What a contrast. In a year that’s on track to be our planet’s hottest on record, America turned “climate change” into a four-letter word that many U.S. politicians won’t even dare utter in public. If this were just some parlor game, it wouldn’t matter. But the totally bogus “discrediting” of climate science has had serious implications. For starters, it helped scuttle Senate passage of the energy-climate bill needed to scale U.S.-made clean technologies, leaving America at a distinct disadvantage in the next great global industry. And that brings me to the contrast: While American Republicans were turning climate change into a wedge issue, the Chinese Communists were turning it into a work issue.
The NYT’s Tom Friedman continues to do some of the best reporting on the economic consequences of the GOP decision to block even the most business-oriented Republican-originated strategies for averting catastrophic climate change and promoting clean energy jobs (see “Invented here, sold there”).
He has op-ed from Tianjin, China, “Aren’t we clever?” that is worth excerpting at length: