A lopsided equation

WHILE the United States continues to dismantle the international climate architecture it once helped build, wars from Ukraine to the Middle East are generating unaccounted emissions, consuming the fiscal space that wealthy nations pledged to climate finance, and returning fossil fuels to the centre of global strategy. Meanwhile, 2024 was the first calendar year to go above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial level; the critical 1.5°C threshold. The tipping points have arrived. What climate models warned would happen by 2080 is happening already. At the receiving end stands Pakistan, a country that caused less than 1 per cent of the problem and is living with an outsized share of the consequences. Its glaciers are melting. Its monsoon no longer arrives on schedule, bringing, instead, either punishing drought or catastrophic flood. Its rivers are caught between a warming mountain range above, and hostile neighbours below. This is not a collection of separate crises. It is one crisis, with many faces, bearing down on us. And time is running out. In January this year, the United States withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundational 1992 treaty ratified by the Senate by a vote of 92-0 and upheld by every administration since. It simultaneously withdrew from the Paris Agreement, the IPCC, and the Green Climate Fund. No country had ever done this before. The decision was taken in a world already destabilised by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, by a Nato rearmament that has absorbed the fiscal space European governments once directed at climate finance, and by a Gulf energy crisis that has returned fossil fuels to the centre of global strategic thinking. The Trump administration’s fossil fuel revival and Europe’s sharp turn towards defence spending reflect the same underlying judgment: that security, defined narrowly, takes precedence over survival defined broadly and over time. Developed countries are choosing to strengthen themselves in th