Dictators hold elections, and businesses greenwash, because they know the importance of appearances. Climate activists, deploying transparency to exploit the reputational fear betrayed by such autocrat posturing, can nudge reluctant businesses into actually cutting emissions, rather than pretending to.

This article argues that though the rise of autocrats offering simple solutions to complex issues is discouraging, it also offers hope to climate activists seeking to address the most complex issue of all, the climate emergency. The powerful still crave the trappings of legitimacy, a vulnerability climate activists can exploit as a stick, alongside carrots like appeals to morality, which have so far been ineffective in cutting emissions.

Why Do Dictators Hold Elections?

Saddams did it.

Assads did it.

Even uneducated Xis do it (at village level).

Why do it?

Why hold a vote?

Why dictators bother to hold elections is a political science paradox. 

Autocrats, and their cowed citizens, are all acutely aware that autocrats’ power emanates from the barrel of a gun. So why bother pretending it comes from the ballot box?

The image at the top of this article answers this question in the form of a riddle. We’ll reveal the answer in due course, but first let’s hear the political scientists’ answer to this paradox. Typically, they involve combinations of factors like:

• Manufactured legitimacy
• Controlled participation
• Divide-and-rule
• Co-opting opposition
• Managing elites
• Projecting stability

…and other academic shorthand delineating the overlap of realpolitik and psychopathy. 

A child might be baffled by such academic jargon, but they can all be summarized in a sentence a 4-year-old could understand:

It makes them look good because deep down, they know the ‘right’ thing to do.

A delicate straw to clutch

Citing dictators might sound like a desperate straw for climate activists to grasp. 

It is. 

Around the world, just as the climate crisis bites, the political pendulum appears to be swinging towards autocracy. 

Activists in democracies often wistfully envy how dictators can ‘just get things done’ without all the complications of consulting with the masses. They may now be regretting what they wish for, but in truth the focus on autocracy vs democracy misses the point, when it comes to effective climate action. 

Consider the following assertions about the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, a people’s republic that only trusts its people to vote for village heads. Does China:

1. Lead the world in renewable energy research, manufacture and installation. 
2. Generate much of the emissions making products for countries who have outsourced their manufacturing base, but don’t count them in their Scope 3 (Indirect Emissions)
3. Still have a huge and rising consumption of coal.

The answer is all three are true. This is why democracy is neither the problem, nor autocracy the solution, to our climate crisis.

The uncomfortable truth is that China’s state-sponsored rise to renewable energy dominance has coincided with rising coal consumption and rocketing national emissions, as demand from its own citizens, and overseas customers, continues to rocket. 

Whether your legitimacy lies in the bullet or the ballot, is not the point. Democrat leaders and autocrats still ultimately depend on keeping their people happy enough (which usually means rich enough)  not to remove them. Ask the ghosts of Saddam and Assad, or Churchill after he lost the 1945 election.

If neither democracy nor autocracy decarbonises on its own, where does that leave fans of human civilization, AKA ‘environmentalists’?

What straw of hope is there for anyone trying to stop our species marching towards an abyss and nudge us towards a sustainable path? 

Will this straw enable our great grandchildren to enjoy the pleasures of civilization we’ve grown to take for granted? Or will they revert to hunting and gathering on the shrivelled, drowned, burnt ecosystem we bequeath them?

Here’s a straw. 

Deep down, they know the ‘right’ thing to do.

Good news buried in bad

The headlines are not encouraging.

Just when we need leaders to collaborate on fixing our self-induced existential crisis through concerted climate action, democracies and autocracies are favouring policies that blame foreigners, highlight national differences and stoke up ethnic divisions, religious conflict and culture wars.

Wherever they lie on the democracy-autocracy spectrum, such tribal responses are the opposite of effective climate action to decarbonise. 

We need to wean ourselves from our fossil fuel addiction, but our leaders are currently inviting the pushers in, and urging us all to pop, smoke and inject whatever they have on offer. Not so much cold turkey, as epic final bender.

