No worries, thought I should do better than a cheap one-liner

re: which faction 'takes charge' - no I don't expect a good outcome from continued 'leadership' of the west, and as we've discussed before I think there are potentially loads of benefits from the emergence of a multipolar world order. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like the climate will be one of those beneficiaries, as the tactic appears to be to beat the west at its own game - 'development', industrialisation, global trade, megacities etc etc. The NSR may have a smaller carbon footprint than the US military, however the point is that it's additional industrial activity powered by fossil fuels, which means yet more ghg's in the atmosphere compounding the warming effect for hundreds or thousands of years to come.

Also, the unipolar order has only really existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 80s/90s - multiple competing power blocks has generally been the norm throughout history, and the difference on how this plays out wrt resource extraction, environmental damage & human exploitation has been minimal. As a resistance movement you might be able to play one off against the other and retain your position, but otherwise the system as a whole continues to march onwards.

I have in mind the 'peer polity' analysis of civilisation which Joseph Tainter articulated. Basically, in state/market societies locked into continual growth, there is a form a prisoner's dilemma where each polity must do everything it can to expand its power, resource use, complexity etc or else be overrun by its competitors. Back to my favourite source on these matters: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jason-godesky-thirty-theses/#toc19 So what we're seeing now is the (re-)emergence of a rival polity to the power block of the US+western European countries. As one power wanes, so another begins to take over - a very old story.

The wild card might be that the globe-spanning civilisation has passed the peak resource consumptions of most key minerals/materials, and that in an age of simplification/contraction/collapse there is more of an incentive to co-operate when it becomes clear that continued growth is no longer possible. I still harbour a belief in the essential decency of humankind, so I'm optimistic on that front. However, we have the inertia of 6,000+ years of state-level societies and the toxic behaviours they've drilled into us to deal with first, so it's going to be a rocky ride.

cheers,
I