Climate Leviathan

A possible (even likely) future, if the U.S. doesn't get its act together

Three months ago I published a piece in Foreign Policy anticipating the possibility of a new Cold War based less on ideological difference than a fundamental “clash over the metabolic basis of modern industrial society.” I anticipated the emergence of a de facto geopolitical bipolarity between, on the one hand, a “Green Entente” of electrostates, led by China, dedicated to making a transition away from the planetarily ruinous fossil fuel regime of high modernity, and, on the other, an “Axis of Petrostates,” led by the Fossil-Fuel-Producer-in-Chief, the United States, whose world-historical role in this context would be (with apologies to Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter Anthony Dolan) that of an ecological Evil Empire.

I make the same case in a different register in a piece published today in the newly-launched Antikythera journal from MIT press, this time in the form of a scenario for what this world could end up looking like by the end of the next decade:

By the late 2030s, it was game over: China had emerged as the comprehensive titan of the technology that would define the central development agenda of the twenty-first century: the transition from fossil fuel democracy to a new energy regime. What gave China the win was not simply that the United States abdicated from any effort to compete after 2025—after all, the Europeans continued to try their damnedest. What ultimately made the decisive difference was that the Chinese coupled their green energy technology package, consisting of modular nuclear and solar power generation and the conversion of ground transportation to electrical vehicles, to a compelling package of communications infrastructure, including 7G networking and “popular opinion monitoring” tools. Described as a “turnkey development package,” the model swept the Global South; leaders found the package a credible way to meet the triple challenge of coordinating economic growth, complying with emergent planetary governance objectives, and controlling political backlash against the costs of the transition.

As the United States descended into self-immolating political chaos from the late 2010s, Beijing seized the opportunity to promote a new set of governance institutions that aimed to impose binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions—positioning itself as the leading “responsible stakeholder” in climate change. China’s dominance of the global green tech trade inevitably led to its growing influence on global environmental standards. Membership was voluntary, but what made membership compelling was Beijing’s offer of a technological stack that made the transition both economically and politically feasible. China’s green tech provided the mechanisms for delivering steady economic growth without fossil fuels, while its ICT package gave governments a way to effectively monitor and head off dissent or revolt. Branded as the “Road and Sky” (道路天空) initiative, it proved far more appealing than the fossil-fuels-plus-human-rights-scolding development package that the US had offered the Global South since the 1990s—a vision of nation-building that integrated economic development with political stability. As President Xi remarked in his final address, “The Soviet–US Cold War was, above all, a competition for the hearts and minds of the South—a competition that was ultimately over which system could provide the most effective and harmonious form of development. China today offers a generous package to our partners across the world to achieve what all humankind wants: moderate prosperity, social stability, and ecological habitability.”

While this speech typified the velvet glove, there was also a harder edge beneath much of the communication. The post-Trump United States had proved enduringly hostile to the very idea of climate change, and even more so to the idea that preserving planetary habitability might require changes of any sort. It was completely antithetical to the monster truck aesthetics at the center of so many ordinary Americans’ political identities. America naturally refused to participate in China’s Planetary Organization for the Reduction of Carbon, with Secretary of Government Efficiency Eric Trump declaring it to be “nothing more than a contaminated Chinese PORC-fest.” In the name of national security, DC forbade the purchase or installation of any Chinese green tech.

Washington attempted to defend a technological order it had once dominated but that was now increasingly seen as having poisoned the planet. Beijing found it easy to portray the post-Trumpian United States as a rogue nation, one that was knowingly making the planet uninhabitable in order to perpetuate a grotesque way of life. By 2040, President Yin Yong went so far as to describe the United States as “an ecological evil empire”—citing the work of American environmental historians who had been exiled following the closure of various US universities in the late 2020s. Europe, meanwhile, continued its inexorable slide into geopolitical irrelevance, as it pursued a twin strategy of homegrown green tech transition while continuing to insist on the universality of its privacy and human rights agenda. Many young populists across the continent increasingly rolled their eyes at this combination, promoting instead an “avocado politics” that combined pro-environmental interventions and anti-immigrant politics and that made them increasingly willing to embrace Beijing’s overtures.