Some even celebrate their perversity by thrusting ‘environmentalists’ into the enemy camp, chanting ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’. 

Others arrest and imprison protestors who point out the ‘hypocrisy gap’, i.e. the distance between: 

1. Their fine words about prioritising ‘the environment’ (as if it were equivalent to ‘patronising the arts’)
2. Their actions, which favour the status quo of elevating profit over planet

Meanwhile, in smoke-filled rooms and whispered conversations in corridors, businesses plot their ‘greenwash gap’, i.e. the distance between:

1. Their fine words about prioritising ‘the environment’ (so long as they set the rules via voluntary self-regulation)
2. Their actions, which favour the status quo of elevating profit over planet

Actual and aspiring dictators alike tend to invoke traditional tropes like blaming foreigners, enriching elites, and ‘Drill, Baby Drill’, not urgent decarbonisation. 

We’ve yet to experience a military coup resulting in shutting down refineries and massive investment in renewable infrastructure.

One day, maybe.

In the meantime, where’s the gleaming gold straw to clutch in this cesspool of despair?

The Dictator’s Dilemma

Let’s start with basics – how does the modern autocrat acquire his (they’re nearly always men) monopoly of power?

Old-school autocrats, having toppled the incumbent by force of arms, used to justify their supremacy by claiming supernatural legitimacy. The evidence was necromancy, angelic messengers, miracles etc.

The advent of ‘Western liberal democracy’ and broader understanding of the scientific method, however, has raised the bar. 

With so many successful examples of regimes selected by all adult citizens, irrespective of wealth, gender and background, the modern autocrat has a limited range of awkward choices to justify wielding absolute power.

Let’s narrow them down to three:

1. Divine Appointees
2. Troll Polls
3. Democratic Dictators

Divine Appointees

Option One is to go old-school/ Assert, in some form or other, that ‘God Chose Me’.

When Chinese dynasties changed, the first new Emperor would claim the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ had been transferred to them. This wiped the slate clean, allowing them to pass the Mandate of Heaven on to their progeny until one of them had it wrested from them by the next lot. 

Lest this interpretation sound cynical, it’s not only possible, but likely, that both victor and vanquished sincerely believed this process was indeed the Will of Heaven. Superior firepower and mass slaughter were simply the means by which God/the gods had decided to express their change of mind.

Until a few generations ago, the ‘God Chose Me’ gambit was the default. European monarchs, Central American ‘Sapa Incas’ and Japanese Emperors all graciously sacrificed themselves in service of their respective deities. 

Today, ‘God Chose Me’ is almost entirely obsolete, even in theocracies. Ayatollahs and Taliban Supreme Commanders may say they’re representing the will of Allah, but even they are circumspect about basing their legitimacy on angels anointing them in dreams, presumably because they know it’s not a good look these days.

The only leaders to still play the God card are, unsurprisingly, religious ones. 

Cult leaders can still go full mediaeval ‘God Chose Me’, but in doing so limit their potential following to a diminishing minority still prepared to take unsupported claims of divine election at face value.

At scale, ‘God Chose Me’ needs to be obscured by ritual. The Catholic Church still invokes God’s will to pick a new Pope for its 1.4Bn global congregation, via the rituals of its Conclave of Cardinals. 

The Gelug (‘Yellow Hat’) school of Tibetan Buddhism does the same, via its particular reincarnation rituals. When the current (14th) Dalai Lama dies, two rival candidates to become the 15th will be selected by different means. 

• In Dharamsala, exiled Yellow Hat clerics will select their next earthly incarnation of Chenrezig, the Buddha of compassion. Their selection process, involving dreams, celestial signs, divinations and prayers that worked for the previous 14 occasions, reveals a child who can identify objects belonging to the previous incarnation. 

• Meanwhile, in Beijing, bureaucrats at the National Religious Affairs Administration will identify their 15th Dalai Lama by inscribing his name on an ivory tally stick, placing it in a silk bag, and drawing it in a blind lottery from a special Golden Urn. This election method was specified by the fourth Manchu Emperor in 1792, the year after France used the guillotine to end its own imperial line.

