Shape of new climate politics emerges

Only a few months ago, a headline like “United States sets tariffs of up to 3,521% on solar panels from Southeast Asia” could have been dismissed as satire.

- Sam Geall

Today, it’s nothing special, one of many published amid an uninterrupted fusillade accompanying Donald Trump's first 100 days in power. Yet it’s also part of something bigger, as axes of economic power shift, technological changes surge, and popular sentiments reconfigure and metastasise. Amid that fracturing world order, how should we consider the climate crisis?

As an unfolding and catastrophic reality, to be sure. Last year was the warmest on record, breaching for the first time the Paris Agreement's target to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. From wildfires to tropical cyclones, extreme weather events in 2024 displaced the highest number of people since 2008, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Homes, livelihoods and natural systems were destroyed, compounding global shocks and stresses, from armed conflicts to rising food prices.

Yet from punishing tariffs and the risk of escalation in the US-China trade war, to Mr Trump's apparent designs on Greenland for its critical minerals — to paraphrase Michael Every, we can’t only talk about warming as lines on temperature charts. We need to talk about lines on maps. Addressing climate change means addressing it not in the world we would like to live in — where multilateralism and global governance really matter — but on this lawless planet of great power rivalry and zero-sum economic statecraft, where sharp economic measures are wielded for national political ends.

We can’t only talk about warming as lines on temperature charts. We need to talk about lines on maps.