The world must try harder on climate change

From: The Economist IE Sep-15-2024 11:19:am

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November 23rd 2023

The Economist this week

Highlights from the latest issue

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Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief

At the forthcoming UN climate-change conference in Dubai, governments will assess how much progress they have made since the Paris agreement of 2015. This week, as well as assessing that progress ourselves in a leader, we also look at one climate solution which is not discussed as much as it should be: carbon-dioxide removal. All net-zero plans rely, at some point, on being able to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere when further reductions in emissions are too hard. But despite lots of interesting startups and increasing investment, the technology to do so is still at a very early stage. Our special report looks both at how it might develop and what the ability to trade off emissions cuts against removals might mean for the economy.

Our cover in the Middle East and Africa this week is also related to Dubai: it looks at the United Arab Emirates’ ambitious ascent. When I travelled there last month with colleagues, I was struck by how upbeat investors, business folk and officials were, even as war had broken out in Gaza. The country is in the middle of an astonishing boom as Chinese traders, Indian tycoons, Russian billionaires and Western financiers flock to it in search of stability and success. The UAE has become the Singapore of the Middle East, but that is only part of the story. It is also seizing a bigger geopolitical role. Over the next few weeks, as the host of the UN’s climate summit, for instance, it hopes to be a broker between rich and poor countries. But it is also making terrible mistakes. Our leader asks what other countries eager to play on the global stage can learn from its example.

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Editor’s picks

Must-reads this week

Must try harder

Progress on climate change has not been fast enough, but it has been real

And the world needs to learn from it

Special report: Carbon-dioxide removal

Solar geoengineering is becoming a respectable idea

Film: How green is the energy revolution really?

Climbing high

How to thrive in a fractured world

Lessons from the ambitious ascent of the United Arab Emirates

The messier the world gets, the more the UAE seems to thrive

The sinews of war

Inside Hamas’s sprawling financial empire

Why Israel is powerless to dismantle the group’s finances

The A to Z of the Arab-Israeli conflict

OpenChaos

The fallout from the weirdness at OpenAI

Sam Altman is set to return, but the episode holds some disturbing lessons

Sam Altman’s return marks a new phase for OpenAI

Inside OpenAI’s weird governance structure

The many contradictions of Sam Altman

Walking on air

Why house prices have risen once again

Across the rich world, they have brushed off higher rates. Can that last?

Watch the box

The Economist’s pick of the best television shows of 2023

Exceptional comedies, crime dramas, and psychological thrillers have come to the small screen this year

Babbage

Fei-Fei Li on why we should avoid existential angst about the future of AI

Our podcast on science and technology

Economist Films

Explainer

Who is Javier Milei?

Argentina’s president-elect wants to take a chainsaw to the state

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Climate change

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