The Duck of Minerva

Josh Busby

Joshua Busby is a Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the author of Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-author, with Ethan Kapstein, of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations (Cambridge, 2013). His main research interests include transnational advocacy and social movements, international security and climate change, global public health and HIV/ AIDS, energy and environmental policy, and U.S. foreign policy.

Recent Posts

Remembering Our Lost Colleagues

Remembering Our Lost Colleagues

by | 22 December, 2025 |

I started this post sort of confessionally. It's been a while since I wrote on the blog. I had started one earlier this year on the destruction of USAID and PEPFAR but redirected my energy into advocacy (such as it was). One reason for my relative absence on the blog is government service. From 2021 to 2023, I was in the Biden Administration serving as a Senior Climate Advisor in the Department of Defense. More recently, my father was in ill health and died at the age of 79 in August. He was also an academic, a distinguished scholar of southwestern American literature at Texas State...

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What to expect at the upcoming climate negotiations?

What to expect at the upcoming climate negotiations?

by | 6 October, 2023 |

A reporter asked me what we should expect from the upcoming climate negotiations, known as COP28, which will be held in the United Arab Emirates starting the end of November. This is my fairly off-the-cuff answer which may be somewhat pessimistic. I am more broadly optimistic that the clean energy transition is underway, though not at that pace required (yet) to stay below 2 degrees C of warming. If you think I'm off-base, please comment or send a post to the Duck so we get more deeply informed perspectives captured here. The Global Souring and the Global StocktakeWe are in a different...

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Go Green Fast: Are the Industrial Policies of the Biden Administration Working?

Go Green Fast: Are the Industrial Policies of the Biden Administration Working?

by  &  | 30 August, 2023 |

Typical energy transitions unfold over 50 to 100 years. The urgency of the climate challenge means that humanity doesn’t have that kind of time. While market developments in renewables and electric vehicles are favorable, even those developments will not transform the energy landscape without concerted government policy. The Biden Administration is trying to re-shape the American economy to support this transformation through incentives that were included in the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). One year into the passage of the IRA and billions of dollars in investment in battery...

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Israel’s Democratic Deficit as a One-State “Solution” Emerges

Israel’s Democratic Deficit as a One-State “Solution” Emerges

by | 11 August, 2023 | ,

I recently had the good fortune to participate in a week-long academic exchange to Israel, along with 20 or so other political scientists and historians. Because Israel isn’t one of the countries I have a lot of knowledge of, I thought this might be an opportunity to learn more about the country and wider region. My mom’s side of the family is Jewish, and I have distant relatives who died in the Holocaust and some who escaped death from Auschwitz. While the immense human suffering of the Holocaust makes me sympathetic to the Jewish people, the Palestinians’ plight and oppression are also...

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Welcome New Ducks and an Invitation

Welcome New Ducks and an Invitation

by | 25 July, 2021 | ,

The Duck has a new look and a new lineup of our core group, what we used to call "permanent contributors." We haven't yet settled on a new term. Blog Jedi Masters came to mind. In this post, I wanted to thank long-time contributors who are stepping away from the core group but who may blog intermittently and welcome some new folks to the core. I also want to invite a new cohort of folks to write for us regularly as Contributing Bloggers. Dan's Back!First, let me thank Dan Nexon for his artful return to the blog. His industry to carry out the site redesign is much appreciated. He founded this...

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Actorless Threats

Actorless Threats

by | 26 February, 2021 | ,

This is a guest post from Morgan D. Bazilian, Director of the Payne Institute, Colorado School of Mines; Andreas Goldthau, Franz Haniel Professor at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, and Research Group Leader at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies; and Kirsten Westphal, a Senior Analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. They tweet at @mbazilian, @goldthau and @kirstenwestpha1. The age of actorless threats has arrived. Democracies need to re-imagine and re-tool their responses. This is an age of the “actorless threats”. As Bazilian and...

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Are Women Leaders Better at Fighting COVID?

Are Women Leaders Better at Fighting COVID?

by | 25 February, 2021 | , ,

This is a guest post from Courtney Burns and Leah Windsor. Burns is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bucknell University. Windsor is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Political Science at The University of Memphis. Follow her on Twitter @leahcwindsor. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, worldwide media heralded the leadership of women leaders like Jacinda Ardern and Erna Solberg for their ability to contain the spread of the virus, and the lethality within their countries' borders....

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Remembrances from Sean Kay’s Students

Remembrances from Sean Kay’s Students

by | 12 February, 2021 |

This is the fifth in our series of remembrances on the life of Sean Kay. This post is from 15 of his former students. May way we all have the good fortune to shape the lives of students in the way Sean did. We will all miss you brother. Kemi George ‘01 The loss of Dr. Kay has broken my heart, as it has so many other people. I only wish I could put into words how much this loss hurts and how much Doc (sorry Sean, but you’ll always be “Doc” to me), but I fear I can only manage a pale approximation. As all of his students know, he exemplified everything you could want in a professor. I remember...

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Sean Kay Memorial

by | 11 February, 2021 |

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoTOvR4uofY This is a guest post from Randall Schweller, Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University and author of Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple. This is the fourth post in our remembrance series on Sean Kay. Sean and I shared two passions: international relations and the Grateful Dead. From the mid-1970s to early 1980s, I was the “Jerry Garcia” in a Grateful Dead cover band called Timberwolf that played in the tri-state area. Our keyboardist, Rob Barroco, later joined the Dead and Phil Lesh and Friends. Sean knew the Grateful Dead and...

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