At least two broad trends are important to keep in mind. First, while renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, receive a great deal of attention, they will remain minor contributors to our overall energy mix. Nearly all our energy is derived from fossil fuels, whether petroleum, natural gas, or coal, and that will remain true for at least the next few decades. Second, demand for energy will continue to grow, keeping prices high. Although industrial energy consumption fell in 2009 as a result of the worldwide recession, by 2017 or so the industrial sector will consume more energy than all other users combined. That will not change for decades to come.

Wars involve the use of force to achieve political goals, and they end when the belligerents stop using force. But that can happen in several ways. Sometimes one side simply loses the ability to continue, because it has been completely defeated (Nazi Germany in World War II). Sometimes one side can choose to walk away from the fight and does so, giving up whatever was at stake (the United States in Vietnam, considering 1973-75 as a single case). And sometimes the key belligerents on both sides agree to stop and call it a draw (essentially what happened in Korea in 1953). At some point, every war, with the general outcome starting to become clear, enters what might be called its endgame, which is best thought of as a discussion over what the details of the final settlement will be and what will happen after the shooting stops. In my book, How Wars End, I tell the stories of the endgames of American wars over the last century.

The number of Internet users worldwide has mushroomed to reach the two billion mark, the head of the UN's telecommunications agency, Hamadoun Toure, said on Wednesday.

WORLD ON THE EDGE: Quick Facts
www.earth-policy.org/press_room/C68/wote_quickfactsThere will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night—many of them with empty plates.

If the 2010 heat wave centered in Moscow had instead been centered in Chicago, it could easily have reduced the U.S. grain harvest of 400 million tons by 40 percent and food prices would have soared.

Winter temperatures in the Arctic, including Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia, have climbed by 4-7 degrees Fahrenheit over the last half-century. This record rise in temperature in the Arctic region could lead to changes in climate patterns that will affect the entire planet.

Half the world's people live in countries where water tables are falling as aquifers are being depleted. Since 70 percent of world water use is for irrigation, water shortages translate into food shortages.

In Sana'a, the capital of Yemen—home to 2 million people—water tables are falling fast. Tap water is available only once every 4 days; in Taiz, a smaller city to the south, it is once every 20 days.

Virtually all of the top 20 countries considered to be "failing states" are depleting their natural assets—forests, grasslands, soils, and aquifers—to sustain their rapidly growing populations.

The indirect costs of gasoline, including climate change, treatment of respiratory illnesses, and military protection, add up to $12 per gallon. Adding this to the U.S. average of $3 per gallon brings the true market price closer to $15 per gallon.

Algeria has enough harnessable solar energy in its vast desert to power the entire world economy.

US population trends:
South-shifting population: More than half of the nation’s population growth during the past decade (51.4 percent) occurred in Southern states, driven in part by an in-migration of an estimated 2.3 million newcomers from nearly all demographic groups – blacks, Hispanics, the elderly and the foreign born – and high fertility rates among some, particularly Hispanics.
“Browning” of America: Nonwhites accounted for an estimated 85 percent of U.S. net population growth during the past decade. Non-Hispanic whites represented 65 percent of the U.S. population in 2009 compared to 76 percent in 1995.
Intermarriage increase: Marriage across racial and ethnic lines has doubled since 1980, further contributing to the browning trend, with 41 percent of all intermarriages in 2008 between Hispanics and whites; 15 percent between Asians and whites; 11 percent between blacks and white; and both parties nonwhite in 16 percent of intermarriages.
“Graying” of America: The first baby boomer born in America turned 65 on Jan. 1, sparking a “silver tsunami” of 79 million baby boomers who will exit the U.S. workforce over the next 20 years. About 8,000 Americans will turn 65 every day over the next five years, and they will live longer than previous generations because of advances in health care and lifestyles that are more active.
Gender shift: Women now hold nearly half of all paid U.S. jobs (49.8 percent), own 40 percent of all businesses and hold 43 percent of executive, administrative and managerial positions in the U.S. economy, narrowing the male-female wage gap to its lowest point in history.
More grandparent-headed households: The number of children living in grandparent-headed households increased by 26.1 percent between 2001 and 2010, compared to 3.8 percent for all U.S. household types. One or both parents also live in about two-thirds of the grandparent-headed households.

Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that China does not face major challenges. In the short term, there is plenty of evidence that a property bubble is building in big cities like Shanghai, and inflation is on the rise. Over the long term, China has alarming political and economic transitions to navigate. The Communist Party is unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly on political power forever. And the country's traditional dependence on exports and an undervalued currency are coming under increasing criticism from the United States and other international actors demanding a "rebalancing" of China's export-driven economy. The country also faces major demographic and environmental challenges: The population is aging rapidly as a result of the one-child policy, and China is threatened by water shortages and pollution.

China's economic prowess is already allowing Beijing to challenge American influence all over the world. The Chinese are the preferred partners of many African governments and the biggest trading partner of other emerging powers, such as Brazil and South Africa. China is also stepping in to buy the bonds of financially strapped members of the eurozone, such as Greece and Portugal.

Over the last 30 years, unique opportunities for high and persistent economic growth have blessed Asia, and policy makers grabbed them with both hands. Global growth was high, commodity prices were low, and a growing labor force turned China into the world’s top manufacturer. Meanwhile, there was not much pressure to heed environmental warnings. The policy challenge for Asia’s political leaders was primarily to manage economic growth. All of that is changing.

In the next 10 to 30 years, society will have to learn to deal with “peak everything” — an epoch of critical scarcities of a broad range of resources. Unexpected sources of expertise — such as physicists advising us about the economy — will guide us through hard times.

The Eemian revealed The North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project reached bedrock in July 2010, at a depth of more than 2,500 metres. The fruits of that effort should soon be seen, now that researchers are analysing gas and particles trapped inside the ice core to reveal details of the climate of the Eemian interglacial period (130,000–115,000 years ago), when the average global temperature was about 5°C warmer than today.

The price of human-genome sequencing will drop to US$1,000 per genome.

Looking back at the major headlines of 2010, one story stands out as truly unexpected: The sudden concern with a little-known class of minerals – rare earth elements – that had previously served a key but quiet role in the global economy. These minerals serve as a foundation for modern technologies – from television screens to missile guidance systems – making this newfound interest warranted.

Bremmer has best identified this new twist to the story of globalization in his book The End of the Free Market. The title is a misnomer. The book is really about the rise of state capitalism, also the subject of a recent essay by him in this magazine. Whereas 20 years ago, the list of the largest companies in the world was dominated by private firms, it is now dominated by state-owned entities, many from emerging markets. China's state-owned companies now not only utterly dominate its economy -- of the country's top 100 companies, 99 are state controlled -- but also increasingly play a large role on the global landscape. They play by different rules and have different goals than do private corporations from the West.

This book is not a work of declinism but an unsparing assessment of the constraints on American power in the years to come. No single power, or concert of powers, Mandelbaum warns, shall step forth to assume the American burden. Humanitarian interventions and military campaigns such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq are not likely to be repeated. Such endeavors, Mandelbaum writes, will be resisted by an "American public worried about increases in the costs and reductions in the benefits of entitlement programs." Americans willed, and paid for, an imperial role in the modern world. And of course they borrowed with abandon; foreign creditors were willing to oblige. But that long run has come to an end. September 15, 2008, will indeed turn out to be a day of great consequence in the history of the American republic abroad.

Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly evolution occurs, and its coupling to ecology have not been satisfactorily addressed and formulated. The lack of widespread appreciation for, and understanding of, the evolutionary process has arguably retarded the development of biology as a science, with disastrous consequences for its applications to medicine, ecology and the global environment.

State: “independent political communities each of which possesses a government and asserts sovereignty in relation to a particular portion of the earth’s surface and a particular segment of the human population, what may be called internal sovereignty, which means supremacy over all other authorities within that territory and population. On the other hand, they assert what may be called external sovereignty, by which is meant not supremacy but independence of outside authorities.”

Here are a few of the notes struck by our authors:

The return of Asia to the world stage will define the era.
The chasm between the United States and China could widen as their differing interests become more pronounced.
Emerging powers, even democratic ones, will have separate agendas, making international integration more difficult.
Cooperative approaches to an array of global issues, such as climate change, will be difficult to accomplish.
Nonstate actors, ranging from unofficial governing entities to terrorist organizations, will grow, particularly in weak states.
The United States' influence, diminished by the rise of other states and nonstate actors, will be fatally undercut if the country does not curb its unsustainable reliance on debt.
Avoiding famine will depend on a vast expansion of Africa's lagging agricultural productivity.
The resurgence of all the major religions will be marked by post-Western versions of Christianity and a return of religious practice to secular Europe.
Half the world will experience "fertility implosions," thus leading to shortages of working-age populations, with only sub-Saharan Africa producing a surplus of working-age men.
The technology revolution, epitomized by the Internet, will empower both people yearning for democracy and repressive tyrants.
The United States will remain the primary source of clean-energy innovation.
Those states that best educate their citizens will win the economic competition.

