New York; February 27, 2024 — “One of the great stories that we are following is the way in which a climate changed world might affect this great geopolitical story of our time, which is the relationship between the U.S. and China,” says Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter at The New York Times.

Last week, Sengupta joined Raymond Zhong, climate reporter at the Times, and Jesse Pesta, deputy climate editor at the Times, for a conversation with Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. Sengupta, Zhong, and Pesta have each spent a substantial amount of their careers on the ground in Asia, and, alongside Schell, they reflected on the intersection between regional geopolitics and climate journalism. 

“As journalists we bear witness to human suffering,” shared Sengupta. “’I’ve spent so much of my career writing about humanitarian crises. I’ve reported from 10 conflict zones and witnessed what is happening in the world in hopes of changing it. This is what I continue to do as a climate reporter.”

"It can be extremely gratifying to see how widely read and embraced some of these stories can be,” agreed Pesta. 

Zhong noted that, as a journalist, "we want to be humble about what we can do.” While The New York Times operates at the forefront of informing the public, it is hard to know how much the audience is responding to the stories. Big, “frightening” stories often catch the public’s attention, but Zhong said that it is less easy to gauge whether a more subtle story about a climate solution is grabbing readers’ attention. 

When asked about solutions for the climate crisis, Sengupta pushed back against the use of the word ‘solution’: “We’re not solving climate change. It is a process that is very much underway. There is warming baked in — no pun intended — because of the emissions of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. However, there are lots of changes that can be made to rapidly reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases.” 

The ability to dominate the production of climate-friendly, next-generation technology has emerged as a point of competition between the U.S. and China, incentivizing investment. However, Zhong believes that the decoupling of supply chains will continue to hinder any cooperation between the U.S. and China, two of the world's greatest carbon emitters, on climate action. “What you’re seeing now is both the U.S. and China putting resources into growing the green economy,” said Zhong. “You’re also seeing signs of protectionism in the United States against some Chinese imports that is now being reciprocated in Europe.”

One of the areas of greatest contention has been around Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs), which have been under intense scrutiny in the West due to fears around hacking and unsolicited information sharing. 

“It is a shame that low emissions vehicle development has coincided with digitization and everything moving to the interest and making everything vulnerable to cyber security issues,” said Zhong. “We could have had a different future in which low emissions vehicles were basically just dumb golf carts and didn't have to be connected to the internet.”

As the panel wrapped up, Schell asked the three journalists what kind of climate stories they hoped to cover in the future. They agreed that there is a need to showcase both the disparaging reality of climate change and the hope of what the world could be like if we embrace climate action like society did during "other moments of great social change."

"I think that there is a great deal of pessimism and forgetting what humankind has achieved in the past,” shared Zhong, reflecting on the importance of persistence in the middle of bleak predictions for the future of our planet. “I think journalism is in so many ways about the world as it is, but it can be also about helping people imagine a different world.”

Watch the full program here.