Aside from the obvious point that flat emissions aren't nearly enough... It's a symptom of reducing gridlock in international climate policy to US obstructionism or the failings of individual global leaders, rather than the limits of the capitalist state form.

The actual detail here, though, suggests that Chinese emissions are a mixed picture at best. Growth in green energy and EVs is primarily additive rather than replacing fossil fuels, and emissions are falling primarily because a real estate boom is tailing off...

www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chi...

Congrats! Well deserved.

(The FT will not arrive at the conclusion that the problem is that capitalist states are expressions of the social power of capital, which poses constraints even on progressive minded occupants of state office. But still.)

This is all very fucked up, but the liberal imperialism it replaces was also imperialism.

I mean in a lot of cases (including the 👆book) it’s not so much a ‘free market’ as ‘reinvestment of surplus in improving productivity and exploiting labour rather than appropriating rent-bearing assets’ that’s supposedly gone. But yeah it’s that same logic.

I mean yes, although ironically the bigger problem is that ‘capitalism’ in the specific way these arguments want to talk about it also never existed…

FWIW at about 60 pages in I’ve got this specific book classified as ‘genuinely worth reading but not convincing’.

Really, the fact that it's Zuboff and not Braverman who is the big 'classic' reference or 'deskilling' is telling. Prime example of the 'raising Marxist-adjacent questions in expressly depoliticized ways' genre.

Can quibble with bits of it, but am very much here for more archive work in IPE, for taking the contradictions of formal decolonization seriously. And that taking race and colonialism seriously lets the piece connect the dynamics of OFCs and 'productive' zones in really useful ways.