China's century

 The U.S. defined itself, in the post WWII period, as the "leader of the free world". And the U.S. was an astonishing economic success in the 20th century.

But the free world is dead, now, and the U.S. is being left behind by China - just as the whole "developed world" is being left behind by the BRICS. This NYT long read by David Wallace-Wells about the pitiful failure of neoliberal politics in Europe and the U.S. to face global climate change has a misleading title:" It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics." The whole world here means, as always, the reassuringly white world, the world of the North. But two thirds into the article you bump into the real world - the world of the BRICS countries.

"And the other side of the great-power rivalry? China has made a different bet and is fast becoming what people in Silicon Valley, raised on science fiction, like to call the world’s first electrostate. A decade ago, those who saw themselves as energy realists would often argue that moving faster on decarbonization amounted to a self-imposed handicap that would benefit less scrupulous powers, like China. But the actual pattern of recent history has been the inverse: As the United States has moved more slowly on green tech, China has stormed ahead. In fact, if you had to name the single biggest development in climate geopolitics since Paris, it would be the startling rise of China as a green-energy superpower in the midst of what looked, at the outset of the period, like a global future still dominated by an indispensable United States"

The other side - of the World. Wallace-Wells unrolls a story that has not been on the front pages. In 1922, due to the cut-off of gas from Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was an energy price crisis in Pakistan. But instead of similar crises in the EU and America, where people lined up at gas stations and demanded lower taxes on gas, etc., in Pakistan this happened.

"And then, something miraculous happened: Without any coordination or planning, millions of frustrated Pakistanis began buying and importing rooftop solar panels manufactured in China, which had grown so inexpensive that in some global markets they were cheaper to buy than the wood for a yard fence. The result: Once a green-energy afterthought, Pakistan is now the sixth-largest solar market in the world, with recent solar additions equal to the entire country’s pre-existing electric grid, all thanks to what the Carnegie Endowment’s Noah Gordon and Daevan Mangalmurti called a “disorganized, bottom-up boom” and the entrepreneur Azeem Azhar and the researcher Nathan Warren called a “silent energy revolution.”

Well, the experts quoted at the end don't add much, but I find this an amazing story. A story that should send a chill through the European or American heart, though it will not. What the OECD powers are doing is equavalent to hiding their heads. Imagine, after the invention of artificial fertilizer due to the Haber-Basch process, that the developed countries had said, oh, no thanks, we will stick to guano? You would have soon had a very severe food crisis. Instead of the famines in the third world, you would have had famines in the first world.

China really is tomorrow. The EU has responded, as I suppose was inevitable when the financial sector is the only sector of interest to the power elite, but massively failing this moment. The materials revolution that wasn't - we have watched the Macron-Merkel entity utterly fail. There are many causes, but I keep going back to the vast wealth inequality encouraged every step of the way by policymakers in the period after the fall of the Wall, who profitted from it, and I think this is what we get for the era of yadda yadda yadda and "carbon tax credits". What a ghastly century the "victors" in the Cold War have had.