By Charlie Wilson.
“Leading Wall Street investors” including Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase now expect, and propose to base investment decisions on, the prospect of a “3C world”. They are quite clear on what such a world would be like, and so should we be. A “3C world” refers to a scenario where global temperatures rise by 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Cities like Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro and Miami would be below sea level and there would be “catastrophic heatwaves, floods, economic strife and other upheavals.”
In the kind of spectacular loss of any sense of proportion that is now characteristic of bourgeois thinking, the bankers console themselves with the prospect that, in the short term, investors can make a killing by buying shares in air conditioning companies, as intensifying heatwaves drive up demand for products that release more carbon emissions, which generates more heat, in a, temporarily very profitable, vicious cycle.
This “3C world” is a political choice, but it is being presented as an inevitable event that “will happen” independently of any of the decisions that are being made to make sure that it does; in the same way that the phrase “the world has changed” removes all agency, and cuts off any thought about how, why and who has made the decisions that are changing it for the worse, and make it something to be fatalistically adapted to, because, as the villains in Sci Fi films always say “resistance is useless”. In this case, as in the Sci Fi, fatalism is fatal.
This kind of gaslighting ideological sleight of hand is necessary on their part because a “3C world” is no more inevitable than it is desirable; and at the backs of their heads even they know they have an interest in making sure it doesn’t happen.
The latest projection from Carbon Action Tracker (see fig 1) shows that the median projection for average temperature rise by 2100, on the basis of existing policies and actions in November 2024 was 2.7C, on current targets, 2.6C, on pledged targets, 2.1C on pledges already made, with an “optimistic scenario” of 1.9C. So, within reach.
Figure 1
In a situation in which every tenth of a degree for better or worse makes a significant difference, this shows that
- political choices will determine how bad things get, and how much damage we can limit and that
- with improved ambition and more determined action, the worst effects can be significantly blunted.
But, Trump’s re-election in November 2024, as the spearhead of fossil fuel interests, and the actions his administration has taken to disrupt and sabotage the energy transition at home and abroad, has already made a material difference speeding us further towards disaster in a matter of months.
3C is not a business as usual scenario. As Gunter Tallinger of Allianz SE, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, has noted, at 3C climate impacts can no longer be insured against. “The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable”.
The phrase “as we know it” is key. Capitalism in a 3C world would be what Elon Musk calls “hardcore” capitalism. The sort of system foreshadowed in his business decisions when he took over Twitter – sacking half the workforce in a week, stopping paying rent on the presumption that he could strongarm his landlords, and dispensing with janitorial services to cut costs, leading to the workplace becoming disgusting and toilets unusable.
The 3C strategy is theorised in a terrifying article by Varun Sivarum, chair of the Climate Realism Initiative, entitled We Need a Fresh Approach to Climate Policy. It’s Time for Climate Realism. Sivarum is a former managing director for clean energy in the U.S. State Department and chief strategy and innovation officer at Ørsted, currently still the world’s largest producer of offshore wind power.
The essence of his argument is that “A doctrine of “climate realism” could earn bipartisan support by decisively pursuing American interests.” The premise of this position is that the US should respond to the climate challenge in a zero sum social Darwinist fashion in which all states will behave solely in their own interests, ruling out the reality that this can only be found through the necessary “win, win global cooperation” to build a “common home for humanity” and “ecological society”, that is being proposed by China.
In a neat side step of historic responsibility, with the US still the world’s second largest emitter and a per capita carbon footprint three times heavier than the global average, Sivarum poses “foreign emissions” as a “threat to the American homeland”, posing this in terms of military confrontation. “As greenhouse gas emissions exacerbate hurricanes and wildfires that level whole U.S. communities spanning North Carolina down to southern California, the effects resemble those if China or Indonesia were to launch missiles at the United States.” Other countries might feel justified in feeling similarly aggrieved that emissions from the US and its allies have had a similar impact on them (and note that the United States is in the habit of launching actual missiles at them in a way that China and Indonesia don’t).
At the same time he notes that successive administrations have “failed to make U.S. clean technologies competitive with those of China’s”;which is an acknowledgement of a failure that poses a series of questions about the importance of strategic thinking and state investment that he does not explore.
