With natural, financial, economic, and political shocks testing the bounds of democratic resilience, trust between citizens and the state needs to be reinvented along with a new paradigm proposition for political economies fit for an age of climate disruptions. The stakes are nothing short of a societal transformation for which alternative visions are needed and have yet to come about. But democratic reflections on the climate transition have generally been limited in scope and ambition, failing to rethink governance, economics, and social contracts beyond the single issue of energy substitution.
States have resorted to ad hoc mechanisms, such as climate assemblies, to support climate transitions-with relative success. Spurred by the rising costs of oil extraction and the urgency of decarbonization, volatile energy prices are becoming more common and social contracts increasingly stand on unstable ground. Most of these gases occur naturally in the atmosphere and, together with water vapour, act like a blanket around the Earth, keeping its surface much warmer than it otherwise would be.The climate transition is challenging the relationship between economics and politics in liberal democracies. Over the past two hundred years, however, and especially since 1950, humanity’s use of ancient fossil-fuel energy has released carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an entirely unprecedented rate, with potentially dangerous consequences.
It was thanks to the balance between real-time solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere and heat escaping back out into space that Earth maintained a steady and benevolent average temperature during the Holocene. Which of these sources of solar energy the economy uses matters a great deal, and here’s why. And some has been stored up since ancient times, particularly the fossil fuels of oil, coal and gas. Some has been stored in recent times, like the energy bound up in crops, livestock and trees. Some of that solar energy, such as sunshine and wind, arrives in real time each day. “The vast majority of energy that powers today’s global economy is from the sun.
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