If you wanted to bring western civilization down, give it a good beating for all its so-called malfeasance, what better way than to make it near impossible to sustain the things that made being a western civilization all it was cracked up to be?
Consider that which makes us or any of our allies any sort of global power? Wealth and energy. Commerce, industrialization, transportation, and militarization to protect it or project it.
We can mince the finer points about what makes all this possible but they all share one thing in common. Cheap, abundant energy.
So if you had a mind to take the average Western Civilization down a notch or two, or even all of them, to make an example of a country like, say America, the fastest way to do that would be to cry wolf about something that would be difficult to dispute and easy to frighten people with; something that would make cheap abundant energy so threatening that no one would pay much attention to the real threats that not having it might present; you’d put forward a theory of global catastrophe that demanded we redirect massive amounts of wealth into expensive forms of energy incapable of sustaining the level of commerce, industrialization, transportation, or defense that we’ve come to enjoy.
You’d invent Global Warming and then blame the people who make the cheap abundant energy for causing it.