Surviving Democracy: Mitigating Climate Change in a Neoliberalized World (Environmental Politics)

Is democracy, in its neoliberalized form, responsible in part for bringing us to the brink of self-destruction and the policy inertia that is doing away with our chances of survival? Surviving Democracy probes the way democracy became neoliberalized and the role neoliberalized democracy plays in our dealings with―causing, understanding, denying, and mitigating―climate change.

Defining neoliberalism as the art of exclusion through inclusion, Chien-Yi Lu treats climate change as collateral damage of the neoliberal order established to ensure upward power and wealth redistribution. Highlighting the role money played in the "free" competition of ideas between Keynes and Hayek, she investigates the resulting global structure, wherein the wealthy and powerful sit above the market and democracy, and the way this structure fundamentally contradicts with honest climate mitigation. Central to the structure is neoliberal elites’ leveraging of the fluid relationship between the market and the state. Merging citizen power with consumer and investor powers is therefore imperative to the success of climate action. While expediting the bursting of the carbon bubble is an obvious answer, it is the discussion of the meat bubble that brings the book full circle, linking our survival to neoliberalism, inclusion, and democracy.

Surviving Democracy probes the role democracy plays in our dealings with―causing, understanding, denying, and hopefully, mitigating―climate change.

Chien-Yi Lu is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies of Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research focuses on how democracy has transmuted as regional integration deepened and supranational institutions gained more power, and how democracy, in its neoliberalized form, has intervened in our ability to recognize, curb, and cope with climate change.