Patrice POYET

The crisis of our era is not ecological; it is institutional. What began in 1988 as a single, urgent environmental mandate has hardened into an apparatus of power, political influence, and immense financial extraction. It is now an economic drain hollowing out the Western world, with Europe floundering under the strain. Climate has been deliberately reduced to the micro-ethics of personal consumption, domestic energy, and daily freedoms—forcing families to treat mundane choices as moral battlegrounds. Yet planetary climate is driven by deep-time geological cycles, not short-term human anxiety. Earth's atmosphere is not a financial ledger. These are the shifting fault lines of a fracturing world. Unelected global bodies like the UN now operate in lockstep with the financial elite of the World Economic Forum, while national governments bow to powerbrokers at the expense of their own citizens. Sovereignty is shredding, and Europe slides deeper into the orbit of an autocratic EU. At the apex sit dominant asset managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—leveraging unmatched financial capital to dictate policy. Corporate and tech elites cash in, typified by figures like Bill Gates, while BlackRock’s Larry Fink helps steer the WEF itself. They are circling the carcass of Net Zero.

China now makes about 86–88% of the world’s solar modules, and an even higher share of the wafers and cells behind them. It produces roughly three-quarters of lithium-ion batteries and holds about 80% of cell-making capacity. Chinese firms account for around 70% of EV batteries actually installed. They supply the majority of wind-turbine components and, in 2025, about four-fifths of the turbines that went up worldwide. They still pour just over half of the planet’s crude steel. It is the largest, quietest transfer of industrial capacity in modern history. On manufacturing value added, China has gone from about 6% of the world in 2000 to roughly 27–30% now. It out-produces the next eight countries put together, and the United States, Germany and Japan combined. America’s share has slipped from the low twenties to the mid-teens; Europe’s from about a quarter to the mid-teens; Japan’s from the low teens to about 5%. The power behind that machine is still coal. China runs nearly 1,200 coal plants and more than 1,200 GW of coal capacity — about half of everything operating on Earth. In 2025 it commissioned 78 GW of new coal plant, a ten-year high, and another 30 GW in the first half of 2026. That is the old 'six large units a month' in practice. It mines around 4.7–4.8 billion tonnes of coal a year, more than four times second-place India. Beijing has a carbon-neutrality date — 2060 — and a pledge to peak emissions before 2030. What it has not done is bind its factories to a Western 2050 net-zero timetable, or treat steel mills and battery plants as disposable. Coal is still treated as the dispatchable backbone that lets the rest of the system run. The West, by contrast, spent two decades talking decarbonisation while offshoring the industries that make the hardware. The result is the joke that dare not speak its name. The Western green transition now depends, almost end to end, on equipment built in a country that still adds coal capacity by the tens of gigawatts. Solar farms in Europe and America are assembled from Chinese modules. Grid batteries are Chinese cells. A growing share of the turbines are Chinese machines. The energy source the West has spent a generation demonising is what made that supply chain possible. It should be the loudest industrial and geopolitical story in the Western world. It barely rates a mention.

The top 10 leading climate and environment predictions, that failed Ice-Free Arctic: In the 2000s, former US Vice President Al Gore predicted the Arctic Ocean would be completely ice-free in the summer of 2013–2014. Vanishing Nations by 2000: In 1989, a UN official claimed entire island nations would be wiped off the map by sea-level rise if global warming wasn't reversed by 2000. 1970s Global Cooling Scare: News outlets and selective scientific papers in the 1970s warned an imminent ice age was coming due to aerosol pollution. Mass Famine (1968): Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb claimed hundreds of millions would starve in the 70s and 80s. Running Out of Metals (1972): The Club of Rome warned the world would run completely out of copper, gold and zinc by 2000. Forest Collapse from Acid Rain: 1980s forecasts predicted acid rain would destroy Central Europe's forests within a decade. Extinction of Coral Reefs by 2020: Activists warned 90% of tropical reefs would disappear by 2020. Immediate Peak Oil (1970s–2000s): Experts routinely declared cheap oil would run out by the 1990s or 2010s. Methane 'Bomb': Early fears warned permafrost thaw would trigger a massive, overnight methane release causing runaway warming. Net Zero & RCP8.5 Overreach: Net Zero policy largely relied on RCP8.5—an extreme worst-case scenario assuming massive coal growth leading to ~4.5°C warming. Scientists have sidelined this pathway as unrealistic.