Saving the Planet Depends on Asia |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Saving the Planet Depends on Asia
A 50 MW photovoltaic solar power station built in Shanxi Province in 2017. Photograph Source: Planet Labs – CC BY-SA 4.0
Early adopters pay a premium for their embrace of innovation. If you bought one of the first electric cars in the United States, you had limited range, long charging times, and very little infrastructure to support you on anything but the shortest journeys. If you’d held out just a little bit longer, you could have spent a lot less money and gotten a lot more vehicle.
Foot-draggers, in other words, can reap a lot of benefits, whether as a result of ignorance (not knowing about a new product), fear (of making a mistake), or strategic patience. But too many foot-draggers could doom innovation.
Public policy is often designed to reward early adopters and light a fire underneath the foot-draggers. During the Biden years, EV buyers could receive a tax rebate, and the administration invested money into the expansion of charging stations. As a result, consumers rejiggered their cost-benefit analyses, and for a short period demand exceeded supply. As more companies went into the EV business, the United States, at least briefly, began to move away from the combustion engine.
The Paris Agreement was supposed to create an overall environment to shape such Green public policies. Unfortunately, the Paris targets were voluntary, which meant that countries could make grand statements of commitment while dragging their feet in reality. The ubiquity of “Green-dragging”—the slow-walking of carbon-reduction strategies—has produced the inevitable results: steadily increasing global emissions, the spiraling costs of loss and damage, and a general skepticism that international cooperation can ever really tackle a problem of such magnitude.
Then along came Donald Trump, who has proudly proclaimed his climate denialism. To the delight of the fossil fuel companies that poured money into his reelection campaign, the president has pledged to extract every bit of oil, gas, and coal from beneath the United States. He hasn’t stopped there. To gain access to every last scrap of extractable value in the world—Venezuela’s oil, Greenland’s minerals—Trump has engaged in truly reckless behavior.
In his riskiest move yet, the American president joined Israel in attacking Iran at the end of February. His rationales were many: to “solve” a problem that had bedeviled presidents going back to the hostage crisis of 1979, to punish the ayatollahs that have taunted him, to upend the politics of the Middle East. But he also dreamed of controlling Iranian fossil fuel assets.
Yet this poorly planned, fitfully executed, and shamelessly promoted campaign has backfired in more than one sense. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which in turn prompted Trump to blockade the blockade, has boosted the price of oil at the pumps in the United States. And it has pushed countries all over the world to rethink their commitment to the fossil fuels that have been blockaded in the Persian Gulf. The fossil fuels that Trump wants to make more available have instead become more scarce.
Will the Iran war prove to be sufficient to shake the Green-draggers of the world out of their torpor? Much will depend on Asia.
What the War Has Done
Very few countries have insulated themselves from the energy shocks of the Iran War and the double blockade of the Straits of Hormuz. Poorer countries that rely on fossil fuel imports are the hardest hit:........