Climate, Energy, & “Wrecking Ball Politics”
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Demolition Man
Bankruptcy, wrote Ernest Hemingway, finds you two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Small decisions, omissions, and mistakes compound over time, at first imperceptibly, then inescapably, until the entire enterprise is at risk. The international system may now be at such an inflection point, with uncertain consequences for the future.
Speaking at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned of a world facing not a transition but a “rupture”—a fundamental break in the system of relationships, expectations, and institutions that has guided world relations for the better part of the last century. From the World Trade Organization to the UN Climate Summits, Carney argued, “the very architecture of collective problem solving is under threat.”
The Munich Security Conference, another major meeting of world leaders and foreign policy experts that opened on Friday, looks set to continue that theme. A report issued ahead of that event warned that the existing system of global governance is under threat from “demolition men,” a group of world leaders practicing “wrecking ball politics.” United by vibes more than ideology, these leaders share not so much a policy agenda as an eagerness to watch the world burn.
U.S. President Donald Trump is this group’s most notorious avatar, but dissatisfaction with the status quo is flaring far beyond American borders. The same preconference report found that large majorities in many of the world’s leading economies believe that their governments are failing to improve the lives of future generations. In Britain, France, and Germany, majorities think their governments are making things worse. Publics professed a widespread loss of faith in democratic institutions, deeming them “overly bureaucratic and judicialized.” The same is true on the international stage, where “key institutions have come to be seen as ‘rigid and unresponsive,’” and incapable of addressing growing risks like inequality and climate change, feeding a pervasive sense of political helplessness.
Those trends point to an uncomfortable conclusion: the world’s democratic and multilateral institutions were failing gradually long before Trump and other wrecking-ball leaders endeavored to make them fail suddenly. The question now is what will be learned from the destruction, and what will follow in its wake.
In the climate and energy realm, that destruction has been severe. In addition to once again withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, Trump also abrogated U.S. membership in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a foundational treaty for global climate cooperation with near-universal adherence. The United States even withdrew from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a consensus-driven body that produces reports reflecting the world’s best understanding of climate science. Acting both unilaterally and with Congress, the Trump administration has rescinded funding from domestic efforts to develop and deploy clean energy, weakened environmental rules designed to protect Americans’ health, and worked to reinforce global usage of fossil fuels.
But there have been some surprising and potentially instructive elements to Trump’s approach to energy, especially on the international stage. He has succeeded in elevating energy as a foreign policy issue in a way that few presidents before him have managed to achieve. President Joe Biden made high-profile efforts to integrate climate and energy into his foreign policy, but in practice cooperation on those issues was often subordinate to more traditional concerns of economic and geopolitical competition.
Trump, in contrast, has proven comfortable with exercising power, not just persuasion, in pursuit of his administration’s energy goals. His administration has prioritized competition in energy and energy supply chains in its trade and diplomatic relations, and has not hesitated to apply political leverage where it saw an opportunity for advantage. It has demonstrated a willingness to penalize other countries for energy policies of which it disapproves, and to condition access to U.S. markets on purchases of American energy.
It is unfortunate, to say the least, that those actions have been predicated on a rejection of even the most basic climate science, and demonstrated a level of disrespect to friends and allies that may permanently damage U.S. global leadership. But the net effect of his actions has been to expand the Overton window for policymaking in climate and clean energy, offering future presidents a broader set of tools that they might use to more constructive ends.
The United States, moreover, is not the only country beginning to experiment in this way. The European Union, for example, is reevaluating its climate and energy diplomacy after finding itself unable to convince the world to adopt stricter limits on fossil fuel use at last year’s UN Climate Summit. An internal report found that it had failed to fully leverage its trade and development tools, which had “limited [its] ability to reinforce its positions and to shape incentives in the negotiating rooms and beyond.” It needed, in other words, to exercise more power.
Other countries are taking fresh looks at diplomatic and economic priorities that once seemed immutable. Germany is easing market protections on its auto sector, one of its economic crown jewels, by allowing purchases of Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) to qualify for consumer tax credits of up to €6,000. Canada, too, is branching out. It recently announced it would be slashing tariffs on Chinese EVs to just over 6 percent (compared to 100 percent in the United States). It will also allow the importation of a small number of Chinese-made EVs, and work to become a global leader in EV and battery manufacturing—a seismic competitive act in the closely integrated North American auto market.
In his viral Davos address, Carney warned that the demise of the postwar order would be costly. “A world of fortresses,” he said, “will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.” Perhaps. But a status quo that delivered more than 40 percent of the wealth created this century to the top 1 percent of people; that left many in even the wealthiest countries pessimistic about their ability to improve their lives; and that presided over an accelerating ecological and climatic disaster is clearly not a safe bet, either.
As leaders gather this weekend in Germany’s Alpine foothills, they should remain open to optimism. Challenging the status quo, applying new tools of power, experimenting and taking risks—these actions can spur virtuous competition in pursuit of climate progress and rising prosperity. Vision, creativity, and courage are needed now more than ever.