the changing balance of power among states and peoples, the urgency of planetary issues

The global religious landscape in the coming years will be affected by the massive shift in population growth from the developed countries of the North -- predominantly in western Europe and the former Soviet republics -- to the developing countries of the so-called global South. The North accounted for 32 percent of the world's population in 1900, 25 percent in 1970, and about 18 percent in 2000. By 2050, it will likely account for just 10 percent. Religion has emerged as a driving factor in this redistribution. Religiosity is now one of the most accurate indicators of fertility, far more telling than denominational or ethnic identity, since religious people tend to have more children than their secular counterparts.

Religion is on the rise around the world. If the United States fails to confront the implications of this growth properly the potential for religiously motivated violence across the globe may increase dramatically over the next century.

After decades of following Deng Xiaoping's dictum "Hide brightness, cherish obscurity," China's leaders have realized that maintaining economic growth and political stability on the home front will come not from keeping their heads low but rather from actively managing events outside China's borders. As a result, Beijing has launched a "go out" strategy designed to remake global norms and institutions. China is transforming the world as it transforms itself. Never mind notions of a responsible stakeholder; China has become a revolutionary power.

China's leaders have spent most of the country's recent history proclaiming a lack of interest in shaping global affairs. Their rhetoric has been distinctly supportive of the status quo: China helping the world by helping itself; China's peaceful rise; and China's win-win policy are but a few examples. Beijing has been a reluctant host for the six-party talks on North Korea, it has tried to avoid negotiations over Iran's potential as a nuclear power, and it has generally not concerned itself with others' military and political conflicts. China's impact on the rest of the world has, in many respects, been unintentional -- the result of revolutions within the country. As the Chinese people have changed how they live and how they manage their economy, they have had a profound impact on the rest of the world. China's position as the world's largest contributor to global climate change is not by design; it is the result of extraordinary economic growth and 1.3 billion people relying on fossil fuels for their energy needs.

Yet all this is about to change. China's leaders once tried to insulate themselves from greater engagement with the outside world; they now realize that fulfilling their domestic needs demands a more activist global strategy. Rhetorically promoting a "peaceful international environment" in which to grow their economy while free-riding on the tough diplomatic work of others is no longer enough. Ensuring their supply lines for natural resources requires not only a well-organized trade and development agenda but also an expansive military strategy. The Chinese no longer want to be passive recipients of information from the outside world; they want to shape that information for consumption at home and abroad. And as their economic might expands, they want not only to assume a greater stake in international organizations but also to remake the rules of the game.

Today, more than 50 percent of the world's population has access to some combination of cell phones (five billion users) and the Internet (two billion). These people communicate within and across borders, forming virtual communities that empower citizens at the expense of governments. New intermediaries make it possible to develop and distribute content across old boundaries, lowering barriers to entry. Whereas the traditional press is called the fourth estate, this space might be called the "interconnected estate" -- a place where any person with access to the Internet, regardless of living standard or nationality, is given a voice and the power to effect change.

For the world's most powerful states, the rise of the interconnected estate will create new opportunities for growth and development, as well as huge challenges to established ways of governing. Connection technologies will carve out spaces for democracy as well as autocracy and empower individuals for both good and ill. States will vie to control the impact of technologies on their political and economic power.

the rise of state capitalism

Bremmer has best identified this new twist to the story of globalization in his book The End of the Free Market. The title is a misnomer. The book is really about the rise of state capitalism, also the subject of a recent essay by him in this magazine. Whereas 20 years ago, the list of the largest companies in the world was dominated by private firms, it is now dominated by state-owned entities, many from emerging markets. China's state-owned companies now not only utterly dominate its economy -- of the country's top 100 companies, 99 are state controlled -- but also increasingly play a large role on the global landscape. They play by different rules and have different goals than do private corporations from the West.

