Climate Change

Since Oct. 20, five young climate activists have been on a hunger strike in Lafayette Square in Washington. Their protest started the day after news emerged that U.S. President Joe Biden planned to downsize his $3.5 trillion domestic spending bill, including by cutting a $150 billion clean electricity program. The activists say that they are “sick and tired of broken promises” and will continue to starve themselves until their leaders deliver “bold and transformative climate action.”  A few days into the protest, the young activists resorted to sitting in wheelchairs, and one of them, 26-year-old Kidus Girma, was hospitalized overnight for nausea, dizziness [...]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wednesday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Beginning Sunday, Oct. 31, world leaders will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for two weeks to unveil new commitments to tackle global warming and climate change. But after weeks of guessing games, it looks like Chinese President Xi Jinping—the leader of the world’s largest emitter of [...]

At next month’s long-awaited United Nations Climate Summit in Glasgow, all eyes will be on national leaders to make commitments that give the world a chance to limit average global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. At a recent youth-led event, Hilda Nakabuye, founder of the Ugandan Fridays for Future movement, articulated the impatience felt by young people across the world, calling on global leaders to finally “put on their big boy pants, to stand up and to take concrete climate action!” All the focus on the leaders at center-stage, however, risks missing the action taking place [...]