Thank you very much for these friendly words of introduction, and I'm pleased to be here. I will switch to English. Thank you for having me this evening, and to apologize to those who have been taking part in the day-long conversations for not being able to be present. I had family commitments today. I also want to apologize, I think, for the rather grim subject matter that you've asked me to address. I don't know whether this is going to give the long and productive day a happy ending. Perhaps it will confirm and supercharge ideas that you've already had. I hope at least it's a clarifying effort to make sense of what's going on.
Coming to you from the United States, our mood is tense, I have to say. As I was leaving, literally as I was on the car to JFK, the news of the ban on foreign students at Harvard broke, and to be honest, I don't want to go back. But we move on, and I want to think onwards with you. I also want to thank you in particular for actually giving me my prompt, which could hardly be more dramatic or it almost has a kind of dark comedy to it.
The dark comedy, really worthy of Ionesco, was the moment that many of you may have missed in the blur of extraordinary news that's come across us in the first months of this year, which is the first week of March 2025, in which the United States became the only nation in the UN General Assembly to formally vote against the nomination of a day of hope and peaceful coexistence. A truly dramatic day in the history of American UN General Assembly diplomacy, which is a checkered and fascinating history going back over decades, but this surely has to go down in the record as one of the more remarkable moments. And it was made even more remarkable by the letter which the United States provided to the United Nations explaining why it was against appointing a day of hope and peaceful coexistence.
And this culminates, after much hemming and hawing, in the extraordinary statement that I've bolded at the bottom, which is that the United States rejects and denounces the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and the sustainable development goals, and will no longer reaffirm them as a matter of course. So this is not simply the United States absenting itself from the Paris Accords. It is explicitly rejecting the entire ambition of the sustainable development agenda, which, if there is a common denominator of the folks in this room right now, I imagine that's it. That's our common denominator. We can all wear the pin with the multi-colored spiral. We're kind of signed up to that.
And you can see that they add furthermore a political justification. In the last US election, the mandate from the American people was clear: the government of the United States must refocus on the interests of Americans. We must care first and foremost for our own. That is our moral and civic duty. President Trump also sets a clear and overdue course correction on gender and climate ideology which pervades the SDGs. So this is a full frontal populist manifesto against the commonly agreed agenda of global development that was set in 2015.
And it goes on in a very interesting way to expand this into a broader geopolitical frame, which is to spell out, and this is a move which is quite significant I think, what it takes to be another element of hidden politics. The resolution's titular reference to peaceful coexistence could be co-opted to imply the UN's endorsement of China's five principles of peaceful coexistence. Any attempt to imply such endorsement could undermine UN's independence. Similarly, the concept of dialogue among civilizations is rooted in President Xi Jinping's global civilization initiative. So there is here an effort to expose, what you might think is bland UN talk, as effectively ridden with CCP ideology that presumably we're either complicit with or too naive to realize is actually going on. And this is the reality that I think we need to understand and engage the significance of.
One possible reaction is the one that I think is shared by the vast majority of the people in this room, which is one of shock. It's in the framing of the introductory statement to this conference: what are we going to do in light of that American default? And I think this is our starting point and it's our common starting point. But there are other ways in which you might react. Another way would be to say: well, fine, fair enough, of course this is shocking, but why are we really bewailing America's renunciation of the SDGs when they in fact have delivered so little? When in fact this has been an agenda which has been notable principally for its failure to actually deliver. And furthermore, you might even say, answering the Americans with their own cynicism, it's kind of above time, beyond time, high time for them to speak frankly how they feel. And there's no question at all that for many years powerful voices in Washington have felt exactly like this about the SDGs, and that the very least we can say is that the Trump administration is sparing us the hypocrisy. If this is what they actually felt, which would help to explain why the SDGs delivered so little, at least now we're playing with open cards, mit offenem Karten, as the Germans would say, mit offenem Visier, with the visor open. We know what we're about at this moment.
The problem, it seems to me, is not that we had a working model that was adequate to the escalating crisis that we all know is multiplying around us that was willfully disrupted by the Americans. Back to its origins in the 1980s, as Jörg endlessly reminds me, sustainable development was always above all an aspiration. It wasn't an achieved reality, it was an aspiration, it was an effort to close by policy, by thinking, by common thinking, a gap between reality and what many of us at least would agree would be a desirable state of affairs. It was also a sustainable development agenda that had a distinctly European flavor, and I think we should admit this as Europeans. Allow me to call myself a European. It had a German flavor. It had a Brandt, it had a Brundtland, it had a Heinrich Böll, it had a Green Party kind of flavor to it.
