For much of 2022, the entire planet has been struggling to cope with extreme weather events, ranging from brutal heatwaves and severe droughts in some regions to record rainfall and catastrophic flooding in others.
Despite this, in early August, Beijing suspended ongoing U.S.-China talks on climate change in response to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. While some climate experts have argued that what matters most in the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is for the United States and China to take action domestically, the suspension of talks represents a shift in the effort to shield the climate agenda from geopolitics and has implications for the ability of each country, and the world, to meet essential reduction targets.
In conversation with Alex Wang on November 1, 2022, Michael Davidson and Joanna Lewis discuss the significance of the downturn in U.S.-China relations on multilateral climate action.
