Keith Schneider

Like a tectonic fault line, underlying China’s new standing in the world is an increasingly fierce competition between energy and water that threatens to upend China’s progress.[read more]

While the two heads of state focus on resolving what pries them apart, both nations share a dangerous confrontation within their borders over energy demand and water supply—offering a matchless opportunity for new kinds of cooperation on policy, technology, business, and trade.[read more]

The upcoming Cancun climate summit reflects two opposing theaters of action. In one, climate negotiators are getting tangled up in the soft lines of national distrust and diplomatic nuance. In the other, their governments and domestic energy companies are busier than ever drilling, mining, processing, and producing the dirty power that perpetuates the fossil fuel era.[read more]

Lying quietly below the nuanced diplomatic language of frustration and distrust expressed all week by Chinese and American negotiators is an expanse of cooperative projects in and outside government that are expressly designed to help China and the U.S. use energy more efficiently, develop new technology, and lower carbon emissions.[read more]

TIANJIN, China - Though Chinese workers this week celebrated the 61st anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, a holiday season as significant as July 4 in the United States, a swarm of construction laborers at China's GreenGen coal-fired gasification power plant were busy welding pipes, fitting massive joints, and bending steel for forms to be filled with concrete.[read more]

China’s economic development ministries consistently state that they anticipate growth to continue apace, and by 2020 the economy will be 60 percent larger than it is today. This week at the UN climate conference in Tianjin several of the leading environmental scientists and technical specialists in China and the United States described the consequences of reaching that goal on the nation’s energy production, and to the work of taming the warming climate.[read more]

What makes the countries similar is how far each needs to go and what both countries are willing to do to really make a dent in reducing global carbon emissions. That, of course, has been the central issue confronting negotiators at UN climate meetings for several years, and it's the single biggest issue again in Tianjin.[read more]