It's 16 September, 2019. Joanna Sustento stands alone, protesting outside the Philippines headquarters of oil company Shell. Her handwritten sign reads, simply, ‘climate justice’. Joanna's parents and brother died in Typhoon Haiyan. That same day, the UK's former government chief scientist, Sir David King, tells the BBC that extreme storms are on the rise. Removing his cloak of scientific objectivity, he says “it's appropriate to be scared”. Later, my teenage son, prompted by something he has read on my laptop screen, asks me what will happen if the earth heats up by 3oC. I think about what it could be like to live in a world that is three degrees warmer, the immense damage to people's lives, to human societies and to the natural world. I find that I can hardly bring myself to speak. I know it's cowardly, but I give him the quickest answer I can get away with, and change the subject. This is the climate crisis.

Faced with a problem of these proportions, the earth scientist James Lovelock has grown frustrated with the lack of response from politicians and the public. After many decades of research and advocacy on climate change, Lovelock no longer believes that elected governments are capable of taking the planetary perspective that he sees as necessary to tackle climate change. He calls for drastic measures. Likening the fight against climate change to a major world war, he points out that wars often involve the suspension of some democratic freedoms. “Climate change may be an issue as severe as a war,” he has said. “It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while” (quoted in Hickman, 2010).

Lovelock's explicit abandonment of democracy is unusual. But it is not unusual at all for scientists, economists and other experts on climate to express deep frustration with politics and, by extension, democracy. Nicholas Stern, economist and author of the highly influential Stern Review, was speaking for many when he said ‘while it is clear that it is still technically feasible to limit warming … we will not succeed without strong political will and leadership’ (Stern, 2018).