Incidentally, the CCP uses a different method to select its own leader. The seven members of its Politburo Standing Committee vote one of themselves to the top job. 

Confused? Exactly. 

The only point we’re making here is that both expat Tibetan monks and bureaucrats of the National Religious Affairs Administration of the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the CCP think it important to perform these elaborate selection rituals, rather than just announce a name and move on.  

Why? Because it confers legitimacy.

Troll Polls

Troll polls are elections so transparently fake, they challenge any challengers to expose themselves by pointing it out. 

• Political scientists call it ‘flushing out the opposition’. 
• To psychologists, it’s ‘passive-aggressive trolling’.
• Chairman Mao, in his ‘Hundred Flowers Campaign’, called it ‘luring the snake from its hole.

Let’s return to the riddle contained in the two logos and numbers featured in this article’s cover image. 

The implied question is ‘What do these two things have in common?’.

Here’s the answer.

As the date suggests, both logo/number combinations refer to events that took place in 2022.

The left hand image is the flag of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. 

97% is the number its electoral commission announced as the percentage of votes cast in the 2022 presidential election for Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, incumbent since 1982 when he moved on from his previous role as Chair of the country’s Supreme Military Council. 

As of 2025, President Obiang is the longest consecutively serving current non-royal national leader in the world, pipping his neighbour to the north, Paul Biya of Cameroon by a few weeks. For the past four decades, both presidents have regularly prevailed in elections since initially replacing their predecessors via military coup. 

The number in brackets (100.17%) is the share of the vote the Equatorial Guinean electoral commission initially claimed for President Obiang. The commission withdrew the figure it was pointed out that this was a statistical impossibility. 97% was their final official vote share figure for the incumbent.

The right hand image is the logo of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. 

0.00 was the figure displayed on the official website as the net amount of greenhouse gas their event emitted. This includes both building 10 air-conditioned concrete stadia in a desert, and hosting three million fans who flew in to attend the event. 

The 0% number was calculated by a carbon consultancy. Coincidentally, both consultancy and the World Cup sponsor shared an owner, the Qatari royal family. 

The net zero claim was removed after the Swiss advertising regulator ruled FIFA had misled fans by claiming the 2022 World Cup was carbon neutral. But they removed it in 2023, when no one was looking.

So the answer to what these two images have in common is that both numbers are patent nonsense. There are many other examples.

Congratulations if you solved this riddle, but the point of it is not to expose statistical infelicities, but to prompt further, more awkward questions, like:

• Why do President Obiang, President Biwa and others choose to hold elections, instead of proudly claiming the title of ‘Dictator’, or advertising their firepower supremacy over any challenger?

• Why do international bodies, the media, and the public, fail to challenge such obvious lies, when they do the opposite of their apparent goal of conferring legitimacy? Could it be related to the fact that during President Obiang’s presidency, Equatorial Guinea (pop. 2M) rose to become Africa’s third-biggest oil & gas producer? 

• Are climate activists, who are less endowed with power, money and influence than the leaders and businesses who can cut significant emissions, missing an opportunity? Might they be more effective if they made better use of the assets in which they are rich, i.e. truth and transparency?

Democratic Dictators

The ‘democratic dictator’, paradoxical thought it might sound, is the most popular option for the modern autocrat. 

It’s a well-understood strategy, and a well-trod path. Tactics include:

• Suppress, intimidate or own the media
• Suppress, intimidate or infiltrate the judiciary
• Suppress, intimidate or co-opt political opposition
• Suppress, intimidate or undermine civil servants and civil society

There are many examples of democratic dictators, but Hungary’s Victor Orbán is an oft-cited role model.

Specifically, would-be autocrats admire, and wish to emulate, how Orbán has asserted his monopoly on power while still holding elections. Despite sounding like a despot, he’s managed to remain inside the EU tent, despite displaying the autocratic behaviour that keeps others, like Turkey, outside Europe’s democratic tent.