And the double movement of 2015, the Paris Agreements and months before that the Sustainable Development Resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly, generalized that, translated that into a global agenda in a way that had never been done before, and I think is rightly seen by many of the protagonists as the culmination of a decades-long campaign starting in the 1970s to achieve this. But I think the question, as a historian with the hindsight that we now have post-Trump, is whether it was really the culmination or whether actually it was something more like last chance saloon. This was the last moment, if you like, in which a Western-led conception of sustainable development could achieve the kind of universal assent that it did in 2015. And what we've seen with Trump is not so much a shocking and scandalous dénouement that oh my god the Americans have defected, as really rather more the predictable realization that time has run out on this paradigm. Time has run out on this paradigm, and Trump has called time.
And I'm going to offer that as the alternative interpretation of a historian and a kind of early sketch of how we might write the history of this moment. Let's be frank, and I think it is time to be frank, and one of the things that this moment may help us and enable us to do is to be truthful with each other. The 2015 agenda was not delivering, I would submit. It was not delivering on the scale that we need. One could point to various different dimensions. I've been involved with the Stiglitz and Guzmán-led campaign on finance and debt, but you could also look at the just energy transition partnerships, for instance, which I know Jörg and I share an interest in, which were the highlight of the Glasgow GFANZ, and a really, when you dig into the details, embarrassing failure of Western development policy. It wasn't working.
And so to reiterate my point: Trump's America is not disrupting a system that was adequate. It's disrupting a non-system that was not adequate to address even the current challenges, let alone the escalating polycrisis that we can all point to and that we all know are coming our way, and ultimately fuel the urgency which so many of us feel, which is we ain't seen nothing yet. This is just the beginning of the combination of crises that we're going to be facing. So 2025, in my view, marks not just an uncouth and embarrassing disruption of the paradigm by the American presidency, but the moment at which I think we have to face the historical obsolescence of a Western-led sustainable development paradigm.
Why does America matter so much? You might say, hang on, isn't Tooze exaggerating the significance of all of this? Is this not somebody who's basically traumatized by American politics right now? That'll be fair. There's definitely that vibe. But if you dig into it, it isn't difficult, I think, in dimension after dimension, to think through the way in which American power actually does matter. And I think we should check ourselves in the months to come when we try and calm ourselves by saying, oh well, we can get by without the Americans. Just look at this list and then tell yourself that again. So, the US market for imports, this is the axis of their trade policy influence, Wall Street for finance, the reach of the American legal system that my colleagues at Columbia Law School write about so powerfully, the reach of the American national security apparatus, going all the way back perhaps in German consciousness to the NSA spying affair of the early 2010s, the predominant role of the United States as a single concerted actor in ODA. If you add up all the Europeans, you get to big numbers too, but they're not acting as a single actor, whereas the Americans, at least for a while, were. The dominant role of American private philanthropy, which behind the scenes, we all know, plays an extraordinarily important role also in European climate activism, for instance. A lot of that is American money. They're deploying it in Europe because they know it gets them more bang for the buck in Europe than it will in the United States. But it's there in the background nevertheless.
The predominance of US-anchored universities as centers of thinking and American think tanks, which is not by any means uncontested, but real. Just look at the career paths of so many people involved in the global world. That kind of influence is singular to the US. And then, of course, finally, there is the voting share of the United States in the Bretton Woods institutions, which whenever we get serious about talking about large-scale global financial reform, you end up running into Congress. And that is the blockage when you start seriously thinking about what the IMF and the World Bank might actually do. So, this crisis in the US, I would submit, is real, and we are kidding ourselves if we think we can walk away from it. It's a dramatic development.
But is the American rejection, as shocking as it is, surprising? Obviously, I'm asking a rhetorical question, and you can see that I've been building up to a degree of skepticism here. But I want to sort of force you to think about the logic here of great power politics. I mean, why is it that we convinced ourselves that it was plausible that the Americans would be serious about sustainable development? I mean, that on and of itself is not an obvious claim. It's not an obvious assumption to make. It came out of the development ideologies, the modernization ideologies of the Cold War.
But if you think about the logic of those, it was development for those people in our camp, within our Cold War camp, and it was development on a scale which didn't fundamentally challenge the balance of power. So, the classic paradigm success story is South Korea, which is a frontline state in the Cold War, miserably impoverished in the 1950s and early 1960s. Difficult now to make ourselves an impression of just how impoverished South Korea was. North Korea was ahead of South Korea in the '50s in economic terms. And now is this triumphant modernist success story that even as a military dictatorship, we were happy to celebrate, and now celebrate even more given that it's transitioned to a contested, vibrant, pluralistic polity.
