Tag: Global Warming

A New Law Supercharged Electric Car Manufacturing, but Not Sales

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President Biden’s signature climate law has stimulated a surge of investment in electric vehicle production across the country, including tens of billions of dollars on battery plants across the South and new assembly lines near the Great Lakes. Based on early evidence, it is succeeding at a goal that economists have long considered difficult and costly: using the power of government to rapidly grow a new industry. That growth could prove crucial for the other side of the electric vehicle equation: enticing more consumers to buy them. That’s because Mr.…

China Is Winning in Solar Power, but Its Coal Use Is Raising Alarms

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China is installing about as many solar panels and wind turbines as the rest of the world combined, and is on track to meet its target for clean energy six years early. It is using renewables to meet nearly all of the growth in its electricity needs. Yet there is another side to that rapid expansion, one that is causing consternation in Washington at a critical period of climate diplomacy: China is also building new power plants that burn coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels, at a pace that…

Gavin Newsom, on Climate Mission to China, Meets With Xi Jinping

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Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, met with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing on Wednesday, according to the Chinese state media, as part of an ambitious weeklong mission to negotiate climate partnerships. The two-term Democratic governor wants California to set an aggressive pace for the United States — and the world — to cut carbon emissions that are dangerously heating the planet. Mr. Newsom’s moves to tackle the climate crisis have elevated his national profile, just as he is widely believed to be preparing for a White House run…

Fragile Global Economy Faces New Crisis in Israel-Gaza War

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The International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that the pace of the global economic recovery is slowing, a warning that came as a new war in the Middle East threatened to upend a world economy already reeling from several years of overlapping crises. The eruption of fighting between Israel and Hamas over the weekend, which could sow disruption across the region, reflects how challenging it has become to shield economies from increasingly frequent and unpredictable global shocks. The conflict has cast a cloud over a gathering of top economic policymakers…

Athens Democracy Forum: The Disunited States of South America

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This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which gathered experts last week in the Greek capital to discuss global issues. Moderator: Serge Schmemann, editorial board, The New York Times Participants: Natalia Herbst, social impact consultant and Obama Foundation Scholar alumnus; Jorge Fernando Quiroga, former president, Bolivia; and Adriana Mejía Hernández, executive director, Fundación Innovación para el Desarrollo Excerpts from the panel Disunited States of South America have been edited and condensed. SERGE SCHMEMANN In my preparatory reading, I found a dual image of the continent.…

U.S. and China Aren’t Invited to speak at U.N.’s Climate Ambition Summit

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The United Nations’ secretary general, António Guterres, convened a special summit on Wednesday in New York City designed to highlight the efforts of the most ambitious global leaders on climate policy — and to implicitly shame those who are dragging their feet. Mr. Guterres, who has made climate action a centerpiece of his agenda and has called on the world’s largest carbon emitters to rapidly shift away from burning fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming, pledged that only high-level leaders whom he sees as taking climate action seriously…

When Great Power Conflict and Climate Action Collide

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Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ The global decarbonization effort is colliding headfirst with the realities of great power politics. China currently controls more than 75 percent of the world’s electric vehicle battery and solar photovoltaic manufacturing supply chains. It also processes the bulk of the so-called critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt and graphite, that are essential to building out clean energy technologies. There is no clean energy revolution without China. What would happen if China decided to weaponize its clean energy resources in the same way Russia recently weaponized…

China’s Addiction to Coal Deepens in the Heat

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China has an answer to the heat waves now affecting much of the Northern Hemisphere: burn more coal to maintain a stable electricity supply for air-conditioning. Even before this year, China was emitting almost a third of all energy-related greenhouse gases — more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. China burns more coal every year than the rest of the world combined. Last month, China generated 14 percent more electricity than it did in June 2022, and the whole increase was generated by coal-fired plants. China’s ability to…

Xi Rejects Pressure on China to Do More to Address Climate Change

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During his visit to China this week, John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, pressed the hope that the two powers could work together on the urgent problem of global warming despite their intensifying rivalry on other fronts. But Chinese officials made clear that even as they were willing to restart long-stalled climate talks with the United States, the two countries’ tense overall relationship could constrain cooperation. And China’s leader, Xi Jinping, asserted that his government would pursue its goals to phase out carbon dioxide pollution at its own pace and…

How the World’s Two Largest Polluters, U.S. and China, Stack Up

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John Kerry, President Biden’s climate change envoy, wraps up high-level talks with Chinese officials on Wednesday aimed at finding ways to work together on climate change despite simmering tensions between the two world powers. The United States and China are the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters as well as the world’s green tech powerhouses. If they can agree to speed plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it could be consequential for the world’s ability to stay within safe limits of global warming. But there are significant hurdles, including longstanding tensions…