The Climate Industrial Complex Is Not Out to Save the Planet, But to Destroy the Capitalism That Ended Much of Poverty

Guest Post by Duggan Flanakin.

The global push to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, based on the questionable premise that increasing CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere threaten to trigger a global climate catastrophe, has wreaked havoc on energy and economic development in the United States, Europe, and Africa while giving so-called “emerging” nations like China and India a virtual free pass.

Europeans and Americans are just beginning to awaken from the deep slumber that was about to result in a Chinese takeover of global automobile sales, thanks to their lower priced (subsidized) electric vehicles that are powered by Chinese-made batteries using Chinese-processed lithium and other critical minerals that they had stockpiled for decades while the West slept.

By contrast, the decision by Western powers to deem China and India as “developing nations” exempt from early restrictions on emissions has had dangerous geopolitical repercussions – and even allowed Russia to further disrupt Western economies.

As of July 2025, China has 1,195 coal-fired power plants, while India has 290 – far more than the United States or any other nation – and most of these have been built in the 21^st Century, whereas nearly every coal-fired power plant in the U.S. and Europe is much older.

Chinese coal production and consumption in 2024 was about 4.78 billion metric tons, over half the world total, with India (at 1.09 billion tonnes) and Indonesia (at 836 million tonnes) in second and third place. Australia and the U.S. each totaled about 464 million tonnes, with Russia not far behind (at 427 million tonnes).

The absurdity of favoring China – a nation with a huge military that uses its freely given natural resource and renewable energy products advantages to increase its global sway – over the poverty-ridden nations of Africa is not just cruel and unusual. It is suicidal for Africa and extremely costly for the U.S., which is at the forefront of warding off Chinese expansion.

The concept of criteria pollutants was incorporated into the 1990 Amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act. Those pollutants were particulate matter, ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and lead. Carbon dioxide – the so-called pollutant added by the Supreme Court in 2009 – is not referenced in the statute.

By 2009, the Clean Air Act had been quite successful in reducing emissions of criteria pollutants from coal-fired power plants – at considerable expense to operators. Power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide fell from 16 million tons per year to just 6 million tpy between 1990 and 2009 and to about 1 million tpy by 2019.

These reductions required electric utilities to switch to lower sulfur coal, add scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide emissions, and find other ways to achieve compliance (including shutting down less profitable units) – or just switch to another fuel source.

Similarly, smog-inducing nitrogen oxides emissions from coal-fired power plants during “ozone season” fell from 2.75 million tons in 1990 to 800,000 tpy in 2009 to under 200,000 tpy in 2019. Overall nitrogen dioxide emissions fell from 6.5 million tpy in 1990 to 2 million tpy in 2009 and to just 400,000 tpy by 2019. In short, the nation was well on its way to winning the battle to control criteria pollutants by 2009 – and those victories today are nearly total.

Total emissions of the six criteria pollutants decreased by 42 percent between 1990 and 2005 and continued to decline even with increasingly stringent standards. But by then, the EPA had “discovered” that carbon dioxide regulation could give its bureaucrats new life – and a new mission to keep its bureaucrats employed.

The arm-twisting bullying of entire nations – let alone industrial giants and middle-class households – was based on the shaky, ever-changing “science” of “climate change” and augmented in importance by manipulation of computer-generated “scary scenarios.”

But in 2015, Christiana Figueres, as executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention of Climate Change, let the cat out of the bag. At a Brussels news conference, Figueres said:

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally – within a defined period of time – to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

In short, the goal of Figueres and entire cadres of environmental activists at the highest level was not to save the world from ecological calamity. It was to destroy the capitalist system that had built a modern society that lifted billions out of drudgery and poverty and even today gives hope even to the world’s poor.

Naturally, those declaring the “war on climate change” (like Al Gore and John Kerry in the United States) found ways to line their own pockets and reputations in the process.

These paeans of propriety, viscounts of virtue signaling, ignored the stark reality that their myopic approach to “saving the planet” enabled China to lead the world with carbon dioxide “emissions” totaling 13.26 billion metric tons, or 34 percent of the global total.

By contrast, Africa, with 17 percent of global population, in 2021 was responsible for only 4 percent of the global total. That share could not grow largely because Africans were systematically denied funding for fossil fuel power plants in a continent with at least 600 million with no access to electricity.

These numbers alone confirm that the goal of the UN and other “climate hawks” was never reducing global carbon dioxide emissions but rather crippling Western industry. The massive efforts to stifle African energy development (or force African nations to develop in ways that benefited European industries through the purchase of “carbon credits”) was at best a temporary sop to distract those industries from the longer-term goal – of global governance.

Oddly enough, the same entities that once supported the “clean energy” campaigns in the name of saving the planet, today are desperate for new sources of reliable, affordable energy. Data centers, blockchains, and other high-end electricity users are hoping that a nuclear energy resurgence, coupled with onsite power plants, will keep their machines running even as the competition for cooling water clashes with the thirstiness of growing urban populations.

A recent report from the Energy Information Administration says that U.S. electricity consumption is once again on the rise, following more than a decade of stagnation. As expected, the rise is attributed largely to data centers and manufacturing establishments. This growth in demand has spurred expansion in generating capacity and electricity storage (at best an emerging technology that has a long way to go).

Worldwide demand is up dramatically, even as many nations still struggle with UN-imposed restraints on their ability to meet that demand. The Biden-era push to make everything in the U.S. run on solar, wind, and geothermal generated electricity has added even more to power generation shortfalls – and increasing costs for electricity, especially in states that kowtowed to the “climate catastrophe” hysteria.

As African nations shake off the neocolonialist strictures and use their own funds to build out their electric grids, and as the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, many European nations return to energy sanity (and as more companies switch production away from China), the global imbalances may begin to diminish – but much damage has been done and a level playing field is a long way out.

Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Duggan Flanakin (duggan@duggansdugout.com) is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.

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