“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats.” — T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Eliot was not writing an environmental treatise. The Waste Land, on its own, does appear as a dystopian, tangible reality because of its physical landscape, its vivid vocabulary, its description and delineation of the “Unreal City” beneath a “brown fog,” and its descriptions of dead trees, stony rubbish, and exhausted water. Yet its physical landscape can also be read, today, as an unsettling reflection of the ecological consequences of modern industrial civilisation. And nearly a century after Eliot imagined this civilisation struggling to regenerate itself from a landscape of fragmented remnants and decay, we live in a world that faces a very different kind of wasteland. Our wasteland today is shaped by economic systems that produce prosperity, but they also place an unprecedented sort of pressure on nature itself.
That exactly is the irony: humanity is attempting to escape this particular wasteland, but that has become a power struggle. It is true to the core that the industrial age has given the world mass production, modern infrastructure, technological progress, and an extraordinary rise in living standards. But, at the same time, it has also produced a dependence on fossil fuels. There is also this reality of pollution and an economic model in which nature was often treated as an apparently limitless input into production. Today, the world is attempting to reverse that fate through decarbonisation. Yet even this transition to a greener economy is becoming a predicament of international trade.
So the question is no longer about how something can be produced cheaply. The question is now how something, or anything for that matter, can be produced in a cleaner way. And how can we afford to produce something cleanly? This serves as an oxymoron when we think about how much nature has given us, yet how much of it we have managed to destroy in the process. If one delves deeply into the discussion, they would find out that this is the emerging dilemma of green protectionism, which includes the use of environmental standards, carbon border measures, clean technology subsidies, as well as local content requirements that serve legitimate climate objectives. However, at the same time, these measures protect domestic industries and create new barriers for foreign competitors.
Since everything in today’s world is so driven by money, the central question becomes a confusion between whether the world should go green or not, who gets to define what “green” exactly means, who can afford to comply, and who would control the industries of the green future. To top it off, there is always the possibility that the industries of the green future will also become monopolised.
In the wake of this, the environmental crisis cannot be separated in any way from the history of industrialisation itself. When the Industrial Revolution transformed the relationship between human beings and nature, fossil fuels allowed societies to produce on a much larger scale. Coal-powered factories emerged, railways emerged, and later oil-based transport emerged. That created an abundance of economic possibilities. Conversely, industrialisation also materialised and externalised the environmental costs of engaging with technology. To put it simply, factories had the liberty to produce profits, but the pollution was absorbed by the rivers and the air. Cities could grow, but the waste would accumulate outside the boundaries of economic accounting. Natural resources, again, could be extracted, but their depletion was not thought of as an immediate cost, and that too on a company’s balance sheet.
Over here, Eliot’s imagery offers a very striking allegory for this particular contradiction, when he says: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?”
So the question fundamentally becomes about regeneration itself. We begin to ask how life can emerge from a civilisation that has already become barren.
Even popular internet culture, in its own informal way, has begun to reflect this growing concern with intergenerational environmental responsibility. The recurring sentiment of wanting to “protect the glaciers” or preserve a livable planet for children may appear humorous on the surface, but it reflects a much deeper anxiety about intergenerational equity: what kind of ecological inheritance is the present generation leaving behind? The concern is no longer simply about how much economic growth we can generate today, but whether that growth is being achieved at the expense of the environmental security of those who will inherit its consequences. In the twenty-first century, therefore, the question of what we leave behind has acquired a profound ecological and ethical resonance.
The modern climate debate, in many different ways, is a debate about regeneration. It is ultimately concerned with whether economies can continue to grow without exhausting the ecological systems on which they depend, and whether industrial societies can become prosperous and flourish without reproducing the environmental costs that accompanied their development. Perhaps most importantly, there is the question of who is going to pay for this transformation.
Some time ago, I asked ChatGPT about how the growing use of AI was affecting water resources. The data centres and infrastructure required to develop and operate AI systems can consume significant amounts of water, particularly for cooling. Yet the response I received seemed to treat the issue as relatively insignificant. In a world already facing severe resource scarcity, even the waste of a single drop of water feels difficult to justify. What struck me was not that the response denied the problem, but that it failed to reflect the urgency of it. There was an irony that I could not overlook. I was using AI to ask about the environmental costs of AI itself. I was asking artificial intelligence about the resources consumed by artificial intelligence. In many ways, that contradiction reflects the predicament of our time. We are increasingly turning to new technologies to solve problems while simultaneously creating new demands on the very resources we are trying to preserve.
