Tag: politics

Argentina’s Senate approved a bill on carbon markets

Fernando BarrioLeave a comment

On 29 October 2026, Argentina’s Senate approved a bill establishing a national regulatory framework for carbon markets, opening the way for its consideration by the Chamber of Deputies. The legislation seeks to provide legal certainty for carbon credits, facilitate their participation in international markets and attract investment into projects that reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions. Its significance extends beyond the development of a new environmental market, however, because it addresses the legal recognition of environmental outcomes as economic assets, the authority of private certification systems and the relationship between climate commitments and commercial transactions.

The proposal represents an important development in Argentina’s environmental legislation, particularly for a country with substantial opportunities in forestry, agriculture and land management, but where the absence of a comprehensive national framework has complicated participation in certain international carbon market mechanisms. At the same time, the legislation raises questions about environmental integrity, regulatory accountability and the increasingly important role of digital technologies in determining which environmental outcomes acquire legal and economic value.

The legislation creates a framework for the ownership, registration and commercialisation of carbon credits generated by projects developed in Argentina. Its principal objective is to facilitate the participation of Argentine projects in domestic and international carbon markets while promoting environmental integrity, transparency and compliance with the country’s international climate commitments.

Importantly, the bill does not establish a mandatory emissions trading system comparable to the European Union Emissions Trading System. It does not impose emissions caps on regulated sectors or require companies to surrender allowances corresponding to their emissions. Instead, it concentrates on the recognition and commercialisation of carbon credits generated through mitigation activities, including projects involving forestry, agriculture, energy and waste management. This distinction is important because the creation of a market for credits does not necessarily establish a corresponding obligation to reduce emissions. Its environmental contribution depends on the characteristics of the projects generating those credits and on the purposes for which they are subsequently used.

One of the bill’s most significant innovations is its express recognition of carbon credits as intangible assets with independent economic and legal value, distinguishable from the land, natural resources or activities from which they originate. A carbon credit is defined as an instrument issued under a recognised certification standard, representing one metric tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent avoided, reduced or removed relative to an established baseline.

The legislation also distinguishes between registered ownership and the underlying economic rights associated with the credit. Registered ownership is determined by the relevant certification registry, while economic ownership depends on the applicable property rights and contractual arrangements. This distinction seeks to accommodate the participation of landowners, project developers, investors and other actors in carbon projects. It also recognises that those developing a project may not necessarily own the land or natural resources involved.

However, the recognition of carbon credits as independent intangible assets introduces legal questions concerning their transferability, use as collateral, treatment in insolvency proceedings and the consequences of subsequent changes to their certification status. The legal existence of the asset may be established through certification and registration, but its underlying environmental validity remains dependent on scientific and technical assessments that can subsequently change.

Argentina’s constitutional framework gives provinces original ownership of the natural resources within their territories, while the federal government retains responsibilities concerning minimum environmental protection standards and international climate commitments. The bill attempts to accommodate this distribution of powers by recognising the possibility of provincial and Buenos Aires City jurisdictional mitigation programmes, including initiatives involving REDD+, agriculture, land use, waste management and energy.

It also addresses the relationship between jurisdictional programmes and individual projects, recognising rights concerning participation, exclusion and the allocation of mitigation outcomes. These provisions have considerable practical importance because jurisdictional programmes may generate credits from environmental results achieved across extensive territories, while individual landowners or developers may also undertake projects within those areas.

The difficulty is that environmental outcomes are not always attributable exclusively to a particular property or economic activity. Reductions in deforestation, for example, may result from interactions between provincial regulations, public enforcement, private conservation initiatives and community land management. Consequently, the allocation of carbon credits cannot always be resolved through conventional property rights or contractual arrangements. It may also require mechanisms for determining the contribution of public policies and collective environmental management to the results being commercialised.

The legislation establishes the National Emissions Reduction Registry, ReNaRe, as a public digital platform for recording carbon projects and providing traceability. Registration is principally declarative rather than constituting a general administrative authorisation to trade credits. The framework also provides for interoperability with provincial registries, seeking to prevent double counting and unnecessary administrative duplication.

