‘Keeping us hooked on fossil fuels’: how can we negotiate with autocracies on the climate crisis? | Climate crisis

When it comes to the climate crisis, how do you negotiate with an autocracy?

It is the case today, and it is almost certain to remain so for the dwindling number of years in which we can hope to stave off the worst of climate breakdown, that the bulk of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that are not democratic. Add to that, many of the major suppliers of oil and gas – the Gulf petrostates for instance, plus Russia, Venezuela and a few others – are likewise authoritarian.

Their outsize impact puts autocratic nations in the spotlight when it comes to global climate talks. How their governments decide to act will be crucial to the planet’s future. But while democracies are subject to the whims of electorates, which can often be unpredictable, autocratic nations tend to be far more inscrutable.

Take the small handful of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, referred to as the “carbon majors”. They hold our future in their hands, and of the top 20 with the biggest carbon output globally, 16 are state-owned and were responsible for 52% of global emissions in 2023.

But these companies are generally accountable only to the governments that own them. The great majority – including Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, China’s CHN Energy and Jinneng Holding Group and the National Iranian Oil Company – are owned by autocracies or authoritarian governments. Among the top five biggest emitters, only Coal India belongs to a democracy.

Does this matter? For many years, climate diplomats took the pragmatic view that it did not. “When we were negotiating, I was not really thinking about where these governments came on the scale of democracy,” said Todd Stern, the US chief negotiator under Barack Obama, who helped craft the Paris agreement.

But now the question has assumed a new significance. The power over the planet wielded by a small number of autocratic states is greater than ever. Their actions could effectively determine whether the world succeeds in limiting global heating to less than catastrophic levels.

“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.”

Their position needs to shift. But how on earth can that be done? The chief executive of this year’s climate summit in Brazil, Ana Toni, said: “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.”

In the past, countries such as Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia – the world’s fourth, seventh and 10th biggest emitters respectively – kept a low profile, and other countries tended to allow them to do so in the hope of preventing them from disrupting an already fragile process. Recently, however, some of those countries have begun to take a more active role in blocking the negotiations.

Russia is the source of vast quantities of online disinformation about the climate crisis, and Saudi Arabia has sought to derail and water down commitments at UN climate summits, including altering a key text last year.

“They, and other petrostates, have gotten away with their morbid resource dependence, which is terribly harmful for the planet,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser.

So can autocracies be persuaded to take action on climate change, and if so how? There is room for optimism, experts point out. Being state-owned, or operating within an authoritarian country or under a populist leader, does not prevent companies with high emissions from environmental progressiveness, according to Francis Fukuyama, a scholar of political systems and author of The End of History, a seminal work on democracy.

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,” he said.

China is a good example. Now the world’s biggest producer of renewable energy, the country has registered record exports of electric vehicles, solar panels and other components of low-carbon technology. The director general of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, 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,” she said. “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.”

But the problem is that even the supposed advantages autocracies possess, in the form of command over the economy, can prove illusory on examination. 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 and author of a recent book on the subject. “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.”

What are the issues that might deter autocracies from taking action? Internally, the lack of pressure from below is a major problem, and arguably – along with transparency – the biggest difference with democracies. Popular protest has been one of the main means by which environmental action has been achieved in the past. The economist Nicholas Stern points, for example, to the first Earth Day demonstrations in the US, on 22 April 1970, in which more than 20 million people are estimated to have taken part. Within a few years, the US had a Clean Air Act, a Clean Water Act and an Environmental Protection Agency – all brought in by the Republican president Richard Nixon, and maddeningly all now gutted by the Republican president Donald Trump.

Thomas Piketty, the French economist and author of several critiques of capitalism, wants to take this further. “We definitely need social protest and popular pressure to deliver climate action,” he said. “But formal democracy is not enough: we need equal voice, effective democratic participation, mass mobilisation 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.”

