novel
I’ll call it Green Capitalismnot an effective mitigation. The history of such policies is rooted in the promise of “both favourable” outcomes where environmental sustainability meets good employment growth, but the reality is much more mediocre.
Global North-wide climate policy aims to make investments and innovations in the green industry financially safe. They focus on making new renewable energy projects profitable, with demand for heat pumps and electric vehicles, allowing businesses to invest without fear of economic losses.
The reason for doing this is not primarily to stop climate change, but for over 10 years. The global northern economy is stagnating now.
Growth was anemia, and productivity gains would be slower if they didn’t stop. Zombie Company It multiplied while wages and living standards were falling. Start one period after the financial crisis that defines the era of 2008Secular stagnation‘, the green transition was to restore the economic fortunes of the North. However, this transition is like a game of music chairs, with only a large number of countries and businesses able to find seats at the table.
Economic growth requires frontiers to grow. One important economic frontier is the new market. Either the new people to sell, or the new things that people buy. Also, competition forces us to find new ways to produce more for less spending, and we need to make our labor more productive. Frontier Technology promises both.
electricity
Frontier technologies such as AI, biotechnology, automation, renewable energy, and new materials science have been bundled together as ideas along with the fourth industrial revolution. They promise to fundamentally increase productivity. They create new markets. And they provide a strong return on investment.
They also offer the possibility of a massive surge in military forces, not by chance. National control over some or all of the major frontier industries can force other countries to purchase or license your products or intellectual property and translate into a globally dominant economic position. There is. Success creates wealth and strength in the future.
The IRA and the European Green Deal were part of the competition to lead, or at least have a foothold in new industries and markets. But the combination of denial and delays in the industrial environment, cross-party support for the fossil industry, and merciless anti-climate compromises has stepped into the US green tech sector. Ultimately, the transition is the race China won. That’s why Trump is throwing tantrums.
That’s not all China is currently the world’s only manufacturing superpower.produces nearly one-third of the total world production output. It also increasingly controls most important frontier technologies.
China manufactures almost 80% of all electric vehicles, owns 80% of the global market share of solar panels and 66% of the market share of wind turbines.
transition
It is at the forefront of space technology, 5G and advanced materials development. Last year, we installed more industrial robots than other parts of the world. And the regions the US thought it had a lead – biotech, AI and semiconductors – have either caught up or are getting closer to doing so.
The United States is also common in the collapse of global political and cultural hegemony. This began before the conspiracy of the Israeli massacre campaign in Gaza.
Trump’s unilateral actions, including dismantling foreign intervention agencies that are not so good foreign intervention agencies like USAID, are the post-US actions that America is one of many competing world powers. It shows a conscious tendency towards the world order. First of many people.
From enforcing Europe to accepting American high-tech orical key domination to trying to reevaluate the currency in China with a new “” while trying to force the scope of enemy and allies’ trading settlements.Plaza Accord(This is destined to fail) – it does so in terms of arresting further decline and staying at the top of the world order.
Trump’s actions must be understood from this perspective. The Trump administration aims to protect revenue streams, resources and market access, and industry as a whole, from the threat of China’s rise and green transition. As the US Secretary of State said,[T]He is not outdated with the postwar global order. It is a weapon used against us now.. ”
decline
The core of this project is to protect oil and gas. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer. The deep and destructive “shale revolution” has supported the US economic growth over the past decade and provided a ready source of inexpensive energy. A decrease in oil and gas use will undermine the US economy.
The substantial transition will take up billions of dollars in corporate investments in the US. Adding to this, various downstream fossil fuel industries such as power generation and automobiles will result in the US losing a ton of money and investment in the transition.
Trump’s election and agenda shows that at least some of the US ruling elites understand that it is holding the hand that it lost, and its decline is ongoing.
Trump himself repeatedly references our decline, underscoring the need to assert independence against foreign powers, often as a matter of fossil freedom and opposes regulation. He consistently spoke about the collapse of modern life marked by the awakened Marxist professor and antifa militant figure.
Trump said he was “fighting to save America’s dreams.” We are fighting to protect our suburbs and to maintain our way of life.” This meant “recovering our work, our factories and our industry.” Trump defended police and declared that while protesters would not turn cities into war zones, he would regain production and maintain the independence of US energy. America’s decline is over. ”
Ecological
Except that it’s not.
Trump’s tone, and the tone of the sound on the right of the Maga, is very apologetic. And there’s a good reason. Trump is a true revelation of the American century. Despite claims of freedom and peace, it has always been the case.
Worse, Trump slid the truth of internal decline that Democrats refused to admit. While it denies Americans’ sense of national collapse as nothing more than an “atmosphere,” the truth is that the economy is not working for most people.
The transition from unipolar to multipolar worlds is that both American business interests and American way of life, where the United States no longer has an unparalleled economic or military power of political and cultural hegemony. It is a deep threat to.
Without global domination, the United States has no capacity to emit resources and wealth from other parts of the world. As the world’s leading consumer nation, it accounts for one third of global consumption, so the United States is over USD 500 billion a year from other parts of the world in unequal exchanges.
America’s way of life is not feasible to the planet and is already under threat. Without the ability to adequately adequately create a large, disproportionate share of global economic and ecological values, there is no American lifestyle of high absorption, high torrential rains.
order
To keep it up, Trump is chasing the only country he feels America is not in conflict – it’s an ally. China is already too military and economic threat to take on more than just a symbolic gesture. His purpose here is to ensure that the allies are properly subsidized, and that the US can extract sufficient compliments to maintain it. Empire’s lifestyle.
It is not clear that this will act as a strategy. When trying to bully Canada and Colombia, they both spun as big wins, but there were few actual concessions. Europe is far from weak, and already has a middle path Focusing on collaboration with Chinathe rest of the world is quietly away from the United States.
Given that many of Trump’s programs will increase unemployment and weaken social protection, increasing inflation and narrowing down American consumers, they will make a former alliance in supporting the US empire lifestyle. Not bullying can accelerate social decline and fundamentally increase internal political instability. US.
As the climate increases, it costs billions of dollars a year, making the entire region more and less inhabitable. End the American Dreamwhich will likely descend into dysfunction and chaos while Trump’s apocalyptic politics intensifies.
In this way, without America, green transitions will continue and become a more uncertain global order.
This author
Nicholas Behrette is a lecturer at the University of Essex and studies the politics and political economy of climate change and green transition. His book, The war against green capitalism, I went out at Verso in September 2025.