The bill incorporates requirements concerning additionality, permanence, environmental and social safeguards, and monitoring, reporting and verification, commonly known as MRV. Certification may be undertaken through recognised standards administered by public or private organisations, including foreign entities. These standards determine the methodologies through which environmental outcomes are quantified, verified and certified. The reliance on certification standards reflects the operation of international voluntary carbon markets, where private organisations have developed much of the technical infrastructure supporting credit generation. Nevertheless, it also places considerable importance on the rules governing the recognition, independence and supervision of those standards, particularly because certification decisions provide the foundation for the subsequent legal and commercial recognition of credits.

Another important component concerns the relationship between domestic carbon projects and Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The bill distinguishes between Mitigation Contributions, which do not require corresponding adjustments and may contribute to Argentina’s national climate commitments, and Transferable Mitigation Outcome Units, which may be authorised for international use under the relevant mechanisms.

Carbon credits may generally be traded domestically or internationally without prior government authorisation. However, transfers intended for use towards another country’s nationally determined contribution, or under international mechanisms requiring authorisation and corresponding adjustments, are subject to approval by the Argentine authorities.

The legislation also establishes that such authorisations must remain compatible with Argentina’s nationally determined contribution, or NDC. This distinction is central to international carbon accounting. When a mitigation outcome is authorised for use by another country, Argentina must apply the relevant corresponding adjustment to prevent the same result from being counted towards both countries’ climate commitments. The framework consequently recognises that international transfers involve more than private commercial transactions, because they can affect the mitigation outcomes available for demonstrating compliance with national climate objectives.

The bill also seeks to integrate carbon credits into financial markets. Credits may be used as underlying assets, sources of repayment or collateral for financial instruments, including securities, investment funds, trusts and derivatives, subject to the applicable legal framework and oversight by Argentina’s National Securities Commission where public offering rules apply.

The Senate-approved framework also provides for fiscal incentives, including thirty years of stability concerning national taxation for qualifying registered projects, a zero rate of export duties on carbon credits and provisions concerning the tax treatment of international transactions. These measures are intended to encourage investment and increase the attractiveness of Argentine credits in international markets. They may also facilitate financing for projects that require substantial initial investment before generating certified mitigation outcomes.

The combined effect is to create a legal framework through which environmental results can be transformed into commercially transferable assets and subsequently incorporated into broader financial arrangements. It is precisely this relationship between environmental performance, legal recognition and financial value that raises the most significant questions about the proposed regulatory framework.

The bill addresses several sources of legal uncertainty surrounding carbon credits, but commercial certainty and environmental integrity are not interchangeable. A carbon credit does not simply represent an objectively observable quantity of carbon. It represents a claim that a particular intervention has produced an environmental result relative to an alternative scenario. For example, a forest may store substantial quantities of carbon without necessarily generating tradable credits. The creation of credits requires demonstrating that a particular activity has avoided emissions or produced removals that would not otherwise have occurred. That assessment depends on the construction of a baseline, the application of a methodology and the verification of the resulting estimate. The credit therefore incorporates assumptions about causation, additionality and future environmental conditions. Those assumptions may be scientifically justified, but they are not necessarily beyond dispute.

The law does not merely recognise a pre-existing environmental commodity. It establishes the institutional conditions under which a particular interpretation of environmental performance becomes a tradable asset. This distinction has important regulatory consequences.

A credit may be correctly registered, legally transferred and incorporated into a financial instrument while the environmental result supporting its issuance remains uncertain or subsequently proves inaccurate. Registration and transaction traceability can prevent certain forms of double counting, but they cannot independently establish whether the certified reduction or removal actually occurred.