Protesting to urge climate action in countries where democracy is under threat is at best perilous, and can be fatal. In Georgia, where a fledgling democracy has taken a turn towards ultra-conservatism under Russia’s influence, Nugzar Kokhreidze, the co-founder of the Dialogue of Generations group describes the reality of activism: “Some have already left the country. Others keep fighting, but without funding and under constant fear of arrest or repression. This severely limits the space for activism and narrows the possibilities for action.”

In many of these countries, fossil fuels represent a super-powered economic interest. In Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran, they literally fuel the entire economy, and the erasure of protest means there is no counterbalance. “In autocracies that are deeply committed to fossil fuel development as part of their economic models, there is no real internal resistance to that,” said Mittiga.

Bledsoe points to Russia, where leaks from oil and gas production are some of the worst in the world, and the government has refused to take any action to reduce them even though it could be profitable to do so. “They have insanely high fugitive methane emissions from their hydrocarbon production, and they have very little incentive to prevent it,” he said.

Much depends on the economic situation of the country involved, adds 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,” he said. “We have to, as political economists, understand vested interests.”

A further issue might be the corrupting effect that authoritarian hierarchy has on information flows. Shiran Victoria Shen, a senior research scholar at Stanford University, says, for example, that autocracies may plan to put positive environmental strategies in place, but “they often struggle with implementation due to information asymmetries – leaders may not always receive accurate reports from local enforcers and often lack alternative channels to verify information, making it harder to ensure compliance”.

What about pressure from outside? Transparency, or the lack of it, is perhaps the most important issue. In 2016, for example, just after the Paris agreement had been signed, analysts said China’s emissions may have peaked, but it was a false hope. Despite forecasts of a plunge in coal use, China’s leadership took a decisive but covert turn back towards fossil fuels. The government had appeared ready to cancel coal contracts, but satellite images revealed coal-fired power stations being built. The country’s coal sector roared back to life, and in every year since, apart from a slight decrease in 2022, emissions have increased.

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. China has pledged to produce a new national plan on emissions before the Cop30 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 the country’s officials are under strict orders to be tight-lipped about its contents. “The plan is all in Xi Jinping’s head at the moment,” one veteran observer of Cops said. “We are finding that no one [in government] will talk about it.”

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.

Unlike companies quoted on stock exchanges, state-owned entities and some other forms of company headquartered in authoritarian states face few requirements to disclose their finances or activities. Saudi Arabia scaled back plans for a partial flotation of Aramco, partly to limit such disclosure. “In well-regulated democracies, you ought to be able to find out who [whether companies or branches of government] is doing what and where,” said Bledsoe. “That’s not the case with authoritarian states.”

External pressure could be brought to bear by economic means. The EU, the UK and other developed countries have, for example, put forward carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs), under which imported high-carbon goods such as steel would face stiff tariffs.

But there are problems with this approach too. Many smaller developing countries are furious, fearing they will be penalised as well. Work has begun on the reporting stage of the EU’s CBAM, but it has not yet entered full operation.

Before reaching for such a drastic tool – particularly in a world reeling from the impacts of Trump’s on-off-on tariffs – countries tend to try a more traditional approach. Before the 2015 Paris summit, France pioneered “360 degree diplomacy” – using every embassy, consulate and cultural institution in every country around the world as a channel to talk about climate. Brazil, as host of Cop30, is taking a similarly cooperative tack, appointing 30 special envoys from around the world to help with its mission.

Sometimes the personal touch can win out against the apparent odds. John Kerry, a US climate envoy under Joe Biden, enjoyed such a warm rapport over many years with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, that before retiring within days of each other, the two men gave a last joint press conference at Cop28 in 2023, in which they shared anecdotes about the attendance of Xie’s young grandson at Kerry’s 80th birthday party. Their successors, Liu Zhenmin and John Podesta, tried to recreate some of that warmth a few months later at a cosy meal in the latter’s Washington home. Democracy being what it is, however, Podesta was ousted when Trump took over, and future US-China climate dinners are now unlikely.

The fact is that many democracies are not faring much better. The US has withdrawn from the Paris agreement and the White House is dismantling domestic environmental regulations. Canada and Australia have both elected centrist leaders this year in free and fair elections. They gave 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.

“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.”