Disclaimer: as y'all know I am not a "drown government in the bathtub" neolib by a long shot. There is a role for national -- hey, for world -- governance. But when responding to a crisis, flexibility, agility, mobility and local accountability are paramount; and this is where devolution and subsidiarity come into their own. Regional responses are more likely to be timely, effective, and intelligent than federal ones.
A city government is quicker off the mark and more responsive to residents than the ponderous machinery of the US, PRC, or EU. It's notable that city mayors in the US are way ahead of the Fed in the carbon reduction game. At the Fed level they are talking about which major US cities "we cannot afford to save" from rising sea levels [read whole article at risk of cranial detonation]; at the city level each polity is trying to protect its own place and people, which it does not regard as expendable.
It is people's affection for their place -- be it rural or urban -- that makes them willing to relinquish some luxuries and privileges in order to preserve community and continuity -- to express solidarity with each other in the face of rapid change. At the Fed level, layers and layers of bureaucracy and abstraction away from actual people living in actual places, there is no affection for the particular and all places are potentially expendable. [cf NOLA, where the FEMA gang in several instances actually prevented aid from reaching residents.]
My $0.02 is that solutions (inasmuch as there are any) to the carbon/climate crisis are not going to come from the highly corrupt top drawer downwards, but upwards from the metropoles and the bioregions. Top-down policy would help, if it were intelligent; but the hugeness of scale of the big bureaucracies makes their response time slow, like the (probably apocryphal) stegosaurus who takes several seconds to realise that a smaller dino is biting his distant tail.
Agree? disagree? the energy and speed of local initiatives is just about the only hope I am holding onto.
