarthy
Yeah, exactly. And so there's maybe potential for things like that. That it's interesting. Insurance and reinsurance companies at some point maybe don't like the scale of losses that they are potentially facing. But I do think that there are both civil society actors and economic actors who have a long term interest in meaningful responses to climate change to maintain some kind of stability.
- [27:03]
Sami Roth
I hope and think you're right. Fingers crossed. And I didn't mean my question to imply that the fourth route you described, the much more populist, progressive, green New Deal route, is impossible or doesn't have a place. I'm sort of hedging here and thinking that that one, if it were ever to come to be, is certainly going to take longer. And in the interest of getting emissions down as fast as possible, I continue to hold out hope that the more neoliberal, market driven route that we've been on recently, that's got to have some promise or emissions just aren't going to come down in the next few years the way that they need to to avoid stuff that's pretty catastrophic.
- [27:42]
James McCarthy
Absolutely. I mean, it's not how I would design things if I were in charge, but certainly if I had the option of choosing between the kind of broadly Obama Biden approach to climate and accepting a cap and trade system and so forth, versus the Trump administration approach to climate, I know which one I would choose.
- [28:04]
Sami Roth
Which one would that. No, I'm kidding. James, thank you very much for being with us on the Boiling Point podcast.
- [28:10]
James McCarthy
Thanks very much for having me.
- [28:16]
Sami Roth
Hey, everybody, one last thing. If you want to help more people find Boiling Points, please give the show a good rating or leave us a good review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen. You could also just tell your friends. Thanks very much. Thank you for listening to Boiling Point. I'm your host, Sammy Roth. My producers are Mary Knoff and Jonathan Shiflett. Sound design and original music by Jonathan Shiflett. Elijah Wolfson is our editor. Denise Callahan is our studio manager. Ben Church is our Production manager. Nick Norton is our engineer. Special thanks to LA Times Studio President Anna Magzanian, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Argentieri and Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Terry Tang. Boiling Point is executive produced by Darius Derekshon and created by me, Sam Roth. The Tunein app is the most convenient.
- [29:20]
James McCarthy
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- [29:22]
Sami Roth
On the Go download the Tunein app.
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James McCarthy
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Sami Roth
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- [29:32]
James McCarthy
To download the app today.
- [29:36]
Taya Jeanette
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