The bill recognises fundamental integrity principles, but leaves much of their operational application to certification standards. Although public authorities retain supervisory functions, the framework does not establish a comparably detailed system of methodological oversight, corrective measures and specific administrative sanctions. This creates the possibility that the legal framework will provide stronger guarantees concerning the circulation of credits than concerning the environmental evidence supporting their existence. The consequences become particularly important when credits are incorporated into financial instruments, because uncertainty about environmental validity may subsequently affect asset valuation, contractual obligations and financial exposure.

Private certification systems play an established role in carbon markets and can contribute technical expertise, methodological development and access to international buyers. Nevertheless, their role becomes more complex when national legislation uses their certification decisions as the foundation for recognising legally transferable assets.

Certification bodies are not merely providing information to public authorities. Their methodologies can determine which activities qualify, how environmental benefits are calculated and how many credits a project can generate. These decisions can significantly influence the distribution of economic benefits between landowners, project developers, investors and public authorities. This produces a form of regulatory authority that operates through technical standards rather than conventional legislation.

The distinction between public regulation and private certification therefore becomes less straightforward. The State establishes the legal framework, but private entities may exercise substantial influence over the conditions through which economic rights arise. An effective regulatory system must address not only the independence of verifiers but also the quality of methodologies, the treatment of uncertainty, conflicts of interest and the consequences of incorrect certification.

The absence of sufficiently developed mechanisms for dealing with reversals is particularly relevant for forestry and agricultural projects. Carbon stored in vegetation or soils may return to the atmosphere through fires, droughts, deforestation or changes in land management. A credit representing such storage cannot necessarily be treated as equivalent to one representing a permanent reduction in industrial emissions. The legal framework must therefore account for differences in environmental permanence rather than relying exclusively on a common unit of measurement.

The increasing use of digital technologies introduces another dimension that receives insufficient attention in the legislation. Carbon markets increasingly depend on satellite imagery, remote sensing, environmental sensors, automated data processing and artificial intelligence to quantify and verify environmental outcomes. These technologies can improve monitoring, reduce transaction costs and facilitate the participation of projects that would otherwise face substantial technical barriers. However, their significance is not limited to operational efficiency.

Artificial intelligence can influence how environmental conditions are classified, how historical trends are interpreted, how baselines are established and how future emissions or removals are estimated. In some circumstances, algorithmic systems may contribute directly to determining how many credits a project is entitled to generate.

Consider a forestry project where machine learning models estimate carbon stocks using satellite observations, vegetation classifications and historical environmental data. The resulting assessment may depend on assumptions concerning biomass, degradation, ecological conditions and the expected development of the land in the absence of the project. Different models, datasets or methodological choices may generate significantly different estimates of the same environmental outcome. Similar concerns arise in agricultural carbon projects, particularly where models developed using data from one geographical region are applied to soils, climates or production systems with different characteristics.

The problem is not limited to isolated computational mistakes. An error embedded in a widely used algorithmic methodology may affect thousands of credits simultaneously, giving systematic inaccuracies the appearance of independently verified environmental results. When those results become the basis for issuing credits, technical decisions acquire legal and economic consequences. This represents a significant transformation in environmental governance.

Digital technologies are no longer necessarily confined to observing environmental conditions or assisting administrative decisions. They increasingly participate in the infrastructure through which environmental outcomes are established, certified and recognised as economically valuable.

The distinction between using artificial intelligence as a regulatory tool and allowing it to become part of the infrastructure through which regulatory authority is exercised becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. For that reason, effective oversight requires attention to the provenance and quality of data, methodological transparency, model validation, uncertainty assessment, independent auditing and mechanisms for reviewing disputed results. It also requires a clearer allocation of responsibility.

If credits are incorrectly issued because an automated model systematically overestimates carbon removals, responsibility cannot necessarily be resolved by identifying the registered owner or project developer. The roles of technology providers, certification bodies, independent verifiers and public authorities may all require examination. The relevant question is not whether artificial intelligence should be used in carbon markets, but how its contribution to legally consequential environmental assessments should be governed.

