Deglobalization and climate

One of the great economists who has addressed these issues, Raghuram G. Rajan of India, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India and now Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, published an article while the Egypt conference was taking place. “Deglobalization is a climate threat”, in which he reminded that there are three categories of climate action: mitigation (reduction of emissions), adaptation (prevention), and migration to places with better climatic conditions (which must be done by those who suffer the worsening of living conditions caused by global warming). And the columnist affirms: “New international agreements are needed to manage each of these issues. But growing geopolitical competition will make mitigation deals even more difficult. How can China and the US agree on significant emissions cuts when both suspect that the other’s top priority is to gain an economic and thus strategic advantage? In short, it is clear that “agreements will be easier to reach and implement in an economically unfragmented world”.

From this analysis and the other analyzes that accompany it, a bitter truth emerges that must be stated without delay: If deglobalization continues to progress, that is, if we continue to follow the reverse path of globalization, it will not be possible to fight climate change. It led to a growing globalization, supported by new and powerful economies of scale, based on trade and specialisation, collaboration in favor of innovation.

Deglobalization will inevitably sow distrust of mitigation progress. If there is no trust and mutual accessibility between actors, if the trade-offs that unite the economic fabric diminish, it will be very difficult for different producing sectors to agree on making their processes more expensive at the request of their competitors. take advantage of it.

Likewise, deglobalization will affect growth, hampering decarbonisation-based development, which includes the construction of renewable energy generators and requires technological advances in energy storage through batteries that require scarce and inaccessible raw materials.

Deglobalization also puts us in a very perverse vicious circle: delays in mitigation will first affect the least developed countries that depend solely on agricultural products for their survival. At first, the effects of global warming on agriculture can be mitigated through technology, which the first world would have to grant access to. Because the next step in the formation of this gradual apocalypse will be mass migration from the south to the north in search of habitable climates. The demographic pressure of the “climate refugees” will be unstoppable because this flow of migration will no longer be to reach better living conditions as it is now, but to survive purely and simply. There will be no obstacles to this mass mobilization.

In reality, the seriousness of the threat should be enough for the problem to become everyone’s main concern, especially if meteorological behavior forces them to accept this fact, about which it no longer makes sense to doubt. Under these circumstances, conflicts such as those initiated by Russia, which interrupts globalization and hinders progress in mitigation and related actions, have the additional criminogenic component of interrupting humanity’s collective position in the face of a natural problem that concerns us all. and will have a very direct impact on the quality of life of future generations.