So, to deal with what might be called a “clean technology gap” he proposes to dispense with what he calls “four fallacies”
- The world’s climate targets are achievable. Giving up on this as policy – as the Trump administration has already done – is an admission that continued US global dominance will take us all to hell in a handcart. It is an assertion which, if accepted as policy, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. His argument that the $10 Trillion a year needed to upgrade energy, manufacturing, transport, agriculture, housing and more is impossible to meet is undermined both by realising that fossil fuels were subsidised to the tune of $7 Trillion in 2022 and his recognition that in a 3C world “damage on this scale could endanger the survival of American society as we know it” a point underlined by a US Army Report from 2019 which envisaged exactly that level of social and political collapse; which makes $10 Trillion a year a worthwhile investment.
- Reducing U.S. domestic greenhouse gas emissions can make a meaningful difference. We have the same weasel argument from the Right in the UK. Global greenhouse gas reduction requires global action; on targets being made and met everywhere. No one gets a free pass. Least of all rich countries with an enormous carbon footprint. Carbon emissions in developing countries will only grow if they are denied the means to develop without recourse to fossil fuels. The US at present is driving the opposite course. Pushing coal, oil and gas on developing countries.
- Climate change poses a manageable risk to U.S. economic prosperity and national security. Where he is right is that current US assessments “underestimate climate’s impact by an order of magnitude or more” with “the risks of seven-foot sea-level rise, dramatically intensified hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms, and entire U.S. cities being wiped off the map this century are nontrivial” This contradicts his initial premise in point 1 and he doesn’t seem to have thought that out.
- The clean energy transition is necessarily a win-win for U.S. interests and climate action. This is the core of his argument “In reality, the unfolding energy transition carries serious risks as well as potential opportunities for U.S. interests. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer and one of its largest exporters, a position that brings U.S. energy security, economic prosperity, and global geopolitical leverage. However, China has emerged as by far the dominant producer of clean energy technologies, spanning solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles. On its current course, a global transition to clean energy would degrade U.S. economic and security interests while advancing China’s.” So, as it is precisely the green technologies that China has a lead in that offer the world the slim lifeline we currently have, a successful energy transition is a threat to US dominance, and that is more important for him and the US ruling class than human survival on a planetary scale. We should let that sink in.
He proposes “three pillars” that are already enshrined in the US administration’s policies.
- Prepare for a world that dramatically blows through its climate targets. What he means is that it is in US interests to make sure that it does. Nevertheless he admits that this would mean a world with “mass migration of at least hundreds of millions of climate refugees (which) could upend the international order, and increasingly grisly natural disasters around the world could overwhelm the humanitarian capacity of countries and international institutions” and in which the US should provide what aid it can to support resilience, but primarily “defend its own borders” – while “accelerating climate change will dramatically reshape global geopolitics” in which “the United States should prepare for global competition for resources and military positioning that is intensifying in the melting Arctic” as Trump is already doing with Greenland and Canada.
- Invest in globally competitive clean technology industries. He notes that “Today, the top five U.S. export industries are oil and gas, fossil-fueled automobiles, gas turbines, and fossil-fueled airplanes. The extremely limited list of globally competitive U.S. clean technology products includes Tesla electric vehicles and GE Vernova wind turbines, both of which are losing global market share to China” and proposes to deal with that by targeted investment in “next-generation geothermal, advanced nuclear, and solid-state batteries.” His problem with this is that the Trump administration is instead doubling down on fossil fuels including “clean, beautiful coal” and closing down research as well as regulation, purging Federal government sites of information and sacking scientists (which is leading to US scientists at international conferences being seen using burner phones). As a result, in a recent Nature Survey, 75% of respondents said they were considering leaving the country. This is a process of serious self harm.
