When you’re a citizen of a nation that has been a legitimate leader, and humanity’s faced with one of our greatest challenges ever, reading this does hurt.
Most of this investment has been domestic, but China is now looking to sell its green tech to the rest of the world. In doing so, the nation steps into the climate leadership void left by the US under President Donald Trump. As Trump pursues an “America First” strategy and sings the praises of “beautiful, clean coal”, China is looking for ways to collaborate with other countries on tackling climate change. [ “Why China’s green ambitions will make it the next world leader,” Alice Klein, NewScientist (16 September 2017, paywall)]
Later:
Tim Buckley at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in Sydney, Australia, agrees. “China wants to dominate industries of the future while the governments of the US and Australia want to dominate industries of the past.”
Look, when you were one of the early ones to get a personal computer – to actually buy it in kit form and assemble it, an Heathkit H-89 – a certain mindset comes with that, a mindset that tries to see what’s coming next. Not necessarily to benefit from it, although that can be part of it through investment, but to understand how the future is going to be shaped, how the nearly undetectable trend of today will be the tsunami of tomorrow.
Mr. Buckley’s quote is very dispiriting. It suggests our leaders are not up to the challenge of tomorrow. They may have mastered yesterday, but the cessation of the Obama Administration appears to have announced the beginning of being a second-banana country, as our amateur President, all prickle and Hollywood, incurious and one of the most shallow people around, can only think of profit and military might.
Unfortunately for him, that’s the glitter, not the bones of greatness. We appear to be burdened with a great many people who’ve learned how to sell themselves to the masses, but don’t understand the necessity of wise and far-sighted governance.
And, unless we can shake off this frantic inward-turning, the desperation for stasis and past glories, we will, indeed, become one with the past, another member of the has-beens and also-rans.
Even liberal democracy might go that route. If the Chinese can offer hope, can “rescue the world”, as the article mentions, perhaps their governmental system will win out over ours. And then we can shit-can ours, move on to being a third-rate theocracy, and start killing each other over imagined supernatural peculiarities.
Again.
