Can Status Competition Save the World? Grafting, Green Energy, and the Climate Crisis

In this article I argue that the climate crisis may emerge as a new arena for status competition among states, enabled through the grafting of decarbonization and green-energy policies onto the status order’s existing symbolic-materialist logic. Status is often thought of as a destabilizing force in world politics, as its pursuit so often pushes states toward violent and financially wasteful policies of social aggrandizement. But this belief elides two points: that the status order and its rules of membership and esteem are malleable and subject to change; and that the emergence of different and new status symbols can also push status-seeking toward more prosocial outcomes. Rather than see these changes as occurring through explicit normative transformation, however, I argue that the status order is most likely to change surreptitiously when entrepreneurs can graft new status symbols onto an order’s underlying tenets, thus concealing but also producing change. I apply this grafting theory to the climate crisis in arguing that (1) highly visible steps taken to effect the green-energy revolution can be legibly grafted onto the existing status order; (2) this grafting technique was already evident in the Biden administration’s increased framing of the climate as an arena of status competition against China; and (3) in an era of renewed great power rivalry, status competition may at least compel states to make the kinds of costly and needed investments in climate mitigation they eschewed earlier.