But that's no test, I would submit, because it's South Korea. It's essentially a client state of the United States. And as dramatic as that growth is, it doesn't pose any challenge to United States hegemony. Japan was already difficult, but of course, the ultimate taste test of the compatibility of the existing status quo of global power with large-scale development globally is China. And China has emerged as a profound challenge to the compatibility of these two ideals. One would be global stability anchored in the status quo power system, and the other one would be global development.
China's growth is clearly the greatest development success story in human history, bar none. It's not even arguable in terms of the scale of the transition from poverty to bearable prosperity. China, not just as a result of COVID, has a longer life expectancy than the United States today. That's a staggering fact compared to where China was in the 1960s. But it has ballooned the environmental equation up, and there is no getting around that fact because of the scale of Chinese CO2 emissions. And it has emerged, from the United States' point of view, as a fundamental challenge at the level of what we call in social science ontological security, the sort of destabilization that we have blamed, for instance, for voters going to the AfD in Germany. It has destabilized the United States both at the level of national security on the global stage and what the Economist calls the China shock, to which Americans attribute an incredible array of domestic social dysfunction attached to the supposed impact of Chinese imports. However large the effect actually is and however much we may debate it, the significant thing is for American society, China is the destabilizing force.
And this is undoubtedly the largest success story of human development that we've ever seen. So, just imagine for a second that that had happened not just in China. Imagine for a second if Brazil or Mexico had quadrupled their GDP per capita over the last few decades. There's no question that a lot of Americans would get rich. There's no question that many people would profit from this. But I think if you think that Washington would have taken this as geopolitically neutral and settled down to live happily ever after sharing power in the Western Hemisphere with a Brazil that is four times larger in terms of GDP per capita, or a Mexico, you're kidding yourself.
Think about the geopolitics of Africa. If Nigeria actually attained the GDP per capita of Turkey, therefore became a global economic player on the size of a France or a Britain, larger than Brazil. Think about the power politics of the continent if Ethiopia or Nigeria or both of them achieved that kind of success. It would be spectacular. It would, of course, in the same way as I think we must welcome Chinese development, be something we would embrace, but on the other hand, the bets would be off as to the way in which the power politics of the continent would play out.
If you want to know how this would look up close, I'm always impressed by conversations I have in Singapore with the long memories of the period of what's called Konfrontasi in the 1960s, when Indonesia looked like it would emerge as the massive regional hegemon and was waging war against the newly independent Malaysian state and threatened Singapore's independence as well. Imagine Indonesia achieving a huge leap forward and how that would conceivably destabilize the regional politics. The point I'm trying to make is that sustainable growth, when we achieve it, is not by itself, or in fact is the opposite, generally speaking, of stabilizing the geopolitical status quo. And it doesn't even have to be relative convergence, right? China is the most dramatic case because it actually catches up with the West. But you don't even have to achieve that. Critically, I think, for the transformative qualitative change that's produced by economic development, is in fact more often than not crossing thresholds. So, it's an absolute effect, not a relative effect.
And the way I would think about this is, for instance, drone-capable players in Africa. We thought of drones once upon a time as something reserved only for rich countries. Well, this is the number of African states which are currently importing drones from Western suppliers. These are data from the last month. And this isn't confined to state actors in Africa because of the potency of various raw material rackets that are run by non-state actors. The orange dots are the non-state actors which have become military drone capable by the spring of 2025. If you wanted to put a label on this globally, it's the Houthi phenomenon. We don't know whether they're a state actor or not, but they're capable with $10 million, $100 million defense budgets of destabilizing global trade with a little bit of technological military help from Iran.
That's the multipolarity. It's not an effect of actual convergence. It's an effect of crossing thresholds. And that lowers the bar dramatically for the disruptive effect of sustainable development. Ethiopia doesn't need to become a Turkey to fundamentally change the power balance in East Africa. If it can leap to lower middle-income status, as it may very well, it will become a regional power of a type we've never had to deal with before. And it will attract the attention of the great powers and complicate the geometries of regional geopolitics in a way we're just not ready for.
In a sense, what I'm saying is the shock on the American side is they made promises on SDGs they never wanted cashed. And only one of them had to be cashed, and that was the Chinese one, and that was enough for them essentially to bolt out of the framework. The fundamental point, to reiterate, is that only in happy fantasy, I think, is sustainable development all around compatible with the geopolitical status quo and the persistence of the American unipolar hegemony.