Reminders of the limits of theory ring true to practical people. But if causes and effects are hopelessly random, then there is no hope for informed policy. Terminal uncertainty, however, is not an option for statesmen. They cannot just take shots in the dark, so they cannot do without some assumptions about how the world works. This is why practical people are slaves of defunct economists or contemporary political theorists. Policymakers need intellectual anchors if they are to make informed decisions that are any more likely to move the world in the right direction than the wrong one.

This is a reminder that simple visions, however powerful, do not hold up as reliable predictors of particular developments. Visions are vital for clarifying thinking about the forces that drive international relations, the main directions to expect events to take, and one's basic faith in matters of politics, but they cannot account for many specifics in the actual complexity of political life. The biggest ideas may also yield the least accurate estimates. The psychologist Philip Tetlock, in Expert Political Judgment, compiled detailed scorecards for the predictions of political experts and found that ones known for overarching grand theories ("hedgehogs," in Isaiah Berlin's classification) did worse on average than those with more complicated and contingent analyses ("foxes") -- and that the forecasting records of any sorts of experts turn out to be very weak. Readers looking for an excuse to ignore dire predictions might also take comfort from evidence that forecasting is altogether hopeless. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, argues that most world-changing developments turn out to be predicted by no one, the result of highly improbable events outside analysts' equations. The overwhelming randomness of what causes things in economic and political life is inescapable, Taleb argues; big ideas are only big illusions.

Right now, with dollar interest rates low and the currency more or less steady, this fiscal slide is more a matter of conversation than concern. But this calm will not last. As the world's biggest borrower and the issuer of the world's reserve currency, the United States will not be allowed to spend ten years leveraging itself to these unprecedented levels. If U.S. leaders do not act to curb this debt addiction, then the global capital markets will do so for them, forcing a sharp and punitive adjustment in fiscal policy.

The result will be an age of American austerity. No category of federal spending will be spared, including entitlements and defense. Taxes on individuals and businesses will be raised. Economic growth, both in the United States and around the world, will suffer. There will be profound consequences, not just for Americans' standard of living but also for U.S. foreign policy and the coming era of international relations.

THE ROAD TO RUIN

It was only relatively recently that the United States became so indebted. Just 12 years ago, its national debt (defined as federal debt held by the public) was in line with the long-term historical average, around 35 percent of GDP. The U.S. government's budget was in surplus, meaning that the total amount of debt was shrinking. Federal Reserve officials even publicly discussed the possibility that all of the debt might be paid off.

The U.S. government is incurring debt at a historically unprecedented and ultimately unsustainable rate. The Congressional Budget Office projects that within ten years, federal debt could reach 90 percent of GDP, and even this estimate is probably too optimistic given the low rates of economic growth that the United States is experiencing and likely to see for years to come. The latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff paper comes closer to the mark by projecting that federal debt could equal total GDP as soon as 2015. These levels approximate the relative indebtedness of Greece and Italy today. Leaving aside the period during and immediately after World War II, the United States has not been so indebted since recordkeeping began, in 1792.

The twenty-first century began with a very unequal distribution of power resources. With five percent of the world's population, the United States accounted for about a quarter of the world's economic output, was responsible for nearly half of global military expenditures, and had the most extensive cultural and educational soft-power resources. All this is still true, but the future of U.S. power is hotly debated. Many observers have interpreted the 2008 global financial crisis as the beginning of American decline. The National Intelligence Council, for example, has projected that in 2025, "the U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished."

Power is the ability to attain the outcomes one wants, and the resources that produce it vary in different contexts. Spain in the sixteenth century took advantage of its control of colonies and gold bullion, the Netherlands in the seventeenth century profited from trade and finance, France in the eighteenth century benefited from its large population and armies, and the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century derived power from its primacy in the Industrial Revolution and its navy. This century is marked by a burgeoning revolution in information technology and globalization, and to understand this revolution, certain pitfalls need to be avoided.

Mearsheimer's vision is especially telling because it is an extreme version of realism that does not see any benign actors in the system and assumes that all great powers seek hegemony: "There are no status quo powers . . . save for the occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position."

Mearsheimer, however, is an unregenerate realist, and he threw cold water on the Cold War victory. Bucking the tide of optimism, he argued that international life would continue to be the brutal competition for power it had always been. He characterized the competition as tragic because countries end in conflict not out of malevolence but despite their desire for peace. In the absence of a world government to enforce rights, they find it impossible to trust one another, and simply striving for security drives them to seek control of their environment and thus dominance. If peace is to last, it will have to be fashioned from a stable balance of power, not the spread of nice ideas. In short, there is nothing really new about the new world.

