Climate Change

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR contributor Lavender Au and Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curate the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. Carbon neutrality is rarely discussed within China. At the U.N. General Assembly last week, however, Xi Jinping made a high-profile pledge that China’s emissions would peak before 2030 and that the country would go carbon neutral by 2060. Ultimately, the pledge fits into a fundamental domestic objective in Beijing: energy security. Debate over energy policy in China centers around the country’s resilience against supply chain uncertainties. This year, for the first time, two Chinese ministries [...]

California prides itself on being a national and global trendsetter. Unfortunately, the state is also setting the pace for climate change disasters, with searing heat and intense wildfires now regular features of its endless summer. Last Sunday, Aug. 16, the aptly named Furnace Creek ranger station in Death Valley posted the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth, when the thermometer hit 130 degrees Fahrenheit. That same weekend, lightning strikes north of Lake Tahoe set off the massive Loyalton Fire in desiccated Lassen and Sierra counties, producing a rare “fire tornado” as high winds whipped flames into a violent, all-consuming [...]

The global environmental crisis, encompassing runaway climate change, collapsing biodiversity and the slow death of the world’s oceans, has exposed the limitations of traditional political realism as a guide to statecraft in the 21st century. The time has come for the nations of the world to embrace a new approach to world politics that treats the preservation of the biosphere as a core national interest and a central objective of national security policy. Call this new mindset ecological realism. Political realism, which has long dominated the teaching and practice of foreign policy, including in the United States, is a venerable [...]