US President Joe Biden meets with China’s President Xi Jinping during a virtual summit from the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., November 15, 2021.(Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
How will global warming change the world’s systems of power? Alfred McCoy argues that American global hegemony will end around 2030, replaced by China as world leader, but Chinese hegemony will last only for about 20 years—and that by 2050, climate change will have brought environmental catastrophe to both countries, and the rest of the world, with consequences that are almost unimaginable. His new book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.
Also: Mutual aid and racial justice during the year of Covid: Kristina Wong explains how, in the darkest days of the pandemic, she started the Auntie Sewing Squad to make masks for the most vulnerable communities—and how she became, in her words, a sweatshop overlord. Her new coedited book is The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice.
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Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.
Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.