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by 5822130027 2505 days ago
According to Mark Blyth ( Prof. of political economy at Brown ).

India is going to continue to build 200 more coal powered plants despite knowing exactly how awful climate change is going to be for India.

Pakistan is following similar strategy.

The idea is that Europe/US have more to lose due to climate change, so when time comes they can use these coal fired plants as a bargaining chip ("bribe") for technology transfer, better trade deals, etc.

I do not agree or disagree with his assessment, it could very well be true.

But if you are India, spending MORE money to fix climate change wont make much of a difference as the biggest polluters are US / CHINA / EU.

So a MAD type strategy makes sense from their perspective.

4 comments

It’s not a MAD strategy it’s a tragedy of the commons dilemma.
When reading comments or articles that acknowledge the problem, but have a rosy outlook on technical or market solutions to the problem, I rarely get the impression that they've spent time grappling with how many deliberative entities in a complex adaptive system are going to interact and recalculate as many social, political, economic, and climatic dynamics play off of each other.
It's Coasian economics. The colonizers can pay their debts or lose their environment.
Do you have a source for this?