April 24, 2026

Despite Divide Inside the Tianjin Climate Conference, China and U.S. Are Cooperating in Race To Deploy Advanced Coal Technology

by Keith Schneider4

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. Since construction on the $1 billion project began in June 2009, said Li …

Read More

Two Senior Diplomats Frustrated By Pace of Tianjin Climate Conference

by Keith Schneider0

TIANJIN, China — Two of the significant participants in the UN climate change conference here, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres (at center in pix above) and chief U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing, have made it known they are increasingly unhappy with a tangled negotiating process that seems unable to move beyond producing more snags. Over the last 18 hours or so, the two made their frustrations public and issued veiled warnings about the relevance of the …

Read More

China’s Climate Emissions A Central World Issue, But Water Scarcity Is Higher Priority Within

by Keith Schneider0

TIANJIN, China – This industrious nation’s allegiance to construction projects of massive scale is as familiar to the world as the 2,500-year-old, 5,500-mile Great Wall of China, which protected the country’s northern frontier, and as imposing as the wide moats and towering red stone walls of the 600-year-old Forbidden City at the heart of Beijing. Still, international visitors attending China’s first U.N. climate change conference are struck by the immensity of the brand new polished …

Read More

In Tianjin, China and the U.S. Look A Lot Alike

by Keith Schneider1

On opposite sides of the Pacific, leaders of the world’s two biggest economies and carbon polluters are plainly thinking about clean energy to power up their economies and cool the climate. In Washington, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced their intention to extend vehicle efficiency standards that went into effect in April in order meet a national goal of 60 miles per gallon average fuel economy by 2025. President …

Read More

Behind The Great Wall of Climate Change, A Young American Artist Gaining Global Distinction

by Keith Schneider0

TIANJIN, China – In almost every way – timing, media coverage, official attention, and spirited engagement  –  the brief morning event to open the climate conference here was a triumph for its organizers — the Global Campaign For Climate Action (GCCA), Tck tck tck, and Greenpeace. The stamping of a symbolic Great Climate Wall of China with a Chinese proverb also was another satisfying example of leveraging art in the public interest for the Great …

Read More

In Tianjin, Fresh Hope For Climate Progress

by Keith Schneider1

TIANJIN, China – In a gesture that signaled more urgent engagement to cool the planet, the United Nation’s chief climate negotiator today opened this nation’s first international climate conference by sealing a symbolic Great Climate Wall of China with an ancient proverb. Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican diplomat and climate expert, who in May was named the new executive secretary for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stamped the proverb – “with everyone’s …

Read More

In Tianjin, Making A Small Dent On Climate Action

by Keith Schneider0

TIANJIN, China — I’m in Tianjin, China today (see pix above) and for the next week to report on the UN Climate Conference, the first ever held in China. I spent much of the day in a Climate Action International meeting with activists from around the planet, though there were many fewer here than attended the UN climate meetings in Barcelona and Copenhagen last year. Everybody is talking about steps forward and preserving the UN …

Read More

In Era of Climate Change and Water Scarcity, Meeting National Energy Demand Confronts Major Impediments

by Keith Schneider0

Photo © Brent Stirton / Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue The All-American Canal, the main water conduit from the Colorado River into the Imperial Dam, flows through the Imperial Valley, Calif. The U.S. consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day. Nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain, half is devoted to producing energy. In November 2009, in pursuit of a …

Read More

Before Big China Climate Conference, New Senate Support For Clean Energy

by Keith Schneider0

I’ll be in Beijing later this week, and then on to Tianjin to cover China’s first UN-sponsored climate summit, which begins October 4. Before leaving, though, I wanted to note that on September 22,  a group of Republican and Democratic Senators sent a rare bipartisan signal to the world that the United States has not abandoned the hard work of reducing climate emissions and speeding the clean energy transition. The group introduced a bill to …

Read More

A Building Named In His Honor, Stewart Udall Declared “Greatest Secretary of the Interior”

by Keith Schneider0

There have been 50 Interior secretaries since the department was established in 1849 and President Zachary Taylor named Thomas Ewing its first secretary. On Tuesday, September 21, 2010, in a Washington dedication ceremony that brought Republicans and Democrats together for an all too rare moment of inspiring reflection, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar formally declared that his predecessor, Stewart Lee Udall, was the “greatest secretary of the Interior in United States history.” Salazar  — in pix …

Read More