China and the United States of America, 21st Century

Officials in Beijing declared on Monday that the thick smog blanketing the city was bad enough to require a red alert, the first time they had raised the alarm to its highest level since an emergency air-pollution response system was announced in 2013.

The Chinese capital endured another day under an air quality ''red alert'' on Wednesday, with schools still closed, half of all cars kept off the roads and factories shut. But in other cities across northern China, tens of millions of people went about their daily routines in toxic air that was far worse than Beijing's.

All Things Considered, May 22, 2007
From World History in Context

If the world's biggest polluter doesn't radically reduce the amount of coal it burns within the next decade, nothing anyone does to stabilize the climate will matter. Inside the slow, frustrating--and maybe even hopeful--struggle to find a new way forward.
Goodell, J. (2014, Sep 25). China, the climate & the fate of the planet. Rolling Stone, , n.p. Retrieved from http://sks.sirs.com

The air in much of China is so bad the government has repeatedly declared "war" on it. The enemy are tiny particulates which spew forth from countless cars, coal-fired power stations and steel plants to create a dense, putty-coloured smog.

n November 2014, President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping stood together in Beijing to make a historic U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change, emphasizing their personal commitment to a successful climate agreement in Paris and marking a new era of multilateral climate diplomacy as well as a new pillar in their bilateral relationship.

China’s environmental crisis is one of the most pressing challenges to emerge from the country’s rapid industrialization. Its economic rise, in which GDP grew on average 10 percent each year for more than a decade, has come at the expense of its environment and public health.

If you listen to climate scientists — and despite the relentless campaign to discredit their work, you should — it is long past time to do something about emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If we continue with business as usual, they say, we are facing a rise in global temperatures that will be little short of apocalyptic. And to avoid that apocalypse, we have to wean our economy from the use of fossil fuels, coal above all.

In this episode of Intersections, Bruce Jones and David Victor, co-chairs of the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate, examine the likely future of U.S. energy and climate policies under the Trump administration, the role of state-level actors and energy markets, and what happens if the U.S. walks away from the Paris agreement.

California, along with 16 other states and the District of Columbia, are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its rollback of clean car rules passed during the Obama administration.

The Trump administration’s tumultuous presidency has brought a flurry of changes—both realized and anticipated—to U.S. environmental policy. Many of the actions roll back Obama-era policies that aimed to curb climate change and limit environmental pollution, while others threaten to limit federal funding for science and the environment.

China on Tuesday rejected a plan by U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to back out of a global climate change pact, saying a wise political leader should make policy in line with global trends, a rare comment on a foreign election.

Why did Mr. Trump eventually decide to back out when he was staying on the fence about the deal, knowing that his withdrawal decision would be subject to extensive criticism both home and abroad? What is the prospect for compliance with the Paris Agreement after the U.S. leaves? How should China respond?