For an ecological realpolitik

Some quotes I found interesting in the article:

With the United States mired in a democratic crisis and Europe stuck in its wait-and-see attitude, China has taken the lead and opened a breach by signaling that it is now possible, indeed necessary, to pursue power politics without relying on fossil fuels. It goes without saying that China’s plan for financing a decarbonized production infrastructure in no way means that the country is abandoning its dream of geostrategic influence and development, but simply that from now on it intends to ground its power—both its economic engine and its strategic base—in other material possibilities.

The Green New Deal, in its significantly varied American and European versions, does not yet structure investment plans that are both capable of meeting the challenge and truly rooted in social justice objectives, but it has imposed itself as the common ground of the Western left.

Yet the strength of the Green New Deal is also its weakness. This plan for economic and social reconstruction aims to break through the barrier of the employment problem by subordinating energy transition to wealth redistribution, control of investment channels, and even job guarantees. Thus defined, this project runs the risk of preserving the structural inequities between Global North and Global South. Whereas the so-called “developing” countries will lack the means to finance such plans, their partners to the North will have the wherewithal to reinvest their techno-scientific capital in a renovation that will only enhance their “lead” and their security. This paradox, which Tooze recently analyzed, is all the more embarrassing for the social-ecological left inasmuch as it compromises its rallying cry, namely the discourse of inclusion and global justice. Seen from the Global South, the Green New Deal often looks like a consolidation of the advantages gained during the colonial period of extractivism, and also like a lifeboat for advanced economies at a time of global disturbances. Since at least the 1990s, Western environmentalism has been the subject of scathing criticism, notably from India. Ramachandra Guha, for instance, exposed the colonial and racist imaginary of the “wilderness” that enabled Americans to cleanse their urban and industrial guilty conscience by way of natural parks, which were established by evicting indigenous populations.

Two questions from the article that I would be curious on your opinion:

First, what kind of alliance will it establish with the Chinese model to safeguard at least what is essential on a strictly climatic level, at the risk of no longer having “clean hands”?

And, symmetrically, how will it make its specificity heard with regard to this new paradigm?

Article's conclusion:

The ecology movement should therefore agree to talk about strategy, conflict, and security; it should present itself as a dynamics of building a political form that assumes the idea of power without scaling back on social and democratic demands. In fact, these demands can only be achieved if they are invested into specifically political reflections and practices. But for this to be possible, we have to leave behind our tendency toward moral depoliticization, because we no longer have a monopoly on the critique of the fossil development paradigm