Congrats @guardian, this is easily one of the most dishonest articles I've read in a long time, just pure ideological propaganda. In short the article's main thesis is that climate change is a "democracy" vs "autocracies" issue whereby virtuous "democracies" are struggling valiantly against climate change while evil "autocracies" are the primary obstacle to progress. And the central question being: how can we, the good guys, force these bad "autocracies" to behave responsibly on climate? As the article puts it, "democracies" apparently have attributes like popular pressure and transparency that mean only they can address important global issues, whereas bad awful "autocracies" are controlled by fossil fuel interests and have no internal pressure to change course. Only problem with this thesis? It's completely false. In fact reality is pretty much the opposite: the only major country with an open climate change denier leading it is non other than the US - the supposed beacon of democracy that just withdrew from the Paris Agreement again and is now the world's top exporter of fossil fuels. And by far the biggest driver of the global energy transition, building an extraordinary 74% of the world's clean solar and wind projects (ft.com/content/e51744d9-e585…), is none other than China. And this trend is accelerating: more and more the US is becoming the world's principal roadblock to global decarbonization efforts, with the Trump administration now using tariffs as a weapon to pressure countries to maintain fossil fuel dependence, specifically US fossil fuels. Even the New York Times recently had to admit this was the case in a lengthy investigation documenting how China leads the energy transition while America actively undermines it (nytimes.com/interactive/2025…). As they document, China is racing toward a renewable future while Trump's America is trying to keep the world "hooked on fossil fuels" through economic coercion and dismantling of climate policies. Long story short, presenting things as if it was "autocracies keeping us hooked on fossil fuels" as The Guardian is doing here is textbook disinformation. Which incidentally also destroys the article's theories around "democracies" supposedly having better information flows and accountability - hard to claim those virtues when peddling basic propaganda. Link to the article: theguardian.com/environment/…