So China trying to essentially subsidize the planet into using solar power and this makes the US unhappy because it’s just an oil company with a military.
an oil company with a military
I love this as a way to sum up the US. Really hits home how fundamentally environmentally destructive it is.
Basically, China is trying to save the world from the climate crisis, and the US is actively trying to ensure the apocalypse for our civilization. This is a battle between good and evil in the most literal sense.
The truth is that much of the leadership and policy groups in the Global North have come to the implicit decision to see the “bright side” of climate change. Going from the US to Canada to the UK to Russia, there’s been numerous environmental studies published in those countries on how they would “benefit” from climate change. This is why there’s a fixation on Greenland and the Arctic. They’ve come to understand the unspoken truth about climate change, which is that the same Global North which has contributed the most historical emissions is also the same region estimated to be set to suffer the least through the coincidence of their geography. They’re more excited about the potential Italian vineyard country climates that the Midlands and Minnesota are estimated to develop towards as climate change is more and more exacerbated than the apocalyptic scenarios slated for elsewhere, like the submerging of Jakarta or the wet-bulb temperatures of South Asia.
SE Asia, Africa, Latin America are likely to suffer severe climate-induced hardships, but the most that the West needs to worry about (apart from the submerging of places like the US Eastern Seaboard, Florida, and the European Low Countries, which they believe they’ll always retain the national wealth to spam dikes and levees and sea walls) is “climate refugees,” which is telling in of itself. The arrogant conceit displayed here is also potentially backed by the current climate estimates, which is the danger of it all. You can see the falsehood that “everyone will suffer equally together so we must all work together, we’re in the same boat” that climate scientists have tried to defend starting to be pierced with climate change-enthusiast leadership like Trump coming to power. From a relativistic sense, so long as your enemies suffer more than you, this is acceptable for them. They don’t need to be better off than themselves in the past (and the Global North is absolutely not completely unscathed from climate-induced catastrophes like they want to believe) but they must be better off than the rest, which is enough for them.
I’ve seen some of that as well, but the whole notion is deeply misguided. In fact, as we’re already seeing, some of the worst climate disasters are happening in northern countries right now. Canada and US have yearly large scale fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods, and so on. The rare of these disasters is accelerating. One of the things people seem to forget is that places where there are below global average temperature are the ones where there’s going to be a lot of volatility. Meanwhile, the climate in places that are at peak temperature isn’t going to change significantly.
