Reality check
The laptop class needs to confront actual threats unfolding in real time instead of self-flagellating over perceived sins of the past. By Nick Cater.
Death, destruction and despotism are only the beginning in the eyes of John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate change.
Shortly before the Russians began shelling apartment blocks in Kyiv, Kerry warned that there would be “a massive emissions consequence to the war”.
“We’re going to lose people’s focus,” he said. “We’re going to lose big country attention because they will be diverted.”
Kerry is not another opinionated numbskull big-noting himself on Twitter. He is a former secretary of state and Joe Biden’s hand-picked Special Envoy on Climate Change. In other words, he qualifies as a grown-up in an unserious, muddled and faint-hearted administration facing the greatest strategic challenge since the Cold War.
Any hope that war might encourage the laptop warriors to put aside their boutique concerns and enlist for the fight against tyranny was dashed within hours of the invasion. “Putin very much benefits from white privilege,” commented Janel Forsythe, a communications professional with a masters degree in sociology from the London School of Economics. “I just can’t see a scenario in which a Black or Brown man running Russia would be allowed to invade Ukraine with no devastating consequences.”
Healthcare writer Bruce Y Lee frets in Forbes magazine that Covid-19 “could be one of the real winners” of the Russian invasion, which “could further drag out the pandemic”. Low vaccination rates have been a continuing problem for Ukraine, he writes. “If you thought Covid-19 can overwhelm the healthcare system, picture what could happen with Covid-19 plus wartime injuries filling the hospitals.”
The absence of self-awareness or proportion is hardly a surprise. Years of obsessing about the past evils of the West has dulled the appreciation of contemporary evils committed by the likes of Vladimir Putin.
Barely a month after the annual fuss about what some like to call Australia’s invasion day, we are confronted with a genuine invasion in real time, an act of imperial aggression on a brutal scale, modern-day colonialism no less, in which Putin aspires to become the despotic ruler of a vassal state.
Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, a retired lieutenant general and former military adviser to Donald Trump published a sobering assessment of the threat from rogue regimes, principally in Russia and China, intent on overturning the liberal world order and ending the dominance of Western liberal democracies. HR McMaster’s book, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, was rubbished by the Trump-obsessed intelligentsia, which had hoped for an insider’s critique of the president. McMaster had delivered something far more substantial, however, a warning that Vladimir Putin was exploiting the crisis of confidence in the West in preparation for the restoration of Russia’s superpower status.
Worse still, the Russian President was establishing a coalition of convenience with other illiberal regimes, notably China.
In the two years since publication, we’ve been watching Battlegrounds: the movie in real time, first with America’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan and now with the collapse of courage on both sides of the Atlantic that has denied the Ukrainians NATO military support.
Great power competition is back with a vengeance, wrote McMaster, highlighted by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine, intervention in Syria and the sustained campaign of political subversion against the US and the West. China under Chairman Xi Jinping has accelerated island building in the South China Sea, incorporated Hong Kong into the mainland, tightened population control under the guise of Covid and flexed its diplomatic, economic and military muscles. War is a contest of wills and the US and allies desperately need to regain the confidence they mustered during the Cold War. Yet national pride has been steadily eroded by the drip, drip, drip of progressive education and the undermining of institutions.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that Kerry is right and that fossil fuels present a greater threat to peace and prosperity than foreign despots. Let’s pretend Putin’s greatest sins are Russia’s failure to meet its 2030 emissions targets, which it won’t, and its laggardly delay in putting back net-zero emissions to 2060.
“I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we want to do for the climate,” said Kerry last week.
Fat chance. Putin was a conspicuous absentee from last year’s Glasgow climate summit along with Xi Jinping. The world’s largest and fourth-largest carbon emitters, jointly responsible for 35 per cent of global CO2 output, are paying little more than lip service to the global agreement.
We should hardly be surprised since the International Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations is in itself the bastion of the old world order Russian and China are bent on subverting.
Russia has no intention of phasing out fossil fuels. Instead, it has succeeded in weaponising oil and gas by taking advantage of Europe’s overhasty transition to renewables that has made countries like Germany reliant on Russian imports. What was supposed to be a global effort to save the planet has succeeded only in hastening the West’s decline.