Energy and Environment

Richard N. Haass, Sunjoy Joshi, and Elizabeth Sidiropoulos discuss the mounting challenges to global governance and their implications for international cooperation, including rising climate concerns, economic volatility, and increasing great power tensions amid a global pandemic. The Council of Councils (CoC) is an international initiative created by the Council on Foreign Relations to connect leading foreign policy institutes from around the world in a dialogue on issues of global governance and multilateral cooperation. The CoC is composed of twenty-eight major policy institutes from some of the world’s most influential countries. It is designed to facilitate candid, not-for-attribution dialogue and consensus-building among influential opinion leaders from both established and emerging nations, with the ultimate purpose of injecting the conclusions of its deliberations into high-level foreign policy circles within members' countries.

Yanzhong Huang discusses his new book, Toxic Politics: China’s Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State. Environmental degradation in China has taken a heavy toll not only on public health, but also on Chinese society, the economy, and the legitimacy of the party-state. Toxic Politics connects the limited success of China's pollution control to pathologies inherent in the institutional structure of the Chinese party-state, revealing a political system that is remarkably resilient, but fundamentally flawed. The CFR Fellows’ Book Launch series highlights new books by CFR fellows.