Other provisions illustrate the importance of integrating commercial regulation with broader environmental governance. The bill’s treatment of corresponding adjustments contains a significant technical difficulty. It refers to applying adjustments to Argentina’s national greenhouse gas inventory, whereas the accounting rules established under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement distinguish the inventory from the adjusted emissions balance used to assess progress towards the NDC. Corresponding adjustments do not alter the national inventory itself. They modify the accounting balance reflecting internationally transferred mitigation outcomes. This distinction is fundamental to the integrity of international climate accounting and should be reflected accurately in domestic legislation.

The relationship between international transfers and national climate commitments also requires careful consideration. Authorising the international use of a mitigation outcome may generate revenue for an Argentine project, but it also affects the results Argentina can count towards its own climate objectives. Consequently, such authorisations should be understood as decisions concerning national climate policy, rather than merely as administrative procedures facilitating international commerce.

Federalism introduces another difficulty, particularly concerning jurisdictional forestry programmes and the respective rights of provincial governments, landowners and Indigenous communities. The allocation of credits generated through territorially extensive programmes cannot necessarily be reduced to individual property rights, especially when the environmental outcomes depend partly on collective management and public conservation policies. The recognition of commercial rights must therefore remain compatible with existing territorial rights, environmental obligations and appropriate arrangements for participation and benefit sharing.

There is also a broader concern about the relationship between carbon credits and direct emissions reductions. A company may acquire credits while continuing to operate emissions-intensive activities. Although carbon markets can contribute to financing mitigation elsewhere, the acquisition of credits does not automatically establish that the purchaser has reduced its own environmental impact. This distinction is increasingly reflected in comparative regulation. Directive (EU) 2024/825, for example, addresses misleading environmental claims based on carbon offsetting, distinguishing actual reductions in a product’s climate impact from compensation through external projects.

From the comparison point of view, Brazil’s Law 15.042/2024 provides an important regional one. It establishes the Brazilian Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading System while also addressing carbon credits, institutional oversight, ownership and territorial rights. Unlike the Argentine proposal, the Brazilian framework incorporates a regulated emissions trading system alongside provisions concerning voluntary credits and their potential recognition within the regulated market. It also develops more detailed rules concerning certain categories of land and the rights of Indigenous peoples and traditional communities.

The European Union’s Regulation 2024/3012 provides a different but equally relevant comparison. Its certification framework for permanent carbon removals, carbon farming and carbon storage in products establishes requirements concerning quantification, additionality, sustainability, monitoring, verification and responsibility for reversals. It also addresses the use of remote sensing and modelling while requiring environmental outcomes to be quantified through scientifically robust methodologies that account for uncertainty. Rather than assuming that certification automatically guarantees integrity, the European approach incorporates specific requirements for certification schemes and their supervision.

Neither system eliminates uncertainty, nor should their different objectives be overlooked. However, both illustrate the importance of treating the integrity of environmental outcomes as a regulatory concern in its own right, rather than merely as a technical matter delegated to certification providers.

Argentina’s proposed legislation establishes important foundations for the development of carbon markets. The recognition of credits as intangible assets, the creation of a national registry, the regulation of international transfers and the possibility of integrating credits into financial markets may all facilitate investment and improve participation in international climate finance. However, these provisions also reveal a broader tension between the legal construction of environmental assets and the governance of the scientific and technological processes through which those assets are created.

The legal framework can establish ownership, facilitate transactions and provide financial certainty. It cannot, through those mechanisms alone, guarantee that the environmental results represented by the credits are genuine, additional or sufficiently permanent. This becomes increasingly important as artificial intelligence and other digital technologies assume greater roles in producing the evidence supporting environmental certification.

The traditional distinction between environmental regulation and technical verification becomes less convincing when algorithmic systems and private methodologies participate directly in determining which environmental outcomes acquire legal and economic value. The development of carbon markets therefore requires more than the regulation of transactions. It requires institutions capable of supervising the production of environmental evidence, evaluating the reliability of certification methodologies and allocating responsibility when recognised results subsequently prove incorrect.

