As apocalyptic wildfires raged in Greece, California and Turkey last week, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered a sobering assessment of the damage inflicted by human beings on their planet since the industrial revolution. Certainly, as droughts parch entire countries, fuel civil wars that spill across national borders and drive uncontrolled migration, collaborative action seems imperative, regardless of which countries industrialized first and kick-started the process of climate change. But the universally urgent goal of decarbonization in the 21st century increasingly faces a greater obstacle than climate-change deniers in the West: the mimic nationalists of India and China chasing a 19th-century fantasy of wealth and power. It is no coincidence that both countries, still heavily reliant on coal and among the world’s top carbon-emitters, declined to endorse the 1.5 degree Celsius limit on global average temperature proposed by President Joe Biden at his […]