Over the last year, Thomas Friedman has frequently promoted China’s green face to the world. Perhaps it’s time the esteemed NYT columnist and foreign policy specialist began paying attention to the other China, the one that’s been on a fossil fuel buying spree the past few years. There’s even a nifty climate change angle for…Continue Reading…
Experts who are grappling honestly with the national security/climate change nexus will wince when they see this post by the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson. It’s the kind of blatant political exploitation of recent headlines that some scholars warned about when the climate security meme was picked up prominently by mainstream media last summer. Johnson, doing…Continue Reading…
If you read this post in Grist, and David Biello’s piece in Scientific American, you’re likely to walk away feeling encouraged by the recent China-U.S. joint statement, which lays out the common ground between the two countries on a host of issues, including “climate change, energy, and the environment.” But if you want a more…Continue Reading…
Over at Foreign Policy, Daniel Drezner offers a tutorial on international relations theory as it applies to international climate change negotiations: China has supplanted America as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. From an economic perspective, we are witnessing a transition from a bipolar world (the US + EU) to a multipolar world (OECD +…Continue Reading…
Krugman goes to China and makes a stunning discovery: I have seen the future, and it won’t work. Seriously, though, the rest of his column effectively highlights–momentarily, at least–the grim specter hanging over the global warming debate, otherwise known as the “China problem.”
This op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor suggests that “environmental engagement” could serve as sort of a back-door channel for easing U.S.-China tensions: Environmental collaboration is unlikely to hit politically sensitive buttons, and thus offers great potential to deepen dialogue and cooperation. Military-to-military dialogue can facilitate the sharing of best practices on a range of…Continue Reading…