It can be made to conform. The Americans are not too worried about the South Koreas, the Japans, the Australias, though they had a minute of anxiety about Japan in the 1980s. But it depends on political frameworks. It depends on geopolitical frameworks. And one of the striking things about the SDGs, not entirely coincidentally, as they emerged out of development discourse in the 2000s and the 2010s, is that they are not just unpolitical, but anti-political. They actually set out to specify a kind of development that doesn't require us to deal with it. And that too has a distinctively European flavor.
Think about how Shimon Peres imagined a new Middle East in the 1990s to be delivered upon European lines, because it was going to be an Abraham Accord mega-deal with Palestine folded in that was going to deliver peace. There is a deep tendency on the part of Europeans, and notably Germans, to think that in your economic success, economic integration necessarily leads beyond national sovereignty, necessarily leads towards confederation, ideally leads you up to the world state of the UN. Think about Habermas in the 2010s speculating about the EU as a precursor to a world order. Whereas historically speaking, the opposite is true. The vast majority of states that have pursued sustainable development have done it so as to resist external power, and then to become powers themselves.
That's the point of development for the vast majority of players: sovereignty. Because sovereignty is another word for collective freedom. And if the point of sustainable development is empowerment, then the classic way of understanding that within the nation-state framework is not immediately to sign on to a UN treaty in which you sign away your sovereignty. Your immediate impulse is to actually use it to empower your state to exercise a kind of sovereignty it's been previously denied. And that is the reality, I think, that we have not dealt with and is key to understanding the American defection from the paradigm.
There's a more specific reason for thinking that there was always something weird about imagining that the Americans would in the long run go along with sustainable development as part of a long-run project, which is this historical chart. It is simply to say that no previous experience of hegemony in the modern sense has ever been compatible with environmental sustainability. The two models of hegemony that we know, the British Empire and the United States, were both of them foundationally set up on the basis, on the one hand, of fossil fuel exploitation, and on the other hand, of entirely non-sustainable, biodiversity-threatening forms of agro-industrial complex. That was their entire foundation. This gives rise to the rather French-sounding idea of the Anglocene, not the Anthropocene, but the Anglocene. And the Anglocene is British and American humanity fundamentally churning up the natural envelope.
And if you look at fossil fuel emissions up to the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of them are actually coming first from Britain and then from the United States as the major sources of fossil fuel emissions. So, the idea that we could have a shift to a sustainable post-fossil energy system whilst maintaining the status quo power system under American leadership is basically betting on a unicorn. It's betting on something that has never previously existed. Now, we all know that unicorns now do exist and they make you very, very wealthy, but that's basically the quality of the thought here. Somehow there is going to be a future beyond fossil fuel that will — and this is, of course, what the American conservatives sense is that you lovely people in this room here are conspiring against American power. And actually, you all know perfectly well that this is the case. And when you say you want to realize the sustainable development agenda, you're actually saying, as they say in their letter to the United Nations, that you're smuggling in a geopolitics which is fundamentally hostile to the power of the United States.
So, those seem to me the plausible alternatives here. We're facing something that's worse than a trilemma because I don't think any part of this is compatible with any other part of it. The tension between comprehensive global development and the environmental envelope is Jürgen's ever-postponed promise that somehow we can get this done, and that's what everyone in this room is committed to somehow working on. That is what we want to deliver on. The comprehensive global development versus the status quo power system is what I'm calling the China-Houthi problem. In other words, as soon as anyone actually develops, they challenge the global power structure, and all you need to do is Houthi-level development and you're challenging the global power structure. And then the final one is: is there any way in which we can imagine squaring an environmental envelope with existing power? And there's frankly no reason to think we can. That doesn't mean there's no historical warrant. It's conceivable that we might, but it will require a huge leap of imagination, of technology. It would require an absolutely massive effort to do that, and we shouldn't kid ourselves about it.
And it will require lots and lots of politics. It will require explicit geopolitics. It's not just technology and economic growth that's going to get us there. We would actually need to somehow persuade the United States elite, founded as it is in fossil power, to give up that power. And so, what is the political project that would enable that? I mean, once you've laid it out like this, you could easily ask yourself: how did 2015 happen at all? What's our theory of the case? How did it happen? I mean, it's not reasonable that it happened on the basis of the analysis that I'm offering here.
