The alt can’t overcome geopolitical growth imperatives or basic human interest. Causes transition wars over resources and relative positioning.

As climate activist Greta Thunberg likes to remind her audiences, when the house is on fire, you stop whatever you are doing and focus on extinguishing. The message is that in our climate emergency all other, petty concerns must be set aside. Applied to international relations, this aspirational thinking has some believing that climate change will imply the end of conflictual geopolitics.44 There are practical reasons why this type of thinking might have gathered momentum. After all, much of the world’s recent conflict history, including war after war in the Middle East in the 1990s and early 2000s, was driven in large part by issues related to petroleum. It might seem logical that once economies, as part of their climate mitigation efforts, switch to renewables like solar and wind, conflictual international relations will become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, that change is very unlikely to represent the end of geopolitics.45

First, the overall premise is wrong, as oil and gas will not disappear any time soon. Rather, we will observe a gradual shift in the energy mix from traditional energy sources toward renewables.46 An effort to fast-track the demise of highly polluting coal, while renewable capacity is still building up, might initially lead to a counterintuitive increase in the use of methane— which is, at least for Europe, another source of conflictual geopolitical relations, in its case with Russia.

Second, as discussed in The New Map by energy expert and Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Yergin, we are by no means close to seeing the end of geopolitics and power politics in the world. Specifically in the realm of energy, new materials such as rare-earth metals will become focal points of contention. Because these minerals are key inputs to the construction of wind turbines and electric cars, and will become fundamental to our technology, varying levels of access to them will reshape the world order and create new imperatives to ensure the safety of supplies.47 Military strategies and foreign policy priorities will be reoriented toward that goal, just as attention has been focused over the past decades on securing oil supply bottlenecks like the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca.48 Indeed, we can already get a sense of this, as the European Union has published, and regularly updates, a list of what it calls “critical raw materials,” necessary to ensure a strong industrial base to the European economy. The US administration did the same, identifying thirty-five critical minerals. For example, cobalt is featured on both lists, as a fundamental mineral in low-carbon technologies like electric vehicles and batteries, including those used every day in smartphones and laptops. Responsible for almost 60 percent of the world’s known reserves and 97 percent of global exports of cobalt is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, suggesting that this country will increasingly enter the spotlight of global power politics.49

Any predictions about geoeconomics must also acknowledge that climate change is not the only megatrend at play; it overlaps with others, including digitalization, automation, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and big data, all of which exhibit important winner-take-all effects, and in all of which countries will compete. A hugely important megatrend is the rise of China and the re-dimensioning of the United States after roughly a century of global economic and political dominance.50 To the relative “optimists,” like political economist Dani Rodrik, the relationship between China and the United States could evolve into a milder, second Cold War or mutual recognition of existence and differences—an us and them dynamic within a framework of continued reciprocal trade and investment. To the less optimistic, as the global center of economic gravity shifts eastward, the risk of escalation to more open confrontation between superpowers is high.

In his 2017 book Destined for War, historian Graham Allison turned his attention to what he called the Thucydides trap.51 Analyzing the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the Athenian historian Thucydides concluded that “it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” How will the rise of a new superpower play out in the twenty-first century? Allison reviews sixteen instances of swaps in economic supremacy between countries over the past five hundred years and paints a grim picture: war broke out in twelve of them. This does not imply that war is inevitable, but suggests the SinoAmerican relationship will shape geopolitics in decades to come. Climate mitigation and international cooperation will play out against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tension between at least two superpowers, which will inevitably push other countries to pick sides.

The politics of degrowth

The degrowth international vision to tackle climate change centers on the proposition that wealthy countries, who have more than enough, will shrink their economies. By doing so, they will bring down greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the risk of catastrophic climate change. And they will do so to such an extent that space will be opened up for poorer countries to develop, while the overall world economy and global emissions remain within safe limits.

From a strictly moral standpoint, this might sound reasonable and desirable. In light of what we have seen up to now, however, we can state categorically that there is no scenario under which a small set of countries willingly makes such an act of self-sacrifice for the global common good.52 While people are primed for altruism and self-sacrifices, these are directed first toward their in-group, and only later toward others, following geographical discounting. Democratic governments are bound by their citizens’ preferences, and therefore these basic human tendencies define the set of policies that can be considered feasible. Naturally, citizens of a country constitute only one type of in-group. Groups can also arise based on shared culture, kinship, language, religion, geography, and other affinities, as emphasized by Amartya Sen in Identity and Violence.53 Humanity as a whole, however, cannot act as an in-group in the absence of an outgroup, and this will not change in the face of climate change.

The fond hope that some countries will actively shrink their economies ignores the reality that these rich countries themselves will remain in conditions of relative scarcity, which will only be felt more acutely as climate change unleashes its negative effects. This implies that the in-group will be in constant need of extra resources, to tackle the needs of the moment, which can be addressing incipient desertification, building infrastructure to prevent flooding, and the like.

In addition, countries themselves, as we have seen, experience relative income theory, and will constantly compare themselves to the past and to other countries. While China’s economy expands at a high clip, you cannot expect the United States to look on with indifference. This is not only based on vague predicaments like “perceptions,” or sinful feelings like envy, but also on hard realities, like the fact that economic might goes hand in hand with military spending and therefore international political influence. This, as we have seen before, generates a sort of geopolitical growth imperative. Reduced resources imply less capacity to protect (or project) a value system, paving the way to reduced self-determination as a people.54

The idea, moreover, that if rich countries shrink poor countries can expand is based on an incomplete understanding of the economics of development. In 2008, a group of nineteen leading policymakers, mostly from developing economies, headed by two economics Nobel laureates, put together The Growth Report, analyzing the experience of thirteen countries that had managed to sustain high GDP growth since the 1950s.55 Drawing on the input of over three hundred distinguished academics, on top of the personal hands-on experiences of the policymakers, the report sifted out common traits among successful cases. These thirteen cases of “miracle” development, all of which featured sharp reductions in extreme poverty, included China, postwar Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Taiwan—and a critical feature of literally all of them was fast expansion of exports.56 Note, however, that most exports go to foreign lands that feature consumption aplenty—that is, the rich, growing, industrialized countries.

To recognize this is to see the flaw in the logic of rich countries having to shrink to open up space for poor countries to grow. The whole idea is based on a misreading of the global economy as a zero-sum game. Pursuing a degrowth agenda in the developed world would bring about a collapse of global trade, closing the door to any hope of fast growth in poor countries, turning economic miracles into mirages, and forcing millions to remain in extreme poverty.57