One of the clearest examples of this is the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM. There is a logic behind CBAM, and it is very straightforward. European producers face a carbon price under the European Union’s Emissions Trading System. So if European steel becomes more expensive because its producers have to pay for emissions, while imported steel from countries with weaker climate regulation does not face a comparable cost, European firms could lose competitiveness over this. Production might then move abroad rather than simply disappear. This particular phenomenon is known as carbon leakage.
CBAM aims to address this problem by putting a carbon-related cost on certain imports. Since January 2026, the EU’s definitive CBAM regime has applied to sectors including iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity, and hydrogen. From the EU’s perspective, this is not a conventional customs tariff. It is a carbon pricing mechanism intended to make imported goods bear a carbon cost comparable to that faced by European producers themselves. Conversely, if we consider the position of a steel manufacturer in a developing country, the situation becomes much more complicated.
The factory may rely on coal, not because the owners consider pollution desirable, but because renewable electricity is expensive. It may also be unreliable or unavailable at the industrial scale required. The manufacturer therefore faces an uncomfortable choice of either investing heavily in cleaner technology without any guarantee of being able to finance it, absorbing the additional costs and becoming less competitive, or losing access to a very important export market. A wealthy country can say that production must be cleaned up if a company wants to sell to its market. But a poorer country cannot respond in the same way. It may have to ask for assistance in acquiring the technology that ultimately allows it to clean up its production. This is why an environmental measure can be environmentally defensible, but at the same time also developmentally unequal.
In this scenario, Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Theory becomes particularly relevant. He categorises the global economy into the categories of periphery, semi-periphery, and core. The core economies possess greater financial resources and technological capabilities. Peripheral economies are more likely to depend on commodities or different sorts of labour-intensive production. The semi-periphery countries occupy an intermediate position and contain both highly advanced and highly dependent sectors. The important point is that global inequality is not simply about who is rich and who is poor, or who can afford something and who cannot afford it. It is mainly about monopoly. It is about who is going to control capital, technology, and high-value production.
This framework becomes very revealing when we apply it to climate policy. In actuality, the geography of pollution and the geography of economic power are not necessarily the same.
Historically, industrialised economies accumulated enormous forms of wealth through fossil-fuel-intensive development. Other countries, particularly those in the periphery and semi-periphery, are still attempting to industrialise. The difference between countries that industrialised generations ago and those that are still attempting to do so today is far bigger than one can imagine. Now, on top of that, the global system is asking them to develop, but to develop everything cleanly. That is not an unreasonable demand, of course. But it is problematic because these countries possess radically unequal capacities to meet it.
A wealthy economy can subsidise renewable energy. It can finance electric vehicle infrastructure. It can support domestic manufacturers. Poorer economies, however, may still be struggling to provide reliable electricity or adequate transport infrastructure. Therefore, when environmental standards are applied across economies with radically different capacities, the burden of producing cleanly should not simply fall equally on both parties. Environmental responsibility may be global, but the capacity to fulfil that responsibility is not.
And this is where the question of emissions becomes even more complicated. The emissions have not necessarily disappeared, but they simply have moved places.
When Eliot says “Unreal City,” he talks about how London is beneath a brown fog. That might be a literary image of modern urban alienation, but it also offers a bridge between the industrial city and today’s environmental anxieties.
Later in the poem, he makes the environmental imagery even more striking when he writes: “The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends…”
Which means that, yes, there is pollution. To put it very simply, in common vernacular, pollution — air pollution, noise pollution, every kind of pollution — is increasing. But the river is also becoming a record of consumption. Economic activity is leaving physical traces that are not going to disappear anytime soon. This is where the discussion on carbon footprint becomes crucial. There is a difference between territorial emissions, per capita emissions, historical cumulative emissions, and consumption-based emissions. A country may appear relatively clean when we look only at the emissions produced within its own borders. But what happens when that country imports steel, electronics, clothing, and other manufactured products whose production generates emissions elsewhere?
Imagine a consumer in a wealthy country purchasing a product manufactured in a developing country. The factory emissions occur in the country of production. But the economic chain is much more complicated. The demand may originate elsewhere. The capital may come from another country. The technology may be controlled by a multinational corporation. The manufacturing may take place in a developing economy. And the final profits may be distributed across several jurisdictions.
So the country where pollution occurs is not necessarily the country where the economic benefits are concentrated.
This is where the idea of a pollution haven also becomes relevant. When environmental regulations become stricter in wealthy economies, some pollution-intensive production may move towards countries where environmental regulations are weaker or where production costs are lower. The emissions have not necessarily disappeared. They have simply moved places.