And so, I'd offer you the following possible explanations. First of all, don't underestimate the Democrats. If the Republicans are scary, don't underestimate the Democrats, because the Democrats are, to an extent that it boggles the mind, players in the business of unfulfilled promises, idealism, or just rank hypocrisy. Like it's not for nothing that they had the resurgence of Woodrow Wilson, who was pilloried by people like Carl Schmitt as the ultimate hypocrite. So, this is one line of policy, and it's Clinton and Obama that do this deal. So, we should be careful in dealing with them.
The other point, I think more serious perhaps, is that strategists under Clinton and Obama actually — and this makes them in retrospect quite sympathetic, unlike the Biden people — saw the change in the world coming, understood multipolarity was a historic fate. This is very much the Brzezinski view, for instance. And so, preemptively want to make international and global rules to their advantage, and tie the Chinese, the Europeans, and anyone else in as quickly as possible while America still has influence and sway. And I think that idea was quite powerful in both the Clinton and the Obama administrations. In retrospect, they seem sensibly modest in their understanding of where American power actually lay.
There is also the idea, still current till quite recently, that Wall Street would actually do really well out of sustainable development. This is my dear friend Daniela Gabor's thesis about the old Wall Street consensus. It looks glossy, it looks left-wing, it looks progressive, but basically, if Larry Fink endorses it at BlackRock, you know where it's really coming from. Or if Mark Carney goes to Glasgow and says I've got 133 trillion dollars, you should be careful about what happens next. Because that's clearly big money lining up to do the best it can out of this transition, which would explain why we get sustainable development, because 133 trillion dollars is a lot of money, and that power really does talk. If it were real, it would be a very powerful force.
Then there is the fracking story and its deeply ambiguous implications for American climate policy. Because in the pretend-extend-and-pretend version of American policy in the Obama era, fracking gas is the transition fuel. Fracking gas is what enables the Americans to sign up to Paris because they know they're simply going to replace all their coal-fired electricity generation with fracked gas, which is super cheap, and it gets them huge CO2 gains. It's a little bit like the European strategy in the '90s around Kyoto where you all knew that East European and Soviet and Russian emissions were going down, and so you could buy into the hot air argument. The Obama people had this in their back pocket. And if you look at American decarbonization, it's heavily driven by fracked gas.
They go deeper into cutting coal out of their energy system than, unfortunately, the Germans do. And they can do that because gas is coming on so quickly. And the final element is, and this is, I think, where we really hinge, is they never thought it was going to go anywhere anyway. They sign on to this knowing that if it ever got serious, they would have a veto power over it. And you see this built into the text of the documents that we celebrate like the Paris Agreement of 2015. At the very last minute, in the last few hours, as I understand it, of the negotiations, the whole thing almost blew up because the French secretariat inserted language which made it so binding that the American administration would have to present it to Congress, and they know since Byrd-Hagel in 1997 that you're never going to get this past Congress.
And so, it was written out, and the nationally determined contributions were lightened to the point where an American administration can sign up. It's a difference between should and must, or should and ought — it's literally one word that changes it from acceptable to the American administration to dead in the water, dead as a duck. It was always there. And what we're seeing, essentially, is the bluff of the Europeans, the Japanese, and all the other people of goodwill who went along with this — went along with this knowing what the compromises were — being called by the Trump administration.
Because the Trump administration is basically saying: we call your depoliticized liberal bluff. We see you. We know perfectly well what your agenda is. It's obvious. We know you're trying to smuggle in a bunch of stuff with ESG and sustainable development goals. We're not going to buy that. We totally reject — and this is not just Trump, but Biden as well — the thesis that America must compromise because it's historically declining. No, America is going to die on the hill of exceptionalism. It's going to die on the hill of dominance.
The China challenge, meanwhile, has fundamentally changed the game. So, any American idea that they would play a leading role in the renewable energy field is dead in the water, and they all know it. Which is why they move around the issue. Blended finance, with all due respect to Daniela, looks amazing on paper and has I don't think ever delivered even as much as a billion dollars in profit to anyone anywhere. In other words, it's peanuts. It's irrelevant. It doesn't work. It's not actually an engine for the transformation of global finance under the sign of green. It's an illusion. It's a Potemkin village. It's to make people like Carney look good on the global stage.
And in the meantime, the US has emerged not just as a low-cost gas producer, but as the largest world-bestriding oil producer we've ever seen. Ladies and gentlemen, we have to reckon with this reality. America is now substantially larger than Saudi Arabia or Russia in the global oil field. They are not retreating. Any European hypothesis about the end of fossil fuels is just utterly irrelevant in the American context. The American assumption is fossil fuels are forever. American fossil fuels are forever. And it's a matter really of how large the export market is. It's a very dramatic historic shift that we have to do justice to, tightly tied up, if we want to get into the details, with the QE policies, the expansive monetary policies of the early 2010s, which made it so cheap to invest in fracking.
