Democracy, mobility and climate change: what’s next?

There’s an epistemological problem today, because even when we have most of the data, we still don’t act. The climate is a good example: for 40 years, we’ve been talking about global warming, but it’s only in the last few years that we’ve been implementing in-depth policies. Action comes late.

What can we do about it? We need to avoid approaching the subject of mobility as a kind of re-fertilization. In terms of freedom, mobility is a luxury reserved for the rich. If we look at cities like London or Paris, it’s clear that having a car in a big city is expensive, as is parking and the space reserved for them. Why not give the city back to the people? But we have to be careful:

• Re-fertilization: habits such as flying, driving or eating meat will be reserved only for the rich. This is very dangerous for democratic societies, which are all based on the equality of all citizens.
• Not adopting control policies. We saw with Covid that there were a lot of conspiracy theories. These tendencies emerge when we start to control and regulate people’s movements.

The answers we come up with have to be democratic, have to deal with the problem of control, and at the same time have to deal with the issue of re-fertilization.

In the past, we’ve created our cities for cars, to the tune of 80%. If we can turn back the clock and give cities back to the people, I think it could be a good move that would be social, climate-friendly and maintain freedom.