Cary Fraser is a Guyanese historian of international relations who teaches in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Penn State University, USA. He has written extensively on international relations and US foreign policy, as well as the politics of race in the US and the Caribbean. He is the former President of the University of Belize.
By Cary Fraser
The recent joint announcement at the end of the 2014 summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC) leaders that the USA and the People’s Republic of China had reached an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to increase use of ‘clean’ energy sources has become a platform for collaboration and increasing interdependence between the two largest economies in the world. It is a major accomplishment that opens the door for wider international efforts to deal with the increasing challenges of climate change for the planet. This development signals a decisive effort to restructure the global economy within the context of a new ‘energy’ regime in which reliance upon the fossil fuels that powered the spread of industrial civilizations over the past two centuries, and the threat of irreversible climate change arising from the use of those fuels, will be diminished.
For both Barack Obama and Xi Jinping, the summit has cemented the growing perception that they are leaders focused upon the future who
