By Will Pease
image provided by Pxfuel under the Creative Commons License
In his first address to Congress since his inauguration, Joe Biden claimed that “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century. We’re at a great inflection point in history.” This rhetoric of global competition has reemerged in recent years as the United States and other great powers- principally China and Russia- have moved away from the post-Cold War era of convergence and back toward balancing international power. However, many object to the need to compete with other nations when a crisis that threatens the stability of the entire world has already begun. Climate change is an existential threat to all nations that demands international collaboration to solve. While coordination between great powers regarding climate change is underway and will likely continue, the effects of climate change will need to get much worse before powerful nations set aside their differences and seek to only cooperate without competition. Great power competition over the future of green energy is set to become a focal point of geopolitics as the balance of world power enters a state of flux and more and more nations seek to transition to renewable energy.
Climate change and the return of great power competition have disproven the optimistic post-Cold War notion that mankind had moved past its long history of international conflict and zero-sum games. Francis Fukuyama’s popular 1992 essay-turned-book, “The End of History?” posited that with capitalism defeating communism in the 20th century our world would become one where liberal democracies would dominate the international arena and the ideological conflict that defined human history up until that point would be effectively over. Yet this so called “Washington Consensus” has been challenged by two illiberal and undemocratic great powers that have risen to prominence in the 21st century: Russia and China. But what went further than Fukuyama’s thesis was the idea of convergence: that the world’s major nations would trend toward cooperation rather than competition within a rules based international order. This seemed plausible in the 1990s when American hegemony reigned supreme and no nation had the means to challenge the liberal international order, but China’s rapid rise and Russia’s revisionist turn in the 2010s have brought great-power competition back to the forefront of international affairs. At the same time, climate change threatens to destabilize, or even upend, the international order as a whole. As the international system returns to a semi-anarchic state after a brief period at the end of history, great powers will compete over the resources that give states power and sustain human life. One of the most important of those is energy.
The simultaneous global dilemmas of power struggle and climate change are intrinsically linked as energy is a core force that shapes international politics. From the United States’ strategic alliance with states in the Persian Gulf to Russia’s natural gas exports to the European Union, large reserves of energy resources afford countries privilege and leverage they would not otherwise have. Yet with only about half a century of oil and natural gas left in the world’s proven reserves at current rates of consumption, many nations have already begun transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. While coal still could likely sustain human energy consumption for over a hundred years, the extreme amount of carbon that coal production emits has already made it the primary target of the global environmentalist movement. Furthermore, for many countries it is already becoming more cost efficient to produce a form of renewable energy than to extract energy from coal. Large investments – both domestic and foreign- in renewable energy are likely to be the way that developing nations increase their productive capacity within the bounds of a world reeling from climate change. The Chinese Communist Party recently announced that it will halt its investment in foreign coal plants (though it did not address ending its own economy’s reliance on coal power). This announcement comes as China undertakes its Belt and Road Initiative of global infrastructure building in Africa, Eurasia, and South America. Through the Belt and Road Initiative China hopes to increase its economic leverage with nations around the globe and has already supplanted the United States as the leading trade partner for most of the world. It is extremely likely that China will seek to continue its energy geopolitics through hydro, solar, and wind sources as technological advancement improves the efficiency of sustainable energy production. Green energy is set to become a central focus of great power geopolitics in the 21st century.
It is undeniably in the interest of powerful nations to lead the world’s struggle against global warming. The changing climate will cause population migrations, resource wars, and territorial conflict in the coming decades. As U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken stated at the United Nations Security Council on September 23, 2021, “Look at almost every place you see threats to international peace and security today, and you’ll see that climate change is making things less peaceful, less secure, and rendering our response even more challenging.” The destabilizing thrust of climate change is certainly not in the interest of countries seeking to maintain regional and international hegemony. Furthermore, renewable energy being the fastest growing energy sector in the world has already made it a target of investment for many nations, especially those seeking international influence. There is arguably no healthier way for great powers to compete than in trying to outperform each other globally in making renewable energy cheap and efficient. This is a rare area of great-power competition where the competition is widely non-zero-sum. While it would be preferable for great powers to cooperate on solving climate change rather than addressing it by following their own political and economic interests, nations seeking to strengthen their role on the world stage will increasingly look to how they can command influence by investing in the world’s transition to green power, which can still move the world in a positive direction. Even in areas where cooperation will not occur, the world can still be benefited by attention being devoted to expanding the productive capacity of green energy.
The world’s major powers have already begun advancing policies to increase their control over the future of the world’s renewable energy supply. At the recent 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Joe Biden pledged to double U.S. funding for poor nations to transition to clean energy sources, though this increased funding will still be far less than what the European Union has committed to. The United States has recently made significant investments in solar and wind energy and pressure is building from the Democratic Party to end reliance on fossil fuels. At the same time, the U.S. Senate passed a bill explicitly written to increase American technology competitiveness with China. The House of Representatives has opted to write their own versions of a competition bill, with many demanding a focus on renewable energy. Members of the House Science Committee see scientific problem solving, particularly on the issue of climate change, as a more constructive alternative to competition for competition’s sake. While China’s economy is still centered around coal, it has been focused on increasing its renewable energy capacity year after year. China is the world leader in renewable energy advancement, responsible for nearly 50% of investment in green energy sources. With Xi Jingping’s recent announcement regarding foreign coal financing it is only a matter of time before exporting this green technology becomes a core focus of the Belt and Road Initiative. Russia is also expected to make moves to diversify its economy in the coming decades as the petrostate’s feeble economy limits its global ambitions. However, Russian natural gas exports are an important source of leverage in its foreign relations with the European Union and former Eastern bloc. The finite nature of fossil fuels raises questions about what comes next for countries whose foreign policy ambitions are extended by hydrocarbon exports. Whether or not Russia has the means to be a world leader in renewable energy is uncertain, but Putin has never been one to let an opportunity to compete with the West go to waste.
The return of great power competition to the forefront of international affairs is an unfortunate development for those hoping for a comprehensive and cooperative global response to the threat of climate change. However, competition over investments in wind, solar, and hydro energy production are certain to increase in coming decades and will mitigate the externalities caused by human energy demand. The volatility of nuclear power makes it unlikely to be seen as a wise export by great power nations, but technological advancement (specifically regarding the ever-elusive promise of nuclear fusion) could further change the state of energy geopolitics. The United States, European Union, China, and Russia will all seek to deepen their investment in green energy technology in order to expand their influence and protect themselves from the destabilizing effects of climate change. Great power competition complicates but does not entirely negate the prospect of climate change being moderated in the 21st century.