The biggest climate change threat increasingly comes from the leaders of China and India
As apocalyptic wildfires raged in Greece, California and Turkey last week, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered a sobering assessment of the damage inflicted by human beings on their planet since the industrial revolution.
Certainly, as droughts parch entire countries, fuel civil wars that spill across national borders and drive uncontrolled migration, collaborative action seems imperative, regardless of which countries industrialized first and kick-started the process of climate change. But the universally urgent goal of decarbonization in the 21st century increasingly faces a greater obstacle than climate-change deniers in the West: the mimic nationalists of India and China chasing a 19th-century fantasy of wealth and power.
It is no coincidence that both countries, still heavily reliant on coal and among the world’s top carbon-emitters, declined to endorse the 1.5 degree Celsius limit on global average temperature proposed by President Joe Biden at his Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate in April. Xi Jinping speaks of building an “ecological civilization,” but the Financial Times reports that China has accelerated its building of coal-powered industry in the first half of 2021.
Humiliated by Western imperialists, both Asian countries set out in the 1940s to match the economic and military power of their tormentors by building powerful nation-states through industrial revolutions of their own.
Successive leaders, whether Mao Zedong or Jawaharlal Nehru, Xi Jinping or Narendra Modi, capitalist or communist, democrat or authoritarian, built their legitimacy on a promise of delivering the fruits of industrial modernity and inviolable sovereignty to their citizens.
Insecure themselves, some of them have nurtured an insecure nationalism that credits unique glory and power to self and conceives of others, the rest of the world, as jealous and malevolent.
It need not have been this way, and it still doesn’t have to be this way. [Continue reading…]