Different story now because it's actually owned by big oil. And so, they're much more sensitive to price signals and interest rate costs than they ever were before. And as the Harvard case makes clear, which I started with, don't expect sanity to return to the United States any time soon. I mean, we really are in a death spiral of culture wars-driven political self-entanglement. It's hard to communicate to the outside world just how irrelevant the vast majority of global politics is in the United States in the current moment. What we're caught up in is domestic culture wars, immigration policy and xenophobia, Israel-Palestine anti-Semitism accusations, and China and the CCP. And that's the whole game, and it's utterly depressing.
So, what does this mean immediately? Let me move to my concluding remarks. First of all, I think we need to do justice to the impact and where this is going to be most severe. And the place it's going to be most severe for the developing world is Central America and northern South America. This is an astonishing graph. And the thing to focus in on is the red bar at the end. And what that's telling you is that terror works. So, this is the number of arrests of migrants from Central America and elsewhere made on the borders of the United States month by month. And that figure in March 2025 is 7,100 people compared to a flow in the late stages of the Biden administration of close to 200,000 people a month.
So, what that's telling you is that the Central American migrant movement doesn't want to end up in one of Bukele's jails. Those people are making the choice. They're opting out of the incredible risks that you now run in making an illegal dash into the United States. That will have huge reverberations on the economies of the region because mass migration out of the crisis-torn, really in the heart of polycrisis, Central American states is a key valve that sustains their societies and the remittances from there are critical for their regional economies. So, we shouldn't take our eye off the ball. We can't just stay global. We have to look where this crisis is going to impact. It's 100 million plus people that are in the crosshairs of this, and there the impact is already there. Those doors have already shut for those migrants.
The second point is obviously the ODA budgets. I'm sure that's been on people's minds all day long. America is a hugely outsized contributor to ODA, nowhere near as much as you'd want in relation to American wealth, but in relation to what everyone else gives, it's significant. And then the third element is that there really is at this point, I think, zero scope. We'll be lucky if the Bretton Woods institutions actually survive, is one of the scenarios which we started the day with, that they deal with.
Briefly, what are the implications of this for a European-centered policy? Since we're in Berlin, we should ask the question. And I want to suggest five different points. I mean, I think the first thing is to recognize the scale of the emergency. And if I'm trying to do anything here this afternoon, it's to really bring that home in my own terms. What kind of an emergency is this? It's Zeitenwende squared. This is even bigger than what we were seeing in 2022.
The second thing is, I think this makes the urgency of focus even greater. And I don't know about you, but I have a checklist of places I really, really worry about. And that's my checklist. People can have their own views. They can have their own views about whether or not we should have checklists. You might prefer various types of complex multilateral regional structure. But I'm really worried about Central Africa, Horn of Africa, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh. If you do the climate map, you know why. If you look at the finance stress map, you know why. If you look at Europe's scrambling emergency funding to Egypt last year that no one was really paying attention to, you know why. I believe everyone in the centers of power knows why these are too big to fail. Or at least in some cases, in the case of I believe Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, too big to fail.
The real question about two other zones of mega-crisis in the current moment is how they're allowed to go on in the state that they're in. Not that they have any patent answer, but I think focus is essential. And I'm impatient with strategies which don't actually address what I take to be everyone's understanding of the really critical zones. Places like Iraq are going to become unlivable in the summer in the next decade. People are taking refuge in their cars, running air conditioning all night long just to get through the night. It's dramatic.
There are deep political choices to be made with regard to the regional partners that you play with in making policy. And these are not easy. This is where the politics really comes in. The idea that you can do sustainable development without thinking through what it means to be a partner of the Emirates is an illusion. Or Rwanda, for that matter, key partner of many European players in the region.
There are, for the Europeans, and I say this advisedly and with heavy emphasis in Berlin, hugely significant political choices to be made with global ramifications. And again, you're kidding yourself if you profess to be a plausible global player in the development sphere and take the line on Israel that the German government has done since the beginning of the crisis. It just won't work. You can't do that.
