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It's strange to try to come to grips with this increasing wreck of a planet. When you're my age, you have to wonder about the future. That's especially true in a world where the two top greenhouse gas emitters, the historically most massive one (the United States) and the present leader (China), are now involved in and it's a phrase that, given the temperatures this summer, should be a lousy joke a new Cold War. Who cares that China was essentially flooded out this summer with fierce coastal storms and 433 rivers rising to dangerous levels? Almost four million people were displaced from their homes, including 1.2 million around that country's capital, Beijing. Who cares that the U.S. was smoked out and distinctly overheated? (Phoenix, Arizona, experienced a record 55 days above 110 degrees this summer). As for ice on this planet, kiss it goodbye.
Joe Biden only recently visited Vietnam (Vietnam! A country from which we can, of course, draw no lessons whatsoever) to create a new global order around opposition to" yes" China. Who cares if such an "order" helps ensure that we'll all be burnt out of the building (or planet, if you prefer) in the decades to come? What could China and the U.S. possibly do together on such a planet? Count on one thing: neither Joe Biden nor Xi Jinping seems to have the slightest idea.
Yes, China is moving fast faster than the U.S. on green energy, but faster, too, when it comes to using coal to transform the world into a new hell. And yes, Joe Biden has indeed taken some steps to reduce this country's green footprint (just not enough of them) at a moment when the Trumpublican Party is preparing to toast us all. But it should be obvious that none of this is faintly enough. Only on a planet where the rich and poor countries, the Global North and Global South, related differently would we have a chance of making a true difference when it comes to the growing catastrophe of climate change. And with that in mind, let me turn you over to TomDispatch regular John Feffer, whose superb weekly column at Foreign Policy in Focus is always a must-read. Consider with him how this planet might indeed still be saved. Tom
Welcome to the New Green Colonialism
One Last Shot at Reducing Global Inequality and Saving the Planet
By John Feffer
In a fit of madness or just plain desperation, you've enrolled in a get-rich-quick scheme. All you have to do is sell some products, sign up some friends, make some phone calls. Follow that simple formula and you'll soon be pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a month or so you've been promised anyway. And if you sell enough products, you'll be invited into the Golden Circle, which offers yet more perks like free concert tickets and trips to Las Vegas.
Still, I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that there's a catch. If you don't sell a pile of products or sign up a ton of friends to do the same, the odds are that you'll end up losing money, no matter how hard you work, especially if you take out loans to build your "business."
The founders of multi-level marketing schemes always make a lot of money. Some of their friends become wealthy, too. But 99% of those who sell the products, whether cosmetics or dietary supplements, lose money. That's worse than a conventional pyramid scam, which fleeces only nine out of every 10 people involved.
Now, imagine that you're a poor country. The international financial institutions (IFIs) promise that, if you follow a simple formula, you, too, will become a wealthy nation. In a fit of desperation or madness, you take out loans from those same IFIs and commercial banks, invest in building up your export industries, and cut back on government regulations. Then you wait for the good news.
But of course, there's a catch. You have to sell a staggering number of exports to actually make money. Meanwhile, you have to repay those loans, while covering the compounding interest payments that accompany them. Soon you're caught in a debt trap and falling ever further behind the wealthy countries of the north. The main winners? The corporations that flooded into your country in search of tax incentives, cheap labor, and lax manufacturing and mining regulations.
The nation-states that founded the modern global economy have indeed made tons of money, as have some of their friends and allies. Despite the devastation of World War II, for instance, Japan was able to scramble up the ladder again to join the treehouse club of powerful nations. Meanwhile, in a single generation, South Korea's economy was transformed from the per capita gross domestic product of a Ghana or Haiti in 1960 into one of the world's most powerful by the 1980s. In Latin America, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica all managed to join South Korea in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a collection of the planet's 38 most prosperous countries.
But in 2023, there's a catch to climbing that ladder into the industrialized world. As the board of directors of the club of the wealthy points out, the classic ladder of development, industrialization itself, has become rickety and ever more dangerous. After all, it requires energy traditionally supplied by fossil fuels, now known to radically heat up the planet and endanger the very survival of humanity. Today, countries aspiring to join the charmed circle of the wealthy can no longer hope to climb that ladder in any usual fashion, thanks in part to the carbon-neutrality pledges virtually all nations made as part of the Paris climate accord.
The Global South is divided on how to respond. For instance, as the world's second-largest consumer of coal and third-largest consumer of oil, India wants to grow in the old-fashioned fossil-fuelized way, becoming the last one up that ladder, even as its rungs are disintegrating. Other countries, like renewables-reliant Uruguay and carbon-neutral Suriname, are exploring more sustainable paths to progress.
Either way, with global temperatures setting ever more extreme records and inequality worsening, poor countries face their last shot at following South Korea and Qatar into the ranks of the "developed" world. They may fail, along with the rest of us on this overheating planet, or perhaps one or two might get lucky and make it into the club. However, with some clever negotiating, judicious leveraging of resources, and a lot of solidarity, it's just possible that they could team up to rewrite the very rules of the global economy and achieve a measure of prosperity for all.
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