The carbon trade doesn’t just fail to address climate change. In countries like Honduras, it fuels a perverse incentive structure by funneling cash to notorious human rights abusers engaged in extractive industries.
Jon Letman of Truthout interviews Dr. Vandana Shiva—a globally respected Indian physicist, philosopher, and activist—on Hawaii’s role as a testing site for both GMO crops and the military, Hawaii’s relationship with Asia, and on the largely unspoken connection between GE crops, climate change, militarism, and what Shiva calls “a war against the earth.”
Even in its relatively early but visibly intensifying stages, climate change threatens to be the singular event in human history, because unlike every other disaster we can imagine (except a full-scale nuclear war or, as has happened in the planet’s past, a large meteorite or asteroid impact), it alone will alter the basis for life on this planet.
A slew of widely hyped reports last year promised a new oil boom for the United States. But while there’s plenty of oil left in the ground, actual peer-reviewed studies make it clear that peak oil is already upon us.
In the interest of keeping vital global issues in the discussion, Foreign Policy in Focus reached out to scholars at the Institute for Policy Studies—our institutional home—to sketch out progressive perspectives on the world issues we don’t expect to get fair treatment in the debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Without an informed citizenry, these crucial topics will always fall by the wayside. So read up, and share widely!
Compared to the interests of Jerusalem, Tehran, and Washington, those of the Iranian people come in a distant last.
Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.
Mohammad ElBaradei, former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief, used to say using the so-called “carrot and stick approach” on Iran – simultaneous use of sanctions and incentives to induce cooperation – is doomed to fail, because “Iran isn’t a donkey”. Others would go further and say that Iran is a proud civilization, and an ambitious regional power, which will not give up an iota of its nuclear ambitions, no matter how painful the price.
China’s rise, according to many analysts, has been the world’s most significant geopolitical and economic development of the 21st century. Central to China’s rise has been the energy it needs to fuel economic growth. Importing over 42 percent of its crude oil from the Persian Gulf, Beijing views the region as vital for this economic development. China growing influence in the world’s most oil-rich region is the subject of Bryce Wakefield and Susan L. Levenstein’s China and the Persian Gulf: Implications for the United States.
Iran has no immediate plans to block the Strait of Hormuz on response to sanctions.