It’s revealing, however, that aspiring democratic dictators publicly praise Orbán’s Hungary, and are happy to be photographed beaming beside him, but are more reticent when it comes to Putin’s Russia. 

Logically, Putin should be a much bigger hero. He’s bent a nuclear-armed superpower of 144M souls to his will, not a middling central European state of 10M.

So why is it OK to publicly praise Orbán, but keep back-slapping with Putin behind closed doors?

Might it be because:

It makes them look good because deep down, they know the ‘right’ thing to do?

The good news

If all this sounds pie-in-the-sky theorising that can’t work in the real world, here, at last, is some good news.

Not all fossil fuel combustion and vs sustainability battles end in defeat for those on the side of ‘right’ (where ‘right’ means bequeathing our children a sustainable civilization).

Some current examples.

• Following a protracted grass-roots campaign and defying huge Big Oil lobbying, the UN’s highest court has ruled that nations can be held legally accountable for their greenhouse-gas emissions. It may take years before this non-binding ‘advisory opinion’ pushes legal victories in court, but the fact that businesses and oil states tried and failed to prevent it tells its own story.
• Smart storytellers like climatevoice.org create tools to empower employees to pressure their employers to act on climate. They especially the young, whose voices are easiest to ignore and who have the most to lose from whistleblowing. Their list of successful campaigns is impressive, and growing.

While still relative skirmishes, these examples of the ‘right’ prevailing have common features:

1. The battleground was storytelling
2. The target was clearly identified
3. The win/lose metric was clearly defined
4. The most effective main weapon was transparency
5. The ammunition was evidence-based truth

These can be seen as a checklist for effective climate activism, much more effective than relying on item 5 alone. 

This checklist exploits the ‘autocrat’s error’ of pretending to care about cutting emissions:

It makes them look good because deep down, they know the ‘right’ thing to do.

The straw in the cesspool

The golden straw in the cesspool, then, is that deep down, all leaders know the ‘right’ thing to do. 

All their trolling, cynicism, manipulation, passive-aggression and intimidation is a projection of their own insecurity.

What bothers dictators when they’re alone with their thoughts at night? After they’ve gone through their own checklist of stuffing all ballot boxes, controlling every gun, silencing every opposition voice, jailing every protestor etc, what nagging doubt keeps them awake?

The truth. 

Deep down, autocrats – better than anyone – know they’re lying. The more they lie, the more tenuous their grip on power. This is why they must keep doubling down on every lie. While they publicly crow they’re burying their enemies, this inner voice knows they’re digging themselves a deeper grave.

The same is true of businesses. For them, legitimacy means sanitising their reputations, so they can deliver shareholder value unencumbered by regulation. The more dependent they are on fossil fuels, the more they resent any regulation requiring them to cut emissions.

• The Qatari royal family bought legitimacy via sportswashing. Like the Saudi ruling family, where necessary they use the fig-leaf of fraudulent carbon accounting to conceal their true purpose – making money by selling oil. 
• The Sackler family bought legitimacy via donating to museums and the arts. Like many super-rich, they use the fig-leaf of philanthropy to conceal their true purpose – making money by selling opioids.

The straw for climate activists to clutch is that all their wealth, power and influence failed to prevent their hypocrisy being exposed in the end.

They fell victim to another asymmetry: they were lying, their critics were telling the truth. 

Climate activists might be more effective if they more consciously targeted this vulnerability. For maximum impact, load the truth warhead onto a transparency rocket, and bombard as wide a target as possible.

A final warning for climate activists

While this article aspires to inspire activists into being more effective, climate activists should resist the rhetorical tricks of populist autocrats.  

Don’t overpromise what you know you can’t deliver. No single solution will solve a crisis as complex as global heating, just as banning immigrants won’t make your country great again.

Mitigating the worst impacts of human-induced climate change on human civilization won’t be easy. If it were as simple as ‘listening to the scientists’, Greta Thunberg would be a global saviour and not a marginalised irritant.

The more subtle, storytelling approach of deploying truth and transparency adopted by the See Through Network and others cited in this article, has drawbacks, like:

• obscuring the message
• diverting attention
• creating less clear calls to action

Neither will exposing the truth ever sway 100% of everyone – you’d do well to move single digit percentages of your target audience.

