The annual United Nations Climate Change Conference wrapped up Sunday in Madrid, after nearly two weeks of wrangling. Despite a two-day extension that made this the longest round of U.N. climate talks ever, the meeting was a massive failure. Instead of setting more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, negotiators went home mostly empty-handed, having punted the most difficult climate-related questions to next year’s conference in Glasgow, Scotland. “The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation & finance to tackle the climate crisis,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared in a tweet Sunday. The [...]
By his own account, Jack Ma, the founder of the hugely successful Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, only visited Africa for the first time in 2017, when he went to Kenya and Rwanda. And yet there he was earlier this month in the Opinion pages of The New York Times, full of supposed wisdom about how the continent can leap into the future by cultivating his own brand of entrepreneurialism. “If we all work together to support entrepreneurs,” Ma gushed, “then Africa will become a hub of innovation and growth, the global leader we know it can be.” It is worth [...]
When Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm, struck the Bahamas in September, it killed dozens of people, displaced tens of thousands more and, according to a recent report, inflicted $3.4 billion worth of damage—roughly a quarter of the country’s GDP. It was the latest sign of the outsized impact that climate change is having on the Caribbean. Many of the region’s small island nations have limited habitable land, much of it barely above sea-level, which is one reason why storms like Dorian, which are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, can have such a devastating impact. The [...]
