Too toxic

Heavy steel factories in Benxi, northeast China, 2013. Photo: WikiCommons

China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet
Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro
Polity Press: 2020
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Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State
Yanzhong Huang
Cambridge University Press: 2020
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By the time you read this, we will know the results of the US presidential election. Inshallah, touch wood, fingers crossed, Joe Biden will win. Donald Trump has wrought chaos in America and elsewhere: caging children taken from their refugee parents, allowing Covid-19 to explode across the country, and whipping up white supremacists in a way that has made people fear a breach in the thin skin of civilisation. Abroad he has undermined alliances, ripped up treaties and uncritically embraced some of the worst rulers on the planet. The guard rails of American politics and justice are twisted and scorched. It cannot end soon enough.

Trump is guilty of many follies, even crimes, but history may be harshest on his deeply ignorant policies on climate change and his undoing of the work President Barack Obama did to come to an understanding with China on reducing greenhouse emissions. Biden’s most pressing international task is to find a way to work with China to deal with global environmental threats; there is no time to waste. The United States fell out of the Paris Accord on 4 November, the day after the election.

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