Can 'the people' solve climate change? France decided to find out.

Cities across France are using citizens’ assemblies, where a diverse group of citizens study important issues and make policy recommendations. In Paris, 150 citizens spent nine months working on the climate convention, which resulted in 149 recommendations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030. President Macron pledged more funding and accepted all but three of the proposals. The convention also showed how citizens’ assemblies improve community cohesion and reduce polarization. Ireland, the UK, and Belgium have also successfully used citizens' assemblies to address important social issues.

TARU, an Indian thinktank, has found that Indians cities have combined decentralized action and "multi-stakeholder engagement" in public policy to respond to problems of scarcity in water and power as well as climate change-related natural disasters. Municipalities are putting responsibility for improving local lives at the grassroots level; integrating disruptive technologies from the private sector; and fostering collaboration between government and citizens.

In Memphis, “school officials, politicians, business leaders, preachers, nonprofit organizations and everyday residents” came together to fight crime in a strategy known as Collective Impact. Could this approach help other cities like Fayetteville fight crime?

A year after Bristol convened a randomly selected 60-person citizens’ assembly, which brought together a representative and diverse group of residents to tackle complex issues facing the city, they have delivered a set of recommendations. The panel produced 17 recommendations, with a total of 82 associated actions on three topics: climate, transport and health. Fourteen recommendations have been fully agreed to and eight have been dismissed. Participants also report positive effects of being able to work together across diverse ideologies and experiences, as well as from the civic participation more broadly.

California residents passed Proposition 11, a redistricting reform ballot initiative, in 2008 and in 2010, voters strengthened that reform by passing a bill to allow an independent commission to redraw state and congressional lines. Fourteen people, who were selected from 30,000 applicants, spent a year holding public hearings across the state to make informed decisions on how to fairly redraw district maps. As a result, more than a dozen Congressional incumbents lost their seats, which was not an intentional outcome but rather what resulted from decisions made based on the public testimony they heard.

In Virginia, as more and more people turn towards electric cars like Tesla, homeowner associations will have to accommodate resident's request for electric charging stations. Because of that very reason, one legislator created Senate Bill 630, which prohibits homeowner and condominium associations from prohibiting installation in a resident's parking space. This story goes into detail about how one man used SB 630 to get three charging stations installed in his condominium.

Citizen assemblies bring together residents for in-depth discussions about solutions to social issues. This alternative form of democracy led to policy changes in many countries, including legalizing abortion in Ireland. In the UK, an algorithm was applied to form a 110-person “climate assembly.” In a multistage process, the algorithm selected a representative sample of the U.K.’s population, sometimes oversampling harder to reach groups to ensure inclusion. A small stipend was also offered to offset costs for people with lower incomes. The group submitted a final report with climate policy recommendations.

Almost half of U.S. states guarantee citizens’ rights to petition for ballot measures, but the coronavirus made gathering signatures in person infeasible. Massachusetts courts allowed electronic signatures, but other states have not approved virtual citizen initiative campaigns. Ballot initiatives allow citizens to advance solutions and enact structural changes without relying on support from elected officials. MA groups used DocuSign to gather 30,000 signatures to get a proposal for ranked choice voting on the ballot. Not all MA groups were able to quickly or successfully pivot to the e-signature process.

In the late 1970s to late 1980s, activists, scientists, and politicians began to address the climate change crisis. For a decade, they attempted to ask the U.S. to commit to an international agreement to reduce emissions, and they almost succeeded. “In a single decade, they turned a crisis that was studied by no more than several dozen scientists into the subject of Senate hearings, front-page headlines and the largest diplomatic negotiation in world history.”

Acknowledging that most coal plants world wide are likely to continue to operate for decades as the world's demand for energy only increases, solutions to climate change become ever more pressing. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is one of the few approaches that can receive bipartisan support in shaping energy policy and - despite a few early experimental failures - the method making a comeback as a viable way to combat the release of C02 into the atmosphere. The Petra Nova plant in Texas may serve as a model for moving CCS forward.