Under the Paris Agreement, states submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) outlining their commitments to reducing emissions. These documents are important window in the international politicization of climate change policy.
What is the name of the journal article (or book) and what are its coordinates? What is the name of the journal article (or book) and what are its coordinates? “The Fossil-Fueled Roots of Climate...
With a symbolically successful COP28 and substantively significant investments in clean energy around the world, 2023 boasts some positive news on climate change. Not a moment too soon: global GHG...
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...
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...
Adam, Daniela and Jarrod discuss the challenge of thinking about climate justice in the context of IR and existing models of justice and reparations. Does the Holocaust and other human rights cases provide a good or useful template? Can IR approaches even handle climate change? https://duckofminerva.podbean.com/e/climate-justice-and-ir/
Name Of The Book… And Its Coordinates? Jennifer D. Sciubba, ed. 2021. A Research Agenda for Political Demography (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, Massachusetts, USA: Edward Elgar) What’s the Argument? We cannot understand contemporary international relations without understanding the demographic shifts going on around the world. Demographics – the characteristics of populations, such as age and location – are not just a backdrop for other, supposedly more important, forces. Population plays a key role in the outcomes of armed conflict, economic development, and political reform....
Climate change poses substantial national, international and human security risks, but analysts have only recently shifted their focus toward how to simultaneously build peace in post-conflict environments and grapple with the dual challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change.
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...
This is a guest post from Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University. He is author of Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War, and tweets @JeffDColgan A slew of new books on grand strategy and international order signal the renaissance these topics are enjoying among scholars. Alas, most of the current thinking does not pay nearly enough attention to climate change—the world’s most important global challenge. Specifically, we are not thinking hard enough about the tradeoffs states face while pursuing the...
Jen Evans (Twitter: @Jen_L_Evans) is a PhD student at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and a Project Lead at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures. Her research focuses on resource rights, cooperation, and conflict. On 30 June, House Democrats released a climate plan aimed at eliminating the U.S. economy’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The plan mandates sweeping shifts towards clean and renewable energy, with U.S. automakers transitioning to solely electric vehicle production and electric utility providers operating as net-zero...
This is a guest post from Emily Meierding, who is an Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Her book, The Oil Wars Myth: Petroleum and the Causes of International Conflict, has just been published by Cornell University Press. The views expressed here do not represent the perspective of the US Navy or Department of Defense. The global oil market has entered uncharted territory. On Monday, the price of WTI crude, the US oil benchmark, went negative for the first time in history, closing at -$37 per barrel. What happened? And what does...