US hegemony undermines global efforts to tackle climate change
Across the globe, scorching days are getting hotter and increasingly more frequent. Hundreds of millions of people in the world are currently experiencing sweltering and also dangerous heat waves – an unpleasant new reality as the effects of global warming and climate change continue to manifest in extreme weather patterns that harm us.
Although heat waves are highly likely to become more intense and more durable, there isn’t a well-coordinated international effort to cope with climate change yet. The world’s major power, the US, is not putting required resources in place to ramp up green growth, but stubbornly insist on forming exclusive political, military and technology groups to squeeze its imagined rivals, which has made the world more divided and fragmental.
Due to a natural gas and oil supply crunch caused by the geopolitical frictions, many European countries are now returning to coal-fired power stations and even stoves. And, the US’ Biden administration has backtracked on its earlier election promise to reduce the country’s carbon footprint. These backflips will increase greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, and make our living planet warmer and less inhabitable.
Unfortunately, Earth’s climate is now slipping into “unchartered territory.” Until now, our planet’s average temperature has already grown by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to the preindustrial era, as a consequence of the emissions from fossil-fuel fired power plants, gasoline-powered vehicles and industries.
The predictions scientists have been making for decades about what awaited our planet should the temperatures continue to spiral up are increasingly coming into fruition now, in the form of these dreadful heat waves and other extreme weather patterns. For example, the torrential rainstorm battered Zhengzhou, capital of Henan Province, inundating the city in just two hours with more than 380 people killed.
The biggest cause for concern is not that these episodes of extreme weather patterns confirm the existential threat of climate change, but rather that what is to come could be more alarming and troubling.
But, many governments have been deaf to or just ignore the wake-up call. While some developed countries are turning back to coal and emitting more greenhouse gases, they are hypocritically instructing developing countries to shoulder more responsibility than they should. In the US, July has dealt a serious blow to the green plans of the Biden government, with a Supreme Court ruling that has severely limited the American president’s ability to make any progress on that front. All indications signal that politicians in Washington are just paying lip service to curbing climate change as the two political parties there are always engaged in partisan fight, while trying to maintain American global dominance and hegemony through containing the rise of China and other countries.
There is still a window to reduce global warming, which needs the collective effort of all the countries, the world’s leading economies in particular, to ramp up our campaign to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, and start to phase in more green energies by building facilities of hydropower, solar panels, wind turbines as well as nuclear power plants, while manufacturing more electric trucks, buses and cars. With regard to developing and using new and clean energies, China has in the past years made marked progress.
The Earth needs our concerted efforts to reduce carbon emissions, because our offspring cannot live in a much hotter and more perilous planet.