Green & war economy – a reasoned reading

By albertobor on November 11, 2021 • ( 0 )

The China Daily announces that China is the country in the world that has the greatest sensitivity to the protection of bio diversity.

At the same time, the crisis in the cost of natural gas forces China to increase the extraction of coal for civil and industrial uses, primarily responsible for the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere, the consequent warming and the crisis of biodiversity itself.

If the United States is energetically independent, consider Washington’s new policy in the enlarged Middle East, aimed at considering that area of the world peripheral, China pays for its heavy dependence on gas and oil.

So it is Beijing that sustains the greatest damage from inflationary policies and the scarcity of supply, another chapter in the new post-Covid war. Becoming a country free from absolute poverty required an extraordinary effort.

In the year 2021, China guarantees its citizens electricity, water, calories, animal proteins, which feed them, heat them in winter and cool them in summer. Hundreds of millions of Chinese have a car to get around and money to buy a plane ticket to be able to go on vacation thousands of kilometers from home.

The legitimacy of the Chinese state capitalism model rested on this result. As simple as Deng’s old metaphor about the color of the cat that has to catch the mouse, regardless of whether it is black or white.

In the past, the great Chinese imperial dynasties fell as a result of disastrous military defeats and invasions by hostile peoples, in the same way the fate of Beijing’s communism is confronted with the challenge of well-being and the increase in consumption.

The theme of the energy transition is exemplary in this sense. China declares that environmental sustainability is an unavoidable theme of the third millennium, President Xi Jinping does not fail to declare it at every public meeting and in international summits with other world leaders.

Chinese companies are among the first in the world in the production of solar panels and lithium batteries, while the story of a group of wild elephants from southern China, which have lost their spatial coordinates as a result of climate change, migrating north for more than 800 km, has fascinated Chinese readers, however the reality is very different.

How much can the costs of a green transition assume when a country remains largely poor? Having become the factory of the world, it has assumed the direct environmental cost, but the production of CO2 and pollutants is such that the Chinese environmental problem has become global.

The issue of the cost of the green transition is the major issue on the agenda of the next decades, for us Westerners the exact assessment of a complex competition with Beijing, which will continue to have lower production costs due to the strong fossil pollutants which it will want to give up only in 2060, a kind of environmental dumping.

The specter of the clash of civilizations shifts from the training academies of Western elite schools, to the economics of programming, to the diplomacy of informal warfare.

The article was originally published on the Italian language site www.altriorienti.com