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

Famine, Climate Change, and the Horn of Africa – part I

by Josh Busby | 1 August, 2011 |

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...

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Raising the Debt Ceiling and Avoiding Economic Catastrophe

by Josh Busby | 19 July, 2011 |

I keep meaning to write a follow up post on U.S. public opinion on climate change and how and why it matters for the world. But, the ongoing political posturing over raising the debt ceiling keeps commanding my attention. Everything I’ve read suggests that failure to resolve this by August 2nd would be what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke called a "self-inflicted wound" on the part of the United States and potentially send the world in to an economic tailspin of perhaps unprecedented proportions. While we can’t know for sure what would happen, most sane observers of this unfolding...

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Climate Change: The Elephant in the Room

by Josh Busby | 1 July, 2011 |

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...

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