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A race against time to create a new green economy
JOHN GREEN looks at how Beijing has raced ahead in environmental initiatives leaving the West, held to ransom by the fossil fuel cartels, panicking in its wake
MIGHT NO LONGER RIGHT: USS Theodore Roosevelt transits the Pacific Ocean in June 2020 [Kaylianna Genier/Creative Commons]

IN August 2019, Larry Fink, co-founder of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management group, flew to Alaska for a fishing holiday with his mates, Philipp Hildebrand, the former Swiss Central Bank governor and Mike Corbat, the former head of Citibank. 

When they arrived, Fink was taken aback to find the water levels very low and wreaths of smoke were drifting across the narrow Bering Strait from Siberia, where the peat in the tundra was on fire. 

During his four-decade career, he had worried about the planet in a vaguely do-gooding way, he says, and he used to assume that personal and philanthropic conviction should stay out of his profit-seeking business. 

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