Thus, carbon borders are only one side of the new trade divide. The other side, which is more consequential, is green subsidies.
The United States, the European Union, and other major economies have increasingly started to regard clean technology as a very strategic industrial policy. So it cannot be innocently framed as an environmental policy, because at the end of the day, it is strategically linked. Governments want domestic production of everything from batteries to solar equipment to hydrogen, but they also want it to be associated with the energy transition. And there is an obvious economic rationale behind this. Governments do not want their future energy systems to depend entirely on foreign suppliers. They want jobs, factories, technological capabilities, and resilient supply chains at home.
The European Union’s Net-Zero Industry Act is a clear example of this shift. The Act is designed to strengthen European manufacturing capacity in net-zero technologies and aims to increase European manufacturing capacity for strategic clean technologies. This is climate policy, but it is also industrial policy. The same tension can be seen in the United States, where large-scale incentives for clean energy production have been designed not only to accelerate decarbonisation but also to encourage investment, manufacturing, and supply chain development within the country.
But this is where the asymmetry appears once again.
A wealthy government can spend billions supporting a domestic battery factory, a solar industry, or another clean technology sector. A poorer government may struggle to finance basic infrastructure, let alone match that subsidy. So the green transition can create a green subsidy race in which fiscal capacity itself becomes a competitive advantage. And this creates another version of the old global divide. It may no longer simply be about who controls fossil fuels and who imports them. The green transition is not taking place on an empty map. It is taking place on a map that has already been shaped by centuries of unequal accumulation. This brings us to local content requirements. A government can argue that if taxpayers are financing a clean energy transition, taxpayers should benefit from it through domestic employment and manufacturing.
The argument is understandable. Why should a country spend public money subsidising solar energy if most of the solar panels are imported? Why should it subsidise electric vehicles if the batteries, components, and critical technologies are produced elsewhere? From a national perspective, these are legitimate concerns. But from a global climate perspective, the consequences are more complicated. Suppose one country can manufacture a clean technology more efficiently than another. If a government insists that subsidised projects must use domestically produced components, the cost of the transition may rise.
The world is already operating under enormous pressure to decarbonise quickly. There is therefore a tension between efficiency and industrial sovereignty. The cheapest clean technology may accelerate global decarbonisation. The domestically produced clean technology may strengthen national economic security. Governments increasingly want both. Perhaps that is where green protectionism becomes most difficult to distinguish from legitimate climate policy. Climate change creates a genuine collective action problem. If one country imposes strict environmental regulations while its competitors do not, its producers can face additional costs without receiving equivalent benefits. If governments subsidise domestic green industries, they should consider whether those subsidies are accelerating global decarbonisation or merely relocating manufacturing behind national borders.
If local content requirements are used, they should be accompanied by efforts to build technological capacity rather than becoming permanent protection for inefficient industries. And developing countries themselves cannot remain passive because they need green industrial policies of their own — policies that allow them to move beyond the extraction of raw materials and into processing, manufacturing, technology, and higher-value production. The objective should not be to choose between development and decarbonisation.
It should be to make clean development economically possible.
Perhaps this brings us back to Eliot.
The landscape of The Waste Land is filled with fragments: broken images, dead trees, stony rubbish, and exhausted water. Yet beneath all of that destruction is the persistent desire for regeneration. The twenty-first century has inherited a similar contradiction. The industrial economy gave humanity extraordinary prosperity, but it also created ecological costs that can no longer be treated as externalities. Now we are attempting to build something new from the remnants of that old system.
But the green transition will not automatically make the global economy more equal. It is entirely possible to imagine a world in which carbon emissions fall while economic power remains concentrated. A world in which fossil fuel dependence declines but technological dependence increases. A world in which developing countries are encouraged to open their markets while wealthy economies subsidise their own green industries.
That would be a cleaner world, perhaps. But it would not necessarily be a fairer one.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply to build a green economy. It is to build a green economy that does not reproduce the same hierarchy that shaped the fossil fuel economy. The industrial age divided the world partly through access to capital, resources, and technology. The green age could divide it through access to clean technology, finance, critical minerals, and the ability to comply with increasingly sophisticated environmental standards.
The colour may change. The structure does not have to.
And this is ultimately where the metaphor of Eliot’s wasteland becomes relevant. The question of regeneration is not only about whether nature can recover. It is also about whether the economic and political systems built around nature can change with it. The world cannot afford a green transition in which the wealthy build the walls and the developing world is simply told to become greener on the other side.
The objective should be a green bridge, not a green wall.