The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) announced that it had reached an agreement on the standards for the UN-led carbon credit market that essentially amounts to buying and selling permissions for carbon emissions this November 12.
While this initiative is touted as an effort to stave off the threat of climate change and to tackle the issue of carbon emissions, not all environmental initiatives championed by the West are as benign as they may seem at first glance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently said that Western powers that long have polluted Earth’s atmosphere with their industries are now trying to force their so-called green agenda on Russia, effectively trying to wield said agenda as an instrument of neocolonialism.
Putin’s concerns were echoed by Come Carpentier de Gourdon, a geopolitical analyst and the convener of the editorial board of World Affairs journal, who observed that “most countries, particularly developing countries, do face increasing pressure from the more influential powers in the name of making the world a better place by cutting down on pollution.”
While calls to cut down carbon emissions and the like may seem reasonable in principle, de Gourdon notes, they are often being used by the West in pursuit of “economic and strategic” goals such as stymying the “growth rate of countries that need to improve their living standards.”
“They can also impose some technologies which are not necessarily very practical or economically viable on poorer countries,” he continues. “Such as, of course, the choice of renewable energy for power generation, which is not always sufficient to provide reliable power to relatively highly populated countries, especially if they do not enjoy your dry sandy climates. And likewise, wind energy which is generally unreliable and which requires an infrastructure that is not always very good for nature.”
Western powers, who “for very long used methods for acquiring wealth, which were only in their own interest,” often do not provide “viable alternatives” to countries that are supposed to adhere to the green agenda, de Gourdon laments.
“For example, the idea of imposing as much as possible electric vehicles is causing a problem because they are more expensive, they are more expensive to maintain also, and the electricity still has to be produced and therefore creating more demand for electricity,” he elaborates. “There is an additional burden that is being placed on the population and on the governments of developing countries.”
At the same time, he points out, “some countries in the West are already scaling down their environmental transition because they realize they are running into massive economic problems.”
“We see what's happening in Germany and even in France, where now there is talk again, not only of building nuclear power plants, but also of rebuilding or reopening thermal coal plants and all this,” de Gourdon says.
He also criticizes attempts by green agenda adherents to portray climate change as the product of human activity.
“Climate change -- is a constant natural phenomenon. It happens cyclically and therefore we cannot hope by just changing some of our industrial and economic policies to reverse or stop climate change,” de Gourdon says.
Meanwhile, he suggests that “BRICS can certainly derive a new formula as far as energy production and distribution in order to encourage and facilitate autonomous energy generation for as many countries as possible and also increase the scientific output.”