Imagine if the United States was still a manufacturing powerhouse today, producing around 65 percent of the world’s new energy vehicles (NEVs), 80 percent of the world’s solar panels; 80 percent of its battery cells, and over 60 percent of global wind turbines. Next, envision China, Russia, and India (and other malcontents) imposing massive tariffs of up to 100 percent on all imports of NEVs, solar panels, battery cells, and wind turbines from America.

The US plus its G7 and Five Eyes allies would lift off into collective, outraged orbit — aided by their equally furious mainstream media outlets. And they would be entirely justified to do so, given the startling evidence of the impact of long-term, harmful climate change on everyone.

It is not hard to picture some headlines: “China, Russia, India And Other Easily Led Followers Declare War on Planet Earth”; “We Have A Solution to Global Warming But China And Others Want To Wreck It”; and so on.

So here is the point. According to the latest Western public data, there already is a single country currently responsible for those NEVs, solar panel, battery and wind turbine outputs. But it is China. And the wild-eyed embrace of massive, often crippling tariffs, in response, is being led by Washington, with other US pilot fish, like Canada and the European Union, scrambling to do likewise.

They argue that they must protect local manufacturers. But what a way to protect them and at what grave cost to the world’s profound common interest in finding real-time, practical ways to curb the generation of greenhouse gases arising from massive, entrenched fossil-fuel consumption.

Meanwhile, one looks in vain for any sort of high-volume, primary condemnation of this tariff-attack on serious, affordable, ready-to-use, climate-friendly remedies by the mainstream Western media. Fevered trepidation about the “China threat” appear to have simply pushed aside concerns in these media outlets, this time round, about addressing the intense risks posed by climate change, aboutwhich dangers they are normally so vocal.

As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US notes, China is now the single largest national emitter of greenhouse gases. This is a product of its unprecedented economic growth over the past 40-plus years. However, China’s per-capita emission of such gases, according to the NOAA, was only about half that of the US in 2021. And it is China that is now leading the world, by a long measure, in manufacturing remarkable, multilayered, climate change responses.China understands that the problem is deeply serious. And it is doing more than anyone to innovate and develop varied, mass-market solutions to apply in China and globally.

Moreover, the NOAA stresses how the US has, over time, released more heat-trapping gases than either China or India and that America “bears more responsibility for the amount of warming that has occurred so far and will persist for millennia”. Which makes this willful rush to build huge tariff walls to shut out the most cost-effective, manufactured solutions we can find today an appalling policy approach.

This conflicted Western response over climate change, led by the US, is fundamentally irrational, as former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani argued during a recent presentation in Hong Kong. It is even more so given that, as he points out, the West, and especially the US over the past 100 years, has persuaded the world, to its great benefit, about the central importance of applying rational thinking to macro-level human problem-solving. Despite still being home to so many world-class, otherwise highly rational academic institutions, US elites, in particular, seem to be gripped by increasing spasms of self-damaging irrationality.

Over the past decade-plus, there has hardly been a geopolitical challenge that the US has encountered which it has not brazenly sought to politicize to its own advantage. Hong Kong has regularly been on the receiving end of this sort of twisted attention. See, for example, President Biden’s latest, bad-faith business advisory directed at the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Washington’s politicizing of pivotal global warming, problem-solving initiatives, though, is exceptionally obtuse. It is terrible for consumers and bad for the planet. And it confirms that America is a committed buddy of global warming.

The author is an adjunct professor at the law faculty of Hong Kong University.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.