Honestly, here’s my best guess: we’re simply on the wrong planet. After all, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare makes clear today, in the next set of Trump years, the U.S. and China are likely to face off in a major way — just how major, given the unpredictability of You Know Who, remains to be seen. One thing, however, is bizarrely clear: on a planet that’s heating up and drying out in a record fashion, the two greatest greenhouse gas producers — the U.S. is historically the all-time greatest emitter and China the largest of this moment — could have ever less (at least in any positive sense) to do with each other when the man who continues to say that, on day one back in the White House, he’ll “drill, baby, drill” returns to power. He may pardon most of the imprisoned January 6th rioters on that very same day, but count on this: he won’t pardon the rest of us or our children and grandchildren.
What he and Chinese President Xi Jinping have in common, in fact, is that both of them are going to preside over countries playing the leading roles in heating this world to the boiling point. China at least is installing staggering amounts of new green energy (more than the rest of the world combined!) and producing stunning numbers of electric vehicles. Still, both seem remarkably intent on leaving a hell on Earth behind for those who follow. With that in mind, let Klare, the author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, consider how Donald Trump might “solve” (and yes, that word needs to be in quotation marks) the present climate nightmare by dealing with China in a way that could leave us all in the midst of World War III and so with other things to worry about than how bloody warm this planet is getting. Tom
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