China's seriousness is our best hope

As a young boy growing up in the North of England, each weekday morning I'd go to my grandmother's house. We'd drink cups of tea and chat about such trivialities as trouble a nascent 8-year-old's mind, until the time came for me to walk up the village to primary school.

For the life of me, I'm sorry to say I can't remember much of what we discussed. But there's one conversation that I will always recall. One day, I declared to my grandma that when I grew up, I would move to America and what's more, I even promised to take her with me.

It was the 1990s, the pre-internet era, and all I knew of the United States was what I had learned from TV shows or books. It seemed a wondrous place, filled with opportunity. "The land of the free and the home of the brave".

Fast forward 20 years and everything has changed. Not only in the US, but in my home country too. New leaders have swept to power on the back of widespread discontent with a system that no longer seems to be working for the good of the people. Wages stagnate as the secure jobs of yesteryear dry up and for the first time in generations, it's predicted that the children born today in much of the West will be less well off than their parents.

Against this background, it's easy to see how support can take root for the kinds of isolationist and xenophobic attitudes characterized by Brexit bogeyman Nigel Farage and Republican president-elect Donald Trump. They offer people easy answers to complicated, scary questions.

Yet scariest of all, for all of humanity, is the callous disregard these new leaders seem to hold for the health and wellbeing of our planet.

Trump is not only a climate change denier, in November 2017 he stated that "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive".

Despite being the anointed leader of one of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters, he has threatened to pull out of last year's historic Paris climate agreement and leave in tatters the commitment made there to limit global warming.

Needless to say, the consequences of this could be apocalyptic. It led China's Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin to remind the US, earlier this month, that it was Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr who first initiated climate change negotiations.

While for environmental governance expert Deborah Seligsohn from the University of California at San Diego: “not only is climate change no Chinese hoax, but Chinese seriousness may be our best hope."

Of course, no one can say with any certainty what the next few years or decades will bring. But if I were a young boy again today, looking for leadership in this world, I scarcely think it would be to the West that my hopeful gaze would turn.