An ongoing investigation from The Washington Post reports that U.S. government sanctions are now “targeting a third of all nations with some kind of financial penalty on people, properties or organizations.” As reporters Jeff Stein, Federica Cocco, and Peter Whoriskey note in a new installment in that series published last week, the sanctions boom has spawned a lucrative cottage industry for D.C. lobbyists. Foreign spending on sanctions-related lobbying, they write, “has surged from roughly $6 million in 2014 to at least $31 million in 2022, the last year for which complete records are available.”
A seemingly unrelated report from the U.N. Environment Program finds that the world is currently on track to warm by between 2.6 and 3.1 degrees Celsius by 2100, far more than the goal of “well below two degrees” (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement. Greenhouse gas emissions rose to record levels last year—up 1.3 percent over 2022 levels—as countries fail to make progress toward the modest emissions reductions targets they’ve set for themselves.
With the world sailing toward hellish levels of global warming, the fact that a third of it is under some form of sanction from the United States—the world’s largest historical emitter of planet-heating greenhouse gases—should be cause for concern. Sanctions can impose environmental threats in their own right, limiting targeted countries’ ability to respond to climate disasters and invest in low-carbon development. The Post’s investigation notes concern from current and former U.S. officials that the massive uptick in sanctions could undermine possibilities for the kind of global cooperation desperately needed to deal with the climate crisis. Moreover, if sanctions can be seen as an extension of American economic statecraft—alongside tariffs and trade agreements—their increasingly bipartisan popularity may well threaten the climate goals the White House claims that Bidenomics aims to meet.
“Undergoing the green transition requires two things: technology and financing,” says Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, an economic think tank. “Broad sanctions regimes, like those in place on Russia and Iran, are expressly designed to reduce access to technology.” These sanctions are meant to reduce government revenues and close off options for foreign investments and loans. “So while the sanctions may not directly target a country’s ability to install solar panels, build wind turbines, or adopt electric vehicles, these critical steps for the green transition become more difficult,”........