- Lead international efforts to avert truly catastrophic climate change. What he means by this is partly to go for potentially truly catastrophic geo-engineering. As measures like “spewing aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into outer space” are “highly speculative and untested” he poses research into them as partly designed to stop other countries resorting to them. So, the core of his proposal is to make the global poor pay; for the US “to work with like-minded partners to drive China and emerging economies…to slash their emissions… Advanced economies should develop aggressive trade tools, tariffs, and so-called “climate clubs” that penalise countries with large and fast-growing emissions.” In the absence of the $1.3 trillion required for the developing world to grow without reliance on fossil fuels, this amounts to keeping the Global South poor by all means necessary. “Every tool of the U.S. and allies’ arsenals, spanning diplomatic and economic coercion to military might, should be on the table.” This is why President Petro of Columbia is right to say that, if a 3C world is the future, it will look like Gaza to the global majority on the receiving end of that “economic coercion and military might”; which is another reason the US is trying to normalise it.
There is no guarantee that this will work, even for the US, and even for the feral billionaires who now run it. That’s why people like Peter Thiel, JD Vance’s mentor and sugar Daddy, are buying deep luxury apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand and Mark Zuckerburg doing the same in Hawaii.
The impact on the rest of the world includes the promotion of climate hostile political forces. Under pressure from Trump’s tariffs, the EU is watering down its targets. In the UK Reform and the Conservative leadership are now opposed to “stupid Net Zero” and the Right wing press is in full cry that the costs of avoiding social and economic collapse are too high. A core part of this argument is that the transition is too dependent on “Chinese technology”.
This Cold War framing will be increasingly central as the rearmament drive builds up; a reframing of “better dead than Red” for the 21st century.
A recent cross-Party amendment to the Energy Bill sought to eliminate any solar panels implicated in “forced labour”. As the false presumption at Westminster is that any solar panel, or component, or raw material from China includes forced labour, and, as China produces around 80% of global solar panel production this is a naked attempt to choke off any solar installation in the country. Though this amendment was voted down in the House of Commons, the labour movement in the UK is vulnerable to these allegations and sometimes makes them itself; so getting the truth out that they are nonsense is a key task.
Whatever happens in the Global North, the pattern of Chinese solar panel exports is increasingly South South. See Figure 2
A spectacular example of this is that in Pakistan last year, additional energy generating capacity equal to a third of the existing grid was added from solar panels on roofs because they are now so cheap.
The UK government is caught between US pressure, the reality that the UK can’t double down on its own fossil fuel reserves because it doesn’t have enough, and the legal requirements of the Climate Change Act. It is required by two court judgements made against the backsliding Sunak government to publish a Net Zero compliant plan by October.
Nevertheless The government’s initial response to Trump’s tariffs, which might be best characterised as “elbows down” or “keep calm and don’t do much”, includes initially small retreats on some climate measures, limiting the EV mandate that reinforces decisions on airport expansion that contradict explicit Climate Change Committee guidance ruling it out, and a declaration that, while still committed to net zero, they are “not ideological” about it. Indeed, they are “pragmatic”. This is a disturbing echo of the script that Rishi Sunak used to use, in which “pragmatic” decision, all with a supposedly “negligible” effect on targets nevertheless all went in a negative direction; and every little doesn’t help if it all adds up to digging in on unsustainable stagnation.
When you add to this the full bore push for rearmament crowding out any other investment and the government’s “growth” strategy – having abandoned the only growth lever they had, the £28 billion a year into green transition – now looks primarily based on “ripping up red tape” and wholesale deregulation. This sets up a further collision with the CCC and the law, which will come to a head with the publication of the new plan in October.
An opposite course is now being proposed by BRICS countries, because they know they can’t develop sustainably on the same basis as the Global North did. India is proposing that, with the US abdicating “global leadership”, the BRICS should mobilise and organise the annual $1.3 Trillion needed for the developing world and Brazil is proposing a global 2% tax on billionaires to pay for it, which is being taken up by the movement here.
The conclusions from this are
- That continued US global dominance is a clear and present danger to the rest of the world.
- Part of this is through intense US pressure on its subordinate allies – “vassal states” as Zbigniev Brezinski put it in 1997 – to follow its lead to double down on fossil fuels, ramp up arms spending, cut environmental and labour regulations and drop climate commitments.
- This will be explicitly posed in a Cold War framework, to trash the global cooperation needed to limit the damage.
Clarifying this and mobilising against all of it, finding common cause with the global majority, is a vital task for Socialists.