The central legal question is no longer simply who owns a carbon credit, but also who has the authority to determine that the credit exists, which evidence is sufficient to justify that determination and who bears responsibility when the evidence proves unreliable. Argentina’s proposed legislation brings these questions into focus, but their significance extends well beyond the country.

As carbon markets become increasingly digital, the credibility of environmental assets will depend not only on their legal recognition and commercial transferability, but also on the transparency, reliability and accountability of the scientific and technological infrastructure supporting them. A carbon credit may acquire economic value because the law recognises it. Its environmental value, however, depends on whether the processes through which that recognition occurs can be trusted.

Beyond Electrostates and Petrostates: Europe, Latin America, and the need of a regulated transition

Fernando BarrioLeave a comment

The emerging narrative of an “ecological cold war” between petrostates and electrostates has an undeniable analytical appeal. It captures, with a certain elegance, the potential material reorganisation of the global order around energy systems and the infrastructures that sustain them. Yet, when this framing is taken as a descriptive account of reality rather than as a heuristic device, it risks obscuring the very dynamics that will determine the success or failure of the transition. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in Latin America, and in the contrast that can be drawn with Europe.

The attraction of the argument lies in its clarity. A world divided between fossil fuel incumbency and green technological ascendancy, with China leading a new electro-industrial bloc and the United States anchoring a coalition intent on prolonging hydrocarbon dominance, offers a powerful way of making sense of current geopolitical shifts. It also provides a convenient place for so-called middle powers, which are imagined as navigating between these poles, extracting benefits where possible while preserving a degree of autonomy. The difficulty, however, is that this narrative assumes that strategic positioning is primarily a function of external alignment, when in practice it is shaped, often decisively, by internal regulatory capacity.

Latin America illustrates this point with particular force. The region is frequently described in aggregate terms as resource rich and strategically relevant, endowed as it is with hydrocarbons, critical minerals, and extraordinary renewable energy potential. This description is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete to the point of being misleading. What matters is not the mere presence of resources, but the institutional and legal frameworks through which they are governed. It is here that the region reveals a growing divergence that complicates any attempt to treat it as a coherent “middle power” actor.

In some jurisdictions, there are visible efforts to construct regulatory environments capable of managing the transition in a structured way. Chile’s approach to renewable energy and its attempts to articulate a strategy around lithium are often cited in this regard, while Brazil presents a more complex but nonetheless significant case in which hydrocarbon production coexists with a relatively clean energy matrix and emerging green industrial ambitions. These examples remain partial and contested, yet they point toward an understanding of extraction not as an end in itself but as a component within a broader developmental and environmental strategy.

In other cases, however, the absence of stable, credible, and forward-looking regulatory frameworks undermines the possibility of such a transformation. Argentina is perhaps the clearest illustration. Despite possessing both vast hydrocarbon reserves, most notably in Vaca Muerta, and a central position within the global lithium landscape, the lack of consistent regulatory direction, coupled with recurring macroeconomic instability, makes it difficult to convert these assets into a coherent transition pathway. Under such conditions, extraction tends to reinforce short term imperatives rather than enable long term change. What appears, from the outside, as strategic optionality becomes, in practice, structural vulnerability.

This divergence exposes a fundamental weakness in the binary framing of electrostates and petrostates. If the world is understood primarily in terms of competing energy blocs, then the policy question becomes one of alignment or hedging. Yet for countries that lack the institutional capacity to shape their own trajectories, neither alignment nor hedging delivers autonomy. Instead, both can lead to forms of dependency, whether through long term fossil fuel lock in or through asymmetric integration into green supply chains dominated by external actors.

Europe offers a useful, albeit incomplete, counterpoint. It would be misleading to suggest that the European Union has resolved the tensions inherent in the transition. It remains dependent on imported energy and critical minerals, and its relationship with both the United States and China is marked by structural asymmetries. Nevertheless, what distinguishes the European approach is the extent to which it has sought to construct a regulatory ecosystem that actively directs the transition. Through instruments such as carbon pricing, sustainability disclosure requirements, industrial policy linked to decarbonisation, and the potential integrated approach to digital and environmental regulation, Europe has created a framework within which market actors are compelled to adjust their behaviour.

