On a Friday morning in April this year, Simon Thompson, the outgoing global chair of the mining giant Rio Tinto, addressed the company’s shareholders in London for the last time. Thompson, who chose not to stand for re-election after Rio Tinto destroyed an ancient Aboriginal site in Western Australia in 2020, spoke with the somber optimism of a leader emerging from scandal and vowing to do better.
But amidst talk of “transition,” “rebuilding” and “strengthening,” ThompsonRio Tinto has appointed Dominic Barton, the longtime McKinsey executive with extensive experience in China, as the company's new chair. brushed over a development at one of the company’s long-stalled mining projects: the Rio Tinto board had agreed to a path forward for the Simandou site, an iron ore venture in the African nation of Guinea.
The Simandou update was awkwardly slotted into the “climate change” section of the chair’s remarks, and Thompson made no reference to what som
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Increasingly, Democrats and Republicans believe that climate change and China pose a single interconnected challenge. As a result — and for the first time ever — a window is opening for bipartisan cooperation on climate policy. Historically progressive ideas like a 'carbon border adjustment mechanism' now have conservative champions, for instance. But with Washington's main focus on the Warming War with China, can it still save the planet?
A look at China’s electricity grid: how it works, who foots the bill, and how its structure leads to power crunches and expensive prices despite the relative abundance of energy in China.
The academic talks about the changing understanding of Leninist regimes; common misperceptions of the post-Mao era; and what the collapse of the Soviet Union means for China today.
