Systemic shifts: Global clean-tech expansion vs. fossil lock-in; forest loss slows amid uneven land governance
Original framing: “DeBriefed 1 May 2026: Countries chart path away from fossil fuels | China’s clean-tech surge | Global forest loss slows” — Carbon Brief
The trickster here is the carbon offset market itself—a Hermes-like figure that promises to 'solve' climate change through financial alchemy, only to deepen the crisis by legitimising continued emissions. Like Erasmus’s *Praise of Folly*, it mocks the solemnity of climate negotiations while profiting from the chaos it claims to address. The 'clean tech surge' is Coyote’s gambit: a distraction that lets the fossil fuel industry off the hook by framing extraction as a 'transition' rather than a crime.
The mainstream narrative’s celebration of 'clean tech' and 'slowing forest loss' masks a deeper paradox: the same extractive logics that drove fossil fuel dependence now animate the 'green transition,' with Indigenous communities and the Global South bearing the costs.
Historical patterns reveal that every 'solution'—from colonial forestry to carbon markets—has reproduced the violence it claimed to fix, while Indigenous cosmologies and Southern epistemologies offer radical alternatives rooted in reciprocity and degrowth. The trickster’s role is to expose this absurdity: the carbon offset market, like Hermes, thrives on the chaos it pretends to solve, while the 'forest loss slows' metric is a sleight of hand that ignores displaced degradation. True systemic change requires dismantling the financial and geopolitical architectures of extraction, centering Indigenous sovereignty, and embracing futures like *buen vivir* that reject the growth paradigm entirely. Actors like the *Sapara Nation*, *La Via Campesina*, and the *Loss and Damage Fund*’s grassroots beneficiaries are not just stakeholders—they are the architects of the only viable path forward.