Entries tagged with: Global Politics

25 result(s) displayed (1 - 25 of 27):

Cold War Over Warming Already Underway?

Seems like it. Mark Lynas, who worked with the Maldives group at COP15, was literally in the room when the final negotiations took place, and wrote about it for The Guardian. The key section: To those who would blame Obama...

Posted on December 25, 2009 12:24 PM

A Cold War Over Warming

What happens if global efforts to set and abide by strong carbon emissions cuts fail? The standard answer to a question like this is that "we all suffer." While that's probably true, it misses the point -- we may...

Posted on December 9, 2009 4:22 PM

Geoengineering: New Problems, Old Politics

I've been writing about geoengineering since 2005, and have even published a short book on the subject (Hacking the Earth), looking primarily at the ethics and politics of the issue. The political aspects are, in my view, the most important,...

Posted on March 16, 2009 11:29 AM

Hurt Feelings and China

Even if China isn't likely to be a drop-in replacement for US hegemony in the 21st century, it will certainly be a key player on the international stage. It's useful, then, for futurists to pay attention to the interesting details...

Posted on January 12, 2009 3:18 PM

Global Climate and Global Power

I was pinged recently by the UK outfit Forum for the Future, a foresight team specializing in sustainable futures. They wanted to know what I thought would be the key issues the world would be confronting in 2030. "Climate" is...

Posted on December 4, 2008 4:30 PM

Viropiracy?

Here's a term to add to the jargon pile: Viral Sovereignty. This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia's minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations...

Posted on August 26, 2008 2:02 PM

The Big Picture: Collapse, Transcendence, or Muddling Through

I'll start this essay by leading with my conclusion: do we make it through this century? Yeah, but not all of us, and it's neither as spectacular nor as horrific as many people imagine. Techno-utopianism is heady and seductive. Looking...

Posted on July 14, 2008 2:33 PM

Who Decides?

Who gets to determine the "right" climate for the Earth? We may broadly agree that the current climate -- warming, with chances of apocalypse -- is decidedly not the right one. After abundant political posturing and nationalist histrionics, we'll eventually...

Posted on May 27, 2008 6:13 PM

Notes for "Battlefield Earth"

Foreign Policy has just published a substantially updated version of my article "Terraforming War," on the potential strategic/military use of geoengineering, under the title "Battlefield Earth." As it is not FP policy to put links in articles, I thought I'd...

Posted on January 28, 2008 6:27 PM

Overton Window

The Overton Window is a memetic engineering concept in use among political wonks, but with broader applicability. Wikipedia describes it thusly: It describes a "window" in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of...

Posted on January 9, 2008 11:43 AM

Terraforming War

No nation that sees itself as a great power is going to be willing to risk having its climate and environment completely in the hands of another nation. Research into methodologies for geoengineering will happen simply out of self-preservation --...

Posted on December 29, 2007 4:34 PM

The Politics of Geoengineering

Geoengineering -- or, as I sometimes call it, re-terraforming the Earth -- is back in the news, with a sobering editorial in today's New York Times by Carnegie's Dr. Ken Caldeira. Caldeira's commentary arrives in the wake of news that...

Posted on October 24, 2007 10:25 PM

F in Citizenship

Foreign Policy magazine has come out with its annual listing of "Failed States. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the media attention to this list has focused on Iraq being #2 on the list, behind Sudan. Of greater interest to me,...

Posted on June 19, 2007 5:17 PM

Second RU Sirius Show Now Up

The second podcast emerging from the conversation session with RU Sirius last week is now available. RU Sirius Show #109 (Weekend Edition): Why Big War is Becoming Obsolete: Jamais Cascio of WorldChanging fame leads us in a discussion about being...

Posted on May 18, 2007 8:21 AM

The Lost Hegemon (pt 2): The End of Conventional War

(Previously: The Lost Hegemon (pt 1) and A Post-Hegemonic Future) Few would dispute that the American military is, far and away, the most powerful conventional armed force on the planet, even as depleted as it is by the Iraq war....

Posted on May 2, 2007 9:33 PM

Responsibility to the Future

It's a troubling sign of the modern political culture that being repeatedly and horrifically wrong about important subjects doesn't seem to make one less popular as an advisor. In fields where the subjects of professional analysis are granular and readily...

Posted on April 30, 2007 3:58 PM

The Lost Hegemon (pt 1)

Rolling Stone assembled a round-table discussion with Richard Clarke, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Bob Graham, Juan Cole and others (from the military, diplomatic and intelligence services) about three scenarios for the end of the US involvement in the Iraq conflict (note I...

Posted on March 19, 2007 1:29 PM

A Post-Hegemonic Future

Here's a question to muse about while awaiting the results of Tuesday's election in the US: what happens after the United States is no longer the dominant global power? This is a question that doesn't get asked often. Public figures...

Posted on November 1, 2006 3:49 PM

Late to the Party

Tom Friedman just left the stage at PopTech, having talked a bit about about his GeoGreens notion. Friedman frustrates me; his work in the 1980s and early 1990s on the Middle East was remarkable and insightful, but he's lost me...

Posted on October 19, 2006 12:28 PM

Tuesday Topsight, October 10, 2006

It's End of the World time at Open the Future Topsight! • MADH -- Mutually Assured Dark Humor: DEFCON proclaims itself to be the "World's First Genocide 'em up," and that bit of ad copy should tell you everything you...

Posted on October 10, 2006 4:27 PM

The Transformation of War

George Mokray writes: I posted my rather extensive notes from Martin van Creveld's The Transformation of War on dailykos at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/22/02622/8960 Heartbreaking that it was published in 1991 and seems so fresh and pertinent today. I wonder what he is...

Posted on September 26, 2006 3:03 PM

Renewable Energy and Global Stability

An Agence France-Presse article, reprinted at Terradaily.com, got me thinking about some of the unanticipated results of a radical shift to renewable energy systems. In "OPEC Casts A Dark Eye On The Greening Of Energy," writer Peter Capella quotes sources...

Posted on September 18, 2006 4:51 PM

Future of the Future

The next five days will see a potentially interesting -- at least to me -- intersection of a variety of important dynamics I've been following closely. • Global guerillas, or the reaction to them. What should be an hour wait...

Posted on August 22, 2006 11:16 PM

Less Than Meets The Eye

I'm getting on a plane in a few days, and I'm not relishing the thought of the wait in the airport beforehand. I normally allow about 90 minutes; this week, I'm going to try to arrive a good three hours...

Posted on August 16, 2006 4:06 PM

UK Terror Plot

The unfolding news about the aircraft bombing plans in the UK hits me pretty hard. I travel to London once a year or so, and two of my closest friends (and their families) live in or around the city. Given...

Posted on August 10, 2006 5:05 PM

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