And then finally, there is the question of budgets. And it's all about budgets, and we have to stop pretending that blended finance works. It doesn't work. It's an excuse for a policy. And if we're serious about it, we need to be talking about percentage points of GDP. And we need to be talking with the same earnestness and speed and expedition which the Germans finally have mobilized around defense. And it's an obscenity that they're able to do that around Ukraine and the Russian threat and not able to do it around — it's a real Armutszeugnis. It's a sign of immaturity. And it's by no means, of course, limited to German politics. It's just particularly striking here because we've had this convulsive move out of stagnation and paralysis on defense to 5%, which is the sort of level we all know we need to be at for the energy transition. If we could get to 5% of GDP on the energy transition, we'd be in the game. We'd be China.
We'd be for real. And until we're at that level, we're not for real, and we should stop pretending. So, those I think are the big challenges. But the real point that I want to make is that this song is no longer about us. This is my Carly Simon quote. You know, you're so vain, you think this song is about you. We need to stop being vain. This is not any longer about us. It's not about the choices that well-intentioned Europeans and Westerners make at this point.
This isn't to say that there aren't important differences. The EU, the UK, Japan are not like the United States or Canada or Australia, for that matter. They have much lower per capita emissions, especially amongst working-class people. They're pretty close, as Thomas Piketty said already in 2015, to a sustainable level if you actually go to a modest European level of consumption. The publics are broadly supportive, and there's been real decarbonization in the low-hanging fruit areas. We all know what they are. It's electricity generation. You replace coal with something better, and you get real benefits. That's actually happened, and it's important.
But our track record, collectively, speaks for itself, and I'm going to show you data in a minute, which you all know them. But we have not delivered. For 50 years, we've been banging on about sustainable development as a central historical challenge, and many people have made honorable lives in the struggle over that challenge. But we have to admit the modesty of what has actually been achieved, and fundamentally, therefore, the lack of credibility that the West has as an actor in the really dramatic changes that lie ahead.
Now, let me just dramatize this with some really kind of quite hokey diagrams, but I still find them useful to shock myself into a realization about this. I mean, this is the reality of the last 50 years. I picked it because it was a 50-year chart, not because it's a particularly good one. But that is the combined total of the CO2 emissions reduction achieved by Europe since the beginning of the realization of the problem. That much. Now, this data stops in 2024. If we took it to 2025, it would go to about there. That's how much all of this effort has actually achieved.
The United States is now at higher levels of emission than it was in 1970. It's not actually achieved any reduction at all. And meanwhile, the entire world has changed around us. And the two really dramatic movements are the purple line — that's China by itself — blasting through any previously conceivable levels of emissions, and then the rest of the world growing much more subtly over the top of it, and in the long run very consequentially because that's an awful lot of players all adding up with steady growth over a long period of time.
So, if we want to do what we want to do, we need to go through the looking glass. We need to turn this around. And then what we need to do is we need to speed up time, because that's 50 years. That won't do the trick. So, we need to take it like that. And then what we need to do is crash-land that graph. We all know this, but just see it graphically and you realize what the scale is of what we're talking about. We need it to go not to where we were in 1970, but to zero by 2050-60, give or take a decade, for everyone, from the levels which the rest of the world and China have overtaken.
And we're going to do that in the face of what we know to be ongoing development around the world, which includes the global population rising to over 10 billion by 2050, global GDP per capita — and climate change is not going to stop this. This level of development is 2.5% per annum. It's very modest. It goes from 2012 today to 20,000. So, the levels of consumption globally just go through the roof. And total GDP globally that needs to be decarbonized goes from 110 trillion to 200 trillion in modern-day money. That's 10 times the current GDP of Europe. That's what it means to do sustainable development by 2050. And it's utterly daunting when you look at it in these sort of simplified terms.
And the next question, of course, is who can do this? And it is just radically historically implausible to me that the people who managed to do that, or the people who didn't manage to do anything really, have any valuable lessons of any kind to teach anyone on this question at this point. We had the knowledge, we had the wealth, we had the affluence, we had the technology, we had the finance, we had endless conversations over decades and decades and decades. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we managed to do.
Now, you can't blame us for not stopping China's growth, but you can ask why on earth our line is still where it's at. But we can consign that to the dustbin of history. That's not our question anymore. The question to decide what happens next is what the big emerging market players do in this space. It isn't the EU and the US that decide this. It's only — and can only be — Just look at the graph to imagine that the Europeans can somehow address, given their modest achievement, that huge surge in global emissions. Or the Chinese story is clearly, I think, bizarrely wide of the mark.
