Special envoys to china

The stakes of the reconciliation package couldn’t be higher. To reach our climate goals and avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we must cut our emissions in half by 2030. As Congress considers the best way to do that, it risks missing a critical key to success. For years, successful efforts to reduce U.S. emissions have involved a particular brand of federalism: Cities, states, businesses and community groups set the pace and raised ambition, while the federal government supported and nationalized the best ideas. It was state leadership that enabled the Obama administration to persuade Detroit to embrace clean car emission standards in 2009. Community activism and state regulators ensured that the U.S. coal fleet would retire faster than the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan would have required and business and state leadership led the U.S. to phase out climate-disrupting refrigerants . The Biden administration is, without …

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Illegal pot farms dry up Western creeks Today is Monday. Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. Subscribe here: thehill.com/newsletter-signup . Illegal cannabis farms are drying up creeks and sucking up scarce groundwater out West in what Oregon Sheriff Dave Daniel called “just a blatant theft of water, ” The Associated Press reported. The Western states’ legalization of marijuana created two parallel industries: a legal one and a much bigger illegal one, which hides large unlicensed farms in the backcountry, where even a small extra drain can tip a stressed-out ecosystem into collapse , a study from University of Berkeley found. Those impacts are magnified because peak cannabis demand comes in the dry season, the study found. But some farms are big; Daniel said he raided an illegal farm of 200,000 plants where a system of pumps and pipes went “into the ground so deep” that …

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Boris Johnson has issued a warning to the leaders of the world’s biggest economies that history will judge them harshly if they fail to deliver on climate change at the crucial COP26 summit in Glasgow in November. Addressing a top-level meeting on the margin of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the prime minister voiced “frustration” that some of the world’s richest economies have failed to come good on demands to cut carbon emissions and fund a $100bn-a-year drive to help developing countries adapt. And he urged them to show “leadership”, warning: “When the summit ends, when most of the world has committed to decisive, game-changing action, it will be clear to all which of us has lacked the courage to step up.” Those who try to “do the minimum” on climate change will be “complicit” in the fate of poorer nations which fall victim to extreme weather as the planet heats, and they will not escape the same problems themselves, he warned. UK …

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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson insists that France and the U.K. are retaining good relations, despite Britain being a minor partner in a submarine deal that also involves the U.S. and Australia. Paris has voiced anger over Australia's decision to forge a submarine deal with the U.S. and scrap a plan that involved a deal with France instead. However, France has not recalled its ambassador from the U.K. and Johnson insists their relationship is still "ineradicable." "Our love of France is ineradicable," Johnson said to reporters traveling with him to New York for the U.N. General Assembly. "AUKUS is not in any way meant to be zero-sum, it's not meant to be exclusionary. It's not something that anybody needs to worry about and particularly not our French friends." For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below. A meeting between French Defense Minister Florence Parly and her British counterpart, Ben Wallace, has been postponed as the agreement roils …

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close Video Lara Logan on Afghanistan fallout: 'We slit their throats and literally handed them to al Qaeda' Lara Logan joined Lt. Gen. William Boykin on 'Fox News Primetime' to discuss the U.S. drone strike that killed 10 civilians, including seven children. Logan said the U.S. betrayal of Afghan allies caused a scarcity in intelligence. WESTMINSTER, Calif. – In the faces of Afghans desperate to leave their country after U.S. forces withdrew , Thuy Do sees her own family, decades earlier and thousands of miles away. A 39-year-old doctor in Seattle , Wash., Do remembers hearing how her parents sought to leave Saigon after Vietnam fell to communist rule in 1975 and the American military airlifted out allies in the final hours. It took years for her family to finally get out of the country, after several failed attempts, and make their way to the United States, carrying two sets of clothes a piece and a combined $300. When they finally arrived, …

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