Fukuyama de-emphasized mainstream liberalism's focus on materialism and justice by stressing "the struggle for recognition," the spiritual quest for human dignity and equality (or sometimes for superiority), as a crucial ingredient in the transformation.

In times of change, people wonder more consciously about how the world works. The hiatus between the Cold War and 9/11 was such a time; conventional wisdom begged to be reinvented. Nearly a century of titanic struggle over which ideology would be the model for organizing societies around the globe -- fascism, communism, or Western liberal democracy -- had left only the last one standing. After a worldwide contest of superpowers, the only conflicts left were local, numerous but minor. What would the driving forces of world politics be after the twentieth century, the century of total war?

Among the theorists who jumped into the market for models of the future, three stood out: Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. Each made a splash with a controversial article, then refined the argument in a book -- Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man, Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, and Mearsheimer in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Each presented a bold and sweeping vision that struck a chord with certain readers, and each was dismissed by others whose beliefs were offended or who jumped to conclusions about what they thought the arguments implied. (Reactions were extreme because most debate swirled around the bare-bones arguments in the initial articles rather than the full, refined versions in the later books. This essay aims to give the full versions of all three arguments their due.)

Policymakers in Beijing, looking to strengthen China’s economy, are no longer satisfied with the country’s position as the world’s manufacturer. Their solution is to break China’s dependence on foreign technology, moving from a model of “made in China” to one of “innovated in China.”

The Chinese phrase for indigenous innovation, zizhu chuangxin, was introduced in a 2006 state-issued report, “Guidelines on National Medium- and Long-Term Program for Science and Technology Development.”

We see this same type of crisis happening around the world. In what once was called “Christendom,” the Catholic Church has become concerned that Islam will eventually become the largest religion in Europe, as most Europeans themselves are now secularist. In America, despite the rise of Evangelical Fundamentalism (which is actually a symptom of the crisis) people are turning to Buddhism, Eastern philosophy, all sorts of “New Age” spirituality, multiplying schools of psychology, while at the same time, America’s “creative minority” (scientists, educators, artists, writers, etc.) is predominantly secularist. In China, while the Communist leadership now openly preaches Confucianism, Christianity is becoming a sub-culture, as a “crisis of belief” wracks the country. In sub-Sahara Africa, which historically has had its tribal gods and spiritualistic rituals, Christianity is exploding. In historically Catholic South America, Evangelical belief is spreading. Increasingly, people are becoming detached from their society’s founding orientation, and are searching for some new belief, some new point of reference in life.

The World is Facing a Mass Extinction Event - (Perth Now - September 3, 2010)
Findings, recently published in the international journal Science, showed a major extinction event was currently underway that had the potential to be more severe than any others in history. The last mass extinction was an estimated 65 million years ago when an asteroid smashed into Mexico and wiped out the dinosaurs. Macquarie University palaeobiologist Dr. John Alroy said a new mass extinction wouldn't be the result of a single horrific event such as an asteroid. Instead, it would be the result of a factors from introduced foreign species, run-offs from fertilisers and pesticides, pollution and deforestation, he said. Climate change and an accelerated growth in the worldwide population were also playing a part. But Alroy said the current situation was not yet as bad as the worst mass extinction 250 million years ago, known as Permian-Triassic extinction or The Great Dying

Quantum Computers Revolutionalize Information Around 2021

A new revolution in computing may make computers exponentially faster than today.

It’s based on the strange behavior of matter at the quantum level. The basic unit of a quantum computer is a “qubit”—an electron spinning either clockwise or counter clockwise, representing a 0 or a 1. Because electrons can coexist in two places simultaneously, a single electron can carry two qubits, two electrons can produce four qubits, three electrons, eight, and 20 electrons could perform a million computations. The exponential growth raises the hope of infinite processing power.

A quantum computer could easily complete in seconds a task that would take a silicon computer billions of years. The first research prototypes are now running at Harvard University, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Reserve. These revolutionary computers may be on the market in about ten years.

Biofuels made from algae could soon provide a substantial portion of our transportation fuel needs. That’s because algae have much higher productivity potential than crop-based biofuels. Algae is capable of producing 5,000 gallons of fuel per acre, which could meet perhaps 30%-60% of U.S. oil needs, a chief NASA scientist told a recent World Future Society meeting. Biomass could generate millions of gallons of additional liquid fuel annually by 2020.

