Does that help at all? If the local people are concerned about their immediate short term concerns will they be bothered about long-term consequences? Do they care about CO2 emissions? About risks to water down-stream of their community? How easily can they be bribed or pressured?

Valid questions all.

To create a real, global economic democracy, you'd have to put economic decision-making power in the hands of local people themselves, everywhere.  This would mean, first of all, granting them control over the issuance and use of their currency, and secondly, putting them collectively in charge of the means of production.  Once they have that, what kind of bribe or pressure would dislodge them from tasks of ecosystem co-existence?

Societies in the capitalist past were concerned with "progress," the ultimate triumph of science and technology in increasing the productivity of human labor to bring technological utopia into being.  The scientific paradigm that was to bring "progress" into being was based on mechanics, as the various sciences were created to fine-tune the economic and physical machines of world society, to make them ever-more-efficient producers of the dreamed-of technological utopia.

The ultimate result of this trend will be the ecological dystopia described, in part, by Mark Lynas in Six Degrees, in which climatic disruption is completely out of control, eventually leading to the breakdown of civilization and the release of the methane hydrates from beneath the ocean floors.  The "Communist" societies were no different in this regard.

Future societies will have to concern themselves with "survival," both individual and global, or risk its opposite, death.  Material conditions will bring this concern into being, as capitalism can be expected to bring everything to the brink of disaster.  A subordination of all of society's "machines," both human and inorganic, to the ecological requirements of survival will be needed by all societies.  The scientific paradigm of said future societies will be based on thermodynamics, as humanity will be coping with the ecological consequences of capitalist entropy for some centuries to come.  Relations between human beings will have to re-adapt to thermodynamic circumstances, as the entropic consequences of economic competition will have to be phased out.

Btw, I know this has become standard usage, but "CO2 emissions" is a poor descriptor of what is causing abrupt climate change.  People have been "emitting CO2" since they came out of the genetic stock, yet only with the current, massive scale of burning Earth's fossil-fuel endowment, combined with the wanton destruction of Earth's forests, its lungs, has it come to where we are now.

The point in discussing economic democracy in this context is to suggest systems in which people, at the local level (the level at which ecosystem impacts are felt), can be empowered to adapt human society to the preservation of ecosystem resilience.  In this regard, economic democracy, though imperfect, would be better than economic oligarchy, which (at this present date) seeks to shield the investor class from the ecosystem consequences of its actions.

"Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world" -- John Lennon