Quote of the Day (Joshua Busby, on Climate Change in the U.S. and China)

“Humans have proved highly adaptable, but the collective effects of climate change on cities, food production, and water supplies present an enormous challenge for the planet. China and the United States will be central to the global response. Together, the two countries are responsible for more than 40 percent of global emissions. . . . Relations between China and the United States have soured recently, but the countries need to work together, as the world will be ill served by an all-encompassing rivalry between them. They will have to build a system that allows issues to be compartmentalized, in which they can jockey over regional security in Asia, for instance, but still cooperate on issues on which their fates are linked, such as climate change and pandemics.” —University of Texas Associate Professor Joshua Busby, “Warming World: Why Climate Change Matters More Than Anything Else,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2018

Oh, my—it’s the last word in the above quote that really hurts. If we can’t cooperate on something as immediate (certainly more so than when this was published) as pandemics, what are we going to do about something longer-term such as climate change?