This does not eliminate dependency, but it does transform its character. Rather than being passively exposed to external pressures, Europe exercises a degree of structured agency, shaping incentives, setting standards, and influencing global practices. Importantly, this occurs alongside continued fossil fuel production in parts of the region, demonstrating that the existence of hydrocarbons does not predetermine alignment with a petrostate logic. Instead, what matters is whether those resources are embedded within a regulatory architecture that orients them toward transition.

The contrast with parts of Latin America is therefore instructive. Where regulatory frameworks are present, even if incomplete, there is at least the possibility of converting resource endowments into instruments of transformation. Where they are absent or unstable, resources tend to reinforce existing dependencies and limit future options. In this sense, the region serves not only as an example of potential but also as a warning against the seductions of overly simplified geopolitical narratives.

The deeper issue, then, is not whether countries will align with one bloc or another, but whether they possess the institutional capacity to govern their own transition. This requires more than policy pronouncements or strategic positioning. It demands coherent legal frameworks, credible regulatory institutions, and a sustained political commitment to aligning short term economic incentives with long term environmental and developmental objectives. Without these elements, the language of nonalignment risks becoming little more than a rhetorical cover for exposure to external forces.

Seen from this perspective, the notion of an ecological cold war captures only part of the picture. It identifies the stakes, but not the mechanisms through which outcomes will be determined. Europe and Latin America, taken together, suggest that the decisive factor will not be the side on which a country places itself, but the extent to which it is able to construct and maintain the regulatory conditions for a managed transition. The future of the global energy order will be shaped as much in legislative chambers and regulatory agencies as in oil fields and lithium brines. To overlook this is to misunderstand both the nature of the transition and the possibilities that remain open within it.

Chinese Whispers

Fernando BarrioLeave a comment

There is a kind of contemporary gossip that does not spread because it is true, but becomes true because it spreads. The more it is repeated, the more it acquires the comforting shape of common sense, as it does not need evidence, and it rarely tolerates context. In the last couple of years, one phrase has become almost compulsory in any conversation about innovation, technology, industrial strategy, education reform, artificial intelligence, productivity, or the future of work: “look at what China is doing“. It is usually delivered as a mic drop, not as an invitation to think. But what is striking is how rarely it is used to understand China, while more often, it is used to validate a Western argument that has very little to do with China at all.

The move is familiar. Someone selects a handful of decontextualised facts about Chinese growth, Chinese industrial capacity, Chinese scale, Chinese speed, and then uses them as proof that Western countries should get out of the way, deregulate, stop overthinking, weaken standards, and let private actors move fast. China is not really being analysed, but it is being used as a prop. The phrase functions as a shortcut to avoid the harder conversation, which is that China’s current state of development is the product of decades of consistency, long term planning, heavy public investment, and a state that is present at every level of the economic and technological system.

Because China did not get here by accident, nor by the invisible hand finally being allowed to do its work. China’s achievements are the fruit of a formula, and it is a formula that many of those invoking the phrase explicitly reject. It includes strong regulatory frameworks and enforcement capacity, industrial policies that picked winners and losers rather than pretending the market would do it neutrally, strategic coordination between state, finance, universities, and industry, and a political system capable of sustaining priorities over time rather than rewriting the national agenda every few years. One can criticise this model, but one cannot pretend it is laissez faire.

Research and development is a good place to start. China’s R&D spending is now among the highest in the world, measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and it continues to grow. In some global estimates, China accounts for roughly a quarter of total world R&D spending, and this is not a story of venture capital alone. It is a story of coordinated national capacity building where the country has treated innovation not as a romantic accident, but as an infrastructure, something that must be funded, organised, and defended.

