China, thirsty for oil, has turned to an entirely new land mass in an attempt to slake itself. Its new target is Argentina, specifically the Argentine company Bridas in which CNOOC, China’s nationally-owned oil and gas company, has just taken a 50% stake worth $3.1bn. CNOOC prez Yang Hua described the deal as being a “good beachhead for us to enter Latin America”, but it’s actually the second front in their Latin American adventures, having previously paired up with Venezuela on new exploration projects.

This follows a year of exponential oil and gas exploration from China, who have recently headed into Canada, Nigeria, Iraq, their own territory, and Uganda just last week, while its interest in Ghana continues to stumble on. A few weeks back China announced that it was planning to increase oil and gas production by 27%, and to do that without eating heavily into its reserves it needs a lot of global expansion. And as the FT notes, Western companies are only too happy to partner with them considering their own core markets, still effectively recessed, are pretty stagnant.

The potential for revenue flowing out of an oil-rich nation is obvious, and Argentina is no exception; but as well as potentially channelling oil revenues towards international corporate partnerships instead of indigenous populations, China’s latest exploration announcement comes at time when their stance on emissions is cloudier than ever. Their eventual ‘support’ of the already limp-wristed Copenhagen accord came last week, but it’s not a full ‘association’ with the agreement but rather a ‘listing’ in it. So they’re sort of attached to an agreement that sort of gets people to reduce their carbon emissions, while quite definitely expanding their emissions on a global scale. And this is being offset with some very unconvincing distractions in the form of alleged snubs at the conference. The tedious and ineffectual playground politics of climate change continue.

China is installing coal-to-gas plants, investing in renewables, seeing their low-carbon industries get major surges in investor confidence, and now the UK government is recognising the potential China has for UK low-carbon businesses. But none of this is enough to generate the kind of growth China is looking for, and we’re back again to the central difficulty that lies at the heart of all global climate discussions – the right for previously undeveloped countries to develop their economies. It’s absolutely China’s right to advance the wealth of its people, and it’s both immoral, impractical and as CNOOC’s tie-ups with the likes of Shell show, an impediment to business to try and prevent that. Nevertheless, and whatever the ills of already developed nations, this right is what’s taking the world from ecological precariousness to permanent damage.

Greed, with its constant recourse to the shortest distance between desire and result, will always channel efforts towards the quickest and easiest solution; it unfortunately therefore often outpaces innovation. It creates an imperative for innovation, as we can see from the aforementioned growing investment opportunities for low-carbon businesses, but its unforgiving engine doesn’t leave room for long-term concerns. If the psytrance bongo campervan crew ever had a point to make against capitalism, then this surely is it.

Photography by Adam Rice