Showing how bad things really are also risks backfiring. For every activist you recruit, there may be others who conclude that ‘nothing works and no one cares’. Pointing out that despair is the best possible form of inaction that most favours the status quo, may not improve your odds..

Nor are truth warheads loaded onto transparency rockets guaranteed to penetrate the defences of the Three-Headed Beasts of Business, Media and Government.

• The Qatari and Saudi royal families’ sportswashing continues unabated. Each superstar football team or flagship global tournament returns a splendid public credibility return on their petro-dollar investment. 

• The Sackler family might not get quite so many fancy dinner invitations since the US Supreme Court rejected their attempt to cut a bankruptcy deal that protects them from future lawsuits for killing people with Oxycontin.  On the other other hand, none of them has yet been obliged to eat dinner in jail, and they still have plenty of money to pay lawyers to keep them out.

But no one said this would be easy. 

When the alternative is inaction, and inaction makes the problem worse, why not make your activism as effective as possible?

Battlegrounds, heroes & villains

The battleground of Truth vs Lies goes by many names:

• Generals call it ‘hearts and minds’
• Priests call it ‘souls’
• PR gurus call it ‘public opinion’
• Financiers call it ‘market sentiment’
• Democrats call it ‘the electorate’ 
• Autocrats call it ‘the will of the people’

We call it ‘storytelling’. 

We know it’s the most important battleground, because it answers the question of why dictators hold elections.

Every story needs heroes and villains. 

For climate activists, politicians captured by Big Oil, billionaire-owned media, and complacent corporations focused on short-term profit over long-term viability provide splendid foes. Cast as moustache-twirling pantomime villains or Three-Headed Beasts, they’re easy targets.

But what about the heroes? Who can climate activists cast as their own guiding lights, as they lob their truth bombs and spray the enemy with the disinfectant of sunlight?

Fortunately, tales of upstart truth-tellers defeating dominant foes are a staple of storytelling across human history, culture and geography:

• The small boy in the crowd pointing out the Emperor has no clothes
• Tanuki, the shape-shifting raccoon dog of Japanese folk tales, besting more powerful beasts
• Anansi the spider, trickster-king of African folk tales
• Shepherd boy David defeating the Philistine giant Goliath in single combat

Or if you prefer an anti-hero, mythologies new and old offer:

• Lex Luthor, who spots Superman’s Achilles heel in his vulnerability to Kryptonite
• Paris, who, guided by Apollo, shot the poison arrow in Achilles’ only vulnerable spot

The problem with this battleground metaphor is that we all occupy the same battlefield. Plus, it’s the only home we have. Any victory that vanquishes the foe, but destroys everything, is a Pyrrhic one.

That’s why we also need Golden Bridges.

Golden Bridges

To avoid leaving the battleground a scorched-earth, cratered, desolate landscape, you must give your enemy a way out. Ideally, an exit route that transforms them from enemy to ally.

Chinese general Sunzi, still quoted in boardrooms two and half millennia after he wrote The Art of War, advised  ‘Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.’

Material to construct this Golden Bridge might include stories that:

• Equate climate inaction with incompetence, not evil
• Confer credibility to measurable carbon reduction, not fraudulent ‘zero-carbon’ claims

Activists need to stop using the old arsenal of moral pressure, guilt-shaming, scientific evidence and celebrity endorsement. They can still work on a few people.

But add some more subtle weapons too. 

• Always point to the Golden Bridge, built from carbon-cutting actions that make all the pain go away at minimal cost
• Appear not just as a placard-wielding protestor, but also as a trusted friend
• Appeal to political and corporate self-interest, not to moral abstractions
• Make carbon reduction synonymous with competence, modernity, and stability

Persevere, and even the most cynical regimes might form an orderly queue to join the rest of us across the Golden Bridge.

*** 

If you now feel moved to take action, here are the Golden Bridges on offer from this article’s author, the See Through Network.