Education tells the same story. China has invested heavily in STEM, and it shows in the scale of its technical workforce, although the more interesting point is what this investment is paired with. China has not treated social sciences, humanities, business, and legal studies as dispensable luxuries, understanding that these disciplines are needed to manage complex economies, to govern institutions, to design policy, and to assess the social and human impact of development. In other words, China’s approach has been far closer to a holistic state capacity model than to the Western fantasy of a nation of coders and entrepreneurs improvising their way to global leadership.

Clean technology and net zero make the contradiction even sharper. China has become a dominant global force in solar manufacturing, batteries, electric vehicles, and clean energy supply chains, all which did not happen because China embraced deregulation and then stepped aside. It happened because China combined industrial policy, strategic subsidies, infrastructure investment, and coordination at scale. It treated clean technology as an economic strategy and a geopolitical opportunity. It also treated it as a matter of national resilience.

And here the Western use of the phrase becomes almost surreal, because some of the loudest voices saying look at China are the same voices opposing net zero policies at home. They will point to Chinese industrial strength in one sentence, and then attack climate policy in the next, often through a bizarre cultural shortcut that frames decarbonisation as woke, as if atmospheric physics were a political ideology. None of this is supported by serious evidence, being a performance, designed to collapse a complex policy conversation into a culture war gesture. It is also, frankly, incoherent, because China’s development strategy has taken clean technology seriously precisely as a route to industrial leadership.

This is why the look at China refrain so often misleads. It is not simply that it simplifies China, btu that it reverses China. It treats China’s results as if they were proof of a free market logic, when they are in fact the outcome of long term state direction. It treats speed as if it came from deregulation, when it often comes from planning, coordination, and the ability to mobilise resources. It treats scale as if it were a natural feature of markets, when it is frequently the product of deliberate industrial strategy.

Underneath all of this lies a deeper difference, not just in tools but in philosophy, one in which China’s model, whatever its flaws, is organised around development framed as collective. It is not primarily about granting private actors maximal freedom to extract value, but about achieving national objectives, including industrial upgrading, technological self reliance, infrastructure expansion, and increasingly, strategic dominance in green industries. The Western discourse that often accompanies the look at China phrase tends to be the opposite, not being really about development or even economic growth. It is about deregulation as ideology. It is about expanding the space for profit, weakening the space for public interest, and presenting any constraint, whether environmental, labour, consumer, or human rights based, as a barrier to innovation.

And this is where the conversation about profit becomes revealing. Profit is not forbidden in China, and becoming rich is neither rare nor illegal. There are billionaires, large private firms, and highly competitive markets in many sectors, but what is far less tolerated, at least in principle and often in practice, is the idea that private profit should be pursued without boundaries, even when it harms society, undermines strategic goals, destabilises institutions, or creates risks that the public will later be forced to absorb. In other words, China has allowed wealth, but it has not endorsed the licence to profiteer. Yet it is precisely that licence, the freedom to extract value at the expense of social cohesion, long term resilience, or national capability, that some Western advocates of the “look at China” slogan seem to want. They praise China while asking for something that China itself would not permit.

In practice, this becomes less a model of innovation than a model of licence to profiteer, where the public pays for the disruptions while a narrow segment captures the gains. China’s model may be many things, but it is not that, being far more disciplined, far more coordinated, and far more explicit about the idea that the state exists to shape outcomes.

None of this means Western countries should copy China, which would be unrealistic, and in many respects undesirable. But it does mean that Western debates should stop using China as a rhetorical shortcut. If China is to be invoked, it should be invoked honestly. China’s achievements did not emerge from deregulation. They emerged from state capacity, long term investment, enforcement, industrial policy, and an explicit commitment to development as a national project.

Chinese whispers are dangerous not because China is inherently dangerous, but because whispers replace analysis, allowing slogans to substitute for strategy. They also allow people to borrow authority from a country they are not actually describing, and they allow the public to be told that the answer is obvious, when in fact the answer is hard, demanding choices.

If we are serious about innovation, industrial renewal, and net zero, we need less gossip and more governance. Less slogan and more system. And we need to stop pretending that we can get China’s outcomes while rejecting the very formula that made those outcomes possible.