Electric Cars Become Fully Practical by 2020

Discover how companies in Denmark are making wind-powered charging stations for electric cars. Freshly charged batteries are exchanged for drained batteries in less time than it takes to fill a car with gas. Consumers pay for the service on monthly plans like mobile phone service.

Japan Dominates the Race for Personal Robots

Despite the popularity of the Roomba floor sweeper, the U.S. lags behind Japan in the development of robots for the home. The Japanese are hoping to have a robot in every home by 2015. Korea is following suit and has mandated a robot in every home by 2020.

Forecast #5:
Bioviolence Becomes a Greater Threat—In the next decade, biological technologies that were once at the frontiers of science will become available to anyone with minimal scientific training. Emerging biotechnologies, such as genomics and nanotechnology, will allow bacteria and viruses to be altered to increase their lethality or make them more resistant to antibiotics.

Forecast #3:
WiMAX Networks Will Soon Create Country-Wide Wireless Internet Access—Often described as “Wi-Fi on steroids,” WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) will cover entire countries with a vibrant, high-speed wireless communications network. Internet access and other data and video applications will be available anywhere with many applications for automobiles.

Forecast #2:
Water Becomes the New Oil—Water desalination may soon become one of the world’s largest industries. By 2040, at least 3.5 billion people will run short of water—almost 10 times as many as in 1995. The huge demand, plus new more efficient desalination technologies, will create enormous profit opportunities and bring new life to arid regions.

The Race for Genetic Enhancements Will Be What the Space Race Was in the 20th Century—Genetic therapies and biomedical enhancements will be a multibillion-dollar industry. New techniques will enable doctors to change your DNA to revitalize old or diseased organs, enhance your appearance, increase your athletic ability, or boost your intelligence.

The ability to sequence the entire genomes--the sequence of almost every letter of an individual's DNA--of parents and their children has for the first time allowed scientists to directly measure how fast our species is mutating. Preliminary studies are coming up with some surprising findings, including more variation than initially thought. A more accurate measure of the number of spontaneous genetic changes passed down from generation to generation will allow scientists to better estimate the timing of key events in our evolutionary history, as well as to evaluate whether some families are more likely to have children suffering from developmental disorders.

Crispian Jago has developed a draft timeline (based on an original London underground map) showing the last 500 years of science,reason and critical thinking “to celebrate the achievements of the scientific method through the age of reason, the enlightenment and modernity.”

http://www.crispian.net/ScienceMapv0.37.png

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

• By Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff  
• August 17, 2010  |  
• 9:00 am  |  
• Wired September 2010

VIDEO: Nuclear Weapons - Creating and Enforcing Global Rules (August 5, 2010) 
John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy in New York joined Global Policy Forum to discuss current debates over nuclear weapons, disarmament, and non-proliferation, and the laws global leaders have developed to address these pressing matters. Enforceable global rules will likely be necessary to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons - political will can only go so far. However, what is perhaps more important than the rules themselves is their legitimacy. International law must be applied to all equally if complete nonproliferation and disarmament are to become a reality. (Global Policy Forum)

From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment (February, 2009) 
Recent research suggests that 40% of all intrastate conflicts in the last sixty years have some connection to natural resources. This report from the United Nations Environment Programme looks at the linkages between the environment, conflict, and peacebuilding. It considers the ways in which environmental factors can contribute to the outbreak of violence, perpetuate existing conflicts and undermine prospects for peace. In turn, it notes that environmental damage can result from conflict. The report also suggests that the environment and natural resources can be used to contribute to peacebuilding and cooperation. (UNEP)

America Can't Afford its Empire

Although Americans are only 4% of the world's population, they consume 25% of its resources and produce 25% of its unsustainable pollution. The US has 865 foreign bases and a military and CIA presence in every corner of the globe. The country enjoys such a privileged position, this author writes, because it has made itself an imperial power. But the United States' ability to afford the cost of maintaining its empire is waning. Sooner or later, the deficit will force Washington to limit its imperial overstretch and bring its troops home.

How Facts Backfire - (Boston Globe - July 11, 2010)
Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It's this: Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. "The general idea is that it's absolutely threatening to admit you're wrong," says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon - known as "backfire" - is "a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance."