Cheng Huang was the City God, or the spiritual magistrate and guardian deity of a particular Chinese city.
Traditionally, before assuming a new post, local officials used to pass the night in Cheng Huang’s temple seeking guidance. When difficult problems of law later presented themselves, officials returned to the temple, in hopes that Cheng Huang would reveal the answer in a dream.
G7 governments could argue that they no longer have the financial means to meet their climate pledges in full, in the wake of the very costly COVID pandemic. But this argument does not hold when we consider that in 2022 the US committed $370 billion over the next ten years for its green energy subsidies, the EU committed €750 billion on its post-COVID, green energy recovery through to 2027; Germany found an additional €200 billion for its own national adjustment to higher energy costs after the invasion of Ukraine, plus a commitment of €100 billion extra for its defence budget over the next five years; and the US and Europe between them provided just under $100 billion for the Ukrainians to defend their country in 2022–23 alone.12 Rather than treating the climate emergency as an opportunity for collective action, countries in the Global South see it as another example of the Global North’s attitude of ‘us first’, despite being the instigators of the planet’s changing climate.
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