COP26 and carbon imperialism: an imminent confrontation

In the first quarter of the 19th^e century, a small corner of northwestern Europe had conquered much of the rest of the world thanks to gunpowder, the sailboat, and an evangelizing worldview that served both God and commerce. Two centuries later, we see a new force at work, aimed at reclaiming the world by the Western nations, this time with a powerful new entrant, the United States of America. The West’s weapons of war are as new as the ideology of conquest is: gunpowder has been replaced by the domination of powerful international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund which include global finance. in their arsenal, and an evangelizing ideology that displays traces of gas CO₂ as original sin. The West’s objective is of course not to directly rule the world for pillage or prestige, but to get the East to agree to give up the fruits of modern economic growth in order to “save the planet”.

Shapeshifter environmentalism

Of course, none of this is very new. The first convocations of nations in the aftermath of World War II, perhaps better marked by the Stockholm conference on the environment in 1972, were devoted to discussions about a new brotherhood of nations that would learn to live in peace not only with one another (the Cold War was then still a dominant reality) but also with “nature” . A new Rousseauist anguish had captured the minds of the ruling intellectual elites in the West, perhaps best personified by Joschka Fischer, leftist activist and member of the beat generation of 1968, who later became Germany’s first Green MP in 1985. This angst had to be shared with the world. It didn’t matter that some in the East like the indomitable Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, proclaimed at the Stockholm conference of 1972, that the environmental problem of the teeming multitudes of the East was one of poverty and not of abundance.

It didn’t take long for this angst to change shape. Initial fears of “depletion” of natural resources – such as the Club of Rome, an international elite of experts, had predicted – or overpopulation as warned by serial predictors of global famines and cataclysms such as Paul Ehrlich are history. By the 1980s and 1990s it had become evident that human ingenuity and the relentless march of technology had relegated the Malthusian thesis to the dust heap of history. The world had growing reserves of minerals and fossil fuels despite rampant consumption. The American Shale Revolution found more oil and gas than the world could absorb. Term maverick President Donald J. Trump proclaimed “energy dominance”For a country that conventional wisdom expected to be an energy-seeker for Saudi Arabia, Russia and other oil and gas producers around the world.

An increasingly prosperous world

And far from fearing overpopulation, countries like China are much more concerned with demographics and geopolitics of “grow old before getting rich”. Indeed, at the end of the 20^e century, demographers were already warning against all the problems associated with a imminent decline of a young population that could support global living standards. As Gaia’s mystical believers worried about the weight of a world population on “nature,” human well-being statistics continued to break historic records like never before. With regard to human well-being, virtually all metrics or indicators shows a significant if not spectacular improvement: life expectancy and income levels have improved; poverty levels have fallen; people are living longer and healthier lives, and the World Bank’s Human Development Index has risen virtually everywhere (ignoring the blow caused by the covid pandemic since 2020).

Since the 1920s, the global death rate from extreme weather events, for example, has decreased by 98% despite the tripling of the world’s population. Average global life expectancy at birth in 1850 was just over 29 years old; a century later, it was over 45 years, and in 2019, it was almost 73 years. In 1820, nearly 90% of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty. By 2015, that figure had fallen to less than 10% despite a seven-fold increase in the world’s population.

Carbon imperialism to save the world

Yet the next United Nations climate conference in Glasgow is fire and brimstone. With the “climate emergency” upon us, Alok Sharma – president of the UN summit “COP26” to be held in Glasgow in November – warns us that this is the “last chance” to accept a radical program of “decarbonization” failing which the world inevitably engages in climate catastrophe (it does not matter that all of this is based on “hockey stick“Models of global warming concocted in the West). UN Secretary-General António Guterres warns us that it is nothing less than “a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deaf, and the evidence is irrefutable.”

And it is here that the West reach to a moral carbon imperialism is on us in the East:

Be prepared to ditch the cheap and affordable fossil fuels that help your people achieve a higher standard of living, otherwise the planet, with all of us, gets it. Yes, we promise you money (we know the last promise was $ 100 billion a year, but not yet met). But there is more, we promise. We all understand that you can’t expect a European standard of living, but new energy technologies are upon us, trust us. With solar and wind power, and electric vehicles, and the capture and sequestration of hydrogen and carbon, we’ll get there. But stop the new coal plants now, as well as the oil and gas. We are all in there.

“History never repeats itself but it rhymes,” said Mark Twain. Now, however, there is nothing short of a massive mismatch. China, by far the world’s biggest carbon sinner, has “promised” net zero by 2060. Sinner or not, it has made it clear that it may consider participating in the Western notion of buying indulgences. of Gaia with decarbonization, perhaps a few decades after the start of the future, but only if the The United States plays ball: Ditch endless tirades about Uyghur oppression, see Taiwan as part of China, and stop being an aggressive competitor in the Middle Empire’s natural quest for Asian domination. India, for its part, is also quite clear: “We urge the G20 countries to commit to reducing per capita emissions to the global average by 2030”. In other words, you don’t quite reach our poverty levels and give us space to become not as rich as you. And then we have the outliers: Australia said clearly enough “No” to Biden, Boris and the UN in their demands to stop coal mining, coal-fired electricity and coal exports.

The days when China was “cut up like a ripe melon” by Western powers or dispelled Mughals in India were easily replaced by the East India Company as overlords of the subcontinent are long gone. Australia, the former convict colony, is not child’s play either. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, host of COP26, without maintaining the imperial notions of conquest and domination, wants his environmental place in the sun. But he will inevitably be disappointed. Carbon imperialism will not work.