Jarrod talks with Professor Marwa Daoudy about her new book, The Origins of The Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (Cambridge, 2020).
Jarrod talks with Professor Marwa Daoudy about her new book, The Origins of The Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security (Cambridge, 2020).
Late last month the New York Times ran an interesting piece about the power of language and climate change. Central to the story is the concept of a carbon budget. On its face, the concept is...
Last fall, I wrote about how the U.S. government was insisting that any climate mitigation commitments agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate negotiations be non-binding political pledges. I argued...
The annual climate negotiations are wrapping up in Lima, Peru tonight or likely tomorrow. Negotiators are working through the night in overtime as they seek to hammer out a blueprint that will serve...
This is re-posted from e-IR. I hesitated to write anything about climate and security until I had read all (or damn near all 17 articles) of the recent special issue of the Journal of Peace Research.My initial mandate for this post was to talk about the significance of climate and security for militaries, and as part of a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, I obviously should have something to say about that. My reaction, however, was that to conceive of climate and security as purely or primarily a military problem would reinforce a narrow understanding of the issue and...
A few years back, when global warming was near the top of the national and global agendas, a surprising new activist suddenly took the field: the Pentagon. In 2009, it called climate change a “threat” to national security. In 2010, it lauded the climate with its ultimate recognition, inclusion in the Quadrennial Defense Review. All of this was uncritically conveyed by journalists on the Pentagon and environmental beats.Recently, the first effort to test whether climate change in fact has security implications was published by the Journal of Peace Research. Its bottom line: “Only...
Durban SkylineWhy aren't you there? You love South Africa. New baby. 'Nuff said.What, there is more? Low expectations. Hard to justify traveling all that way (let alone burn all those hydrocarbons) for a meeting that is likely to be unproductive.*I take it you are not a big fan of big global conferences? Not really. Hard to see how thousands of delegates and NGOs can converge in a single place and actually produce meaningful results.Jealous much? A little.Ok, low expectations aside, what would constitute a "success" and what would be a failure?Here are some headlines coming out of Durban...
Supporters of action on climate change are under siege in Washington. House Republicans are attempting to cut appropriations on all things related to climate change. Even Democrats appear to want to downplay talk of the issue. The "green jobs" agenda, in light of Solyndra solar's woes, is now mired in controversy. Despite Al Gore's recent effort to refocus attention on the problem with his new Climate Reality campaign, an economy wide legislative effort like cap-and-trade appears dead in the United States for the foreseeable future (That didn't stop Australia's House of Representatives from...
So, we're almost in October, and it's still 100 hundred degrees here in Texas. We have just endured the hottest summer on record for any state in the United States. Just last month, thousands of acres burned in a series of wildfires just outside Austin.September 2011 Texas FiresOur governor Rick Perry is running for the Republican nomination for president, and though climate change is not high on the agenda, he took time out of his busy schedule to deny that climate change was real and to claim his perspective was akin to being a modern day Galileo. These remarks prompted President Obama...
So, I will ultimately come back to climate change and public opinion in this country, but when I haven't been handwringing over the debt ceiling, I’ve been preoccupied by the humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Somalia and East Africa more broadly. I'm going to tackle this topic in a couple of parts since this post is already quite long. The United Nations estimates that as many as 11 million people are being affected by the current crisis, seen as the worst drought in the region in 60 years (see the FEWS NET map of the extent of the crisis below).Why is this crisis emerging now, and why are...
This is my inaugural post on this site, and I thought I would start with a topic I’ve been puzzling over for a while. It may take me a couple of posts to get it all out, but here goes: What happened to Republican elites on climate change?Republicans have long been more reluctant than Democrats to address the problem. However, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore’s slide show and mov(i)ement, moderate Republican governors – Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee – lined up to support schemes to cap and trade emissions of greenhouse gases. In the Senate, John...
Most of the members of the Duck are at the ISA conference in Montreal this week.Meanwhile, Japan is trying to deal with a horrific series of nuclear accidents, triggered by natural disaster -- the 9.0 earthquake and resultant tsunami. I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on nuclear engineering or physics. However, I can recommend some writing by specialists who are closely following the situation and describing the events in understandable terms.First, I always turn to the Arms Control Wonk for nuclear-related issues. Jeffrey Lewis was in Japan when the earthquake hit and he's been...