Now, we know what China's done. And we have a pretty good idea from policy studies how they did it. And it's not magic, ladies and gentlemen. It truly isn't. If you want to have an electric vehicles industry like the Chinese, if Germany had wanted to have it 20 years ago when the Chinese got serious about it, you would have set policy, you would have spent money, you would have set incentives, you would have put the stick about when you needed to rationalize a little bit. It's not magic. It's not command economics. It's highly competitive. And they did it because they've had lots of different reasons to do it, including beating the Germans at their own competitive game. And apparently the Germans slept while this was happening. But it's possible to
Do that, right? This is not a thing, kind of ding that will move this kite. You can transform an industry. And the key players that are going to have to do it, if we take seriously these numbers, are the grouping that is basically identified as BASIC. It has to be the key players, which are Brazil, India, China, and South Africa as a key partner, at least, right? Ideally one would look for a G20, a G30 kind of configuration to do this.
And the history of this is real, right? This is not slow-moving stuff. So this is data I calculated from IRENA last week. This is the latest IRENA release from April. And what it shows you is that this is not slow-moving, right? So this is the history of European leadership. This is the glory days of the Böll Foundation, the Greens up there when Germany was responsible for two-thirds of new solar and wind additions, right? So Europe led. It really did lead. And then the financial crisis happened and the Eurozone crisis in Europe itself. It isn't China that does that. That's Europe doing it to itself. China then takes off and reaches the 45 to 50 percent share before 2020.
And then this is the real story. China surging in the last two years to over 60 percent of global emissions. That is history. The Chinese are making it, right? This isn't a story of the Chinese having some long structural advantage they've always had. This is the Chinese moving faster and with vastly greater energy than we have ever done. I mean, take that number up there. The Chinese have added in the last two years, what is it? Three times as much renewable energy capacity as Europe and the United States together. Three times as much.
I said this is the scale of action that's necessary. There has never been action in the West on this kind of scale. Let's step away from this and come to the conclusion with a couple of other really dramatic demonstrations of where we go, because this is the solved problem. If we don't buy Chinese photovoltaics, we're choosing to heat the world. If you want to prioritize rapid decarbonization, you buy the results of this. One-off, literally in the history of our species, this is what the Chinese are doing, right? We know we need to do something radical. There it is. So, what about the hard-to-abate sectors? This is the easy-to-abate bit.
What about the hard-to-abate sectors? So let's focus on two to end, steel and cement. We know they're fundamental to infrastructure. We know they're hard to decarbonize. Who are going to be the actors? We know there's a huge conversation in Germany about ThyssenKrupp and green steel and endless — all of us have been in English workshops on this. But ask yourself for a second who actually makes steel. Have we forgotten that from the 1970s onwards the locus of heavy industry shifted away from the West to Asia? And have we forgotten the scale of what happened in Asia, such that the current state of play is that China alone produces more than half of all steel produced in any given year?
I mean, this is a staggering shift in the balance. So the only place where large-scale decarbonization of steel can realistically be performed, and where it must be performed, is obviously in the place that it's produced. And that is essentially China and India. You might say, well, hang on, twos, what about the European Union? We're still in there. We're still players. That's a deception. And it's a deception of using national economic statistics rather than what we all know matters, which is corporate level. Which businesses are the big players in steel? And this is the list of the top 10 steel producers and their locations.
And ArcelorMittal we all know is located in Luxembourg as a matter of convenience. That's an Indian business. So every single one of the top 15 steel producers in the world is an Asian-centered producer. The solution for decarbonization of the most basic heavy industries has to come out of where they're located, and that's in Asia. The first Western firm on this list will be in place 15. That would be the American firm Nucor. ThyssenKrupp, the national champion of German green steel, comes in at 41st in the list. It's responsible for 0.5 percent of global steel production.
Which gives you an idea of what kind of a platform that offers you for doing a transformative technology shift in the world. Important laboratory. They make 10 million tons of steel a year. Shouldn't be ignored, but clearly the problem is in fact to decarbonize the great Asian producers. Those are really also the bluff that we should call in our conversations with our Indian colleagues about CBAM, because basically they object to CBAM, and yet it's their steel producers that are in the crosshairs here. And those aren't small businesses. Those are the oligarchs of China. How about cement? And this is a more optimistic note.
If you wanted to find a historically — a world-historically relevant place for Europe to intervene in decarbonization right now, it would be cement. It's as mundane as that. But seriously, folks, that's the most optimistic thing I can offer you. Focus on cement. European producers are key players in the cement industry. We all know it's important. And I think it gives us an appropriate sense of where we fit in the world-historic food chain at this particular moment. Thank you very much for your patience.
