Long Game

The modern concept of Geoengineering (or Climate Engineering) is usually taken to mean proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth's climate to counteract the effects of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions.

This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleontologists say they’ve studied the period about 200 million years ago when dinosaurs first came to power, and found that while catastrophic volcanic activity may not explain dinosaur extinction, it could have explained why dinosaurs’ competitors disappeared and the terrible lizards took over the planet.

The scientists examined how two different isotopes (or forms) of carbon fluctuated during these volcanic eruptions. They found that the “heavy” form of carbon was depleted relative to the “light” form. They say this reflects disturbances in the carbon cycle at this time, including a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and aerosols (fine solid particles)

Putin's treatment of Clinton raises doubts about the Barack Obama administration's strategy toward Russia, which has focused on building up the supposedly moderate President Dmitri Medvedev, reportedly one of the few foreign leaders Obama has bonded with, as a counterweight to Putin.

And now, we're hearing that Obama believes he has a different and promising relationship with Medvedev -- one independent of Putin.

China’s covert intelligence capability seems vast mainly because of the country’s huge population and the historic Chinese diaspora that has spread worldwide. Traditionally focused inward, China as an emerging power is determined to compete with more established powers by aiming its intelligence operations at a more global audience. China is driven most of all by the fact that it has abundant resources and a lot of catching up to do.

To Western eyes, China’s whole approach to intelligence gathering may seem unsophisticated and risk-averse, particularly when you consider the bureaucratic inefficiencies inherent in the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) administrative structure. But it is an approach that takes a long and wide view, and it is more effective than it may seem at first glance.

As a symbol of how bad relations are between the two men, there was no final joint statement, no meeting with reporters and no pictures.

Obama wants to make it appear that the problem is with Netanyahu’s unwillingness to forego 1,600 apartments at a time when the United States needs an Israeli-Palestinian peace process in place to decrease anti-American sentiment in Iraq and particularly Afghanistan where fighting is raging. Netanyahu regards Obama’s wishes as intruding on Israeli national sovereignty, core interests and, ultimately, irrelevant to either Iraq or Afghanistan. Obama is trying to frame the matter as Netanyahu deliberately trying to scuttle a process Obama badly wants to happen.

The fact that the housing is located in Jerusalem is itself an important point to many Israelis. It is not one that most Americans care about.

France, which spends more of its GDP on health care than any other European country, also spends a higher percentage than the rest of Europe on its military.

Britain's financial straits following the Second World War coincided with an expansion of the British welfare state that made imperial expenditures hard to maintain (though the British Empire was in its death throes in any case).

If a government is going to tax people heavily, those people had best feel as though they're getting something out of the bargain.

THE UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA came to an agreement on all the elements needed to sign a new nuclear arms treaty, a senior Kremlin official said Wednesday.

Negotiations for a replacement treaty for the expired START have dragged on as relations between the United States and Russia have been in decline.

But even with such pitiful relations between Moscow and Washington, the two sides were able to push through a deal on START.

Even though lack of subsequent military conflict shows that the incident has now become a political event, the maritime boundary of the Korean Peninsula should be watched closely in the coming days to see how the incident fits within Pyongyang’s attempts to hold its own as it approaches the resumption of international negotiations and an important leadership transition.

According to the draft circulated on Thursday at the two-day EU heads of government summit, Greece would indeed be offered a financial aid package of around 22 billion euro, but only after Athens was no longer able to raise funds by selling its bonds in the international markets, and even then at above-market rates, entirely obviating the point of the bailout. That is akin to offering a homeowner, who is about to default on a mortgage, a refinancing offer that equals or increases his mortgage rates above the rate he already cannot pay.

The proposal may very well push Athens to pursue an International Monetary Fund package independent of the eurozone, which could be the intention of Berlin perhaps looking to wash its hands of the entire problem.

Germany essentially has a limited window of opportunity in the next 10 years to make or break its leadership of the European Union and therefore its claim to global relevancy. Germany’s birth rate is lower than all of the major European powers that surround it (France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden), while its population is significantly older than that of Poland.

For the Europeans, Bretton Woods provided the stability, financing and security backbone Europe used first to recover, and in time to thrive. For the Americans, it provided the ability to preserve much of the World War II alliance network into the next era in order to compete with the Soviet Union.

Militarily and economically, it became the bedrock of the anti-Soviet containment strategy.

The conventional wisdom is that Bretton Woods crafted the modern international economic architecture, lashing the trading and currency systems to the gold standard to achieve global stability.

The origin of Bretton Woods lies in the Great Depression.

Economically, World War II was a godsend. The military effort generated demand for goods and labor. The goods part is pretty straightforward, but the labor issue is what really allowed the global economy to turn the corner.

Earlier this month, the European Commission reported that the EU was on track to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

A "super-smart" grid powered by solar farms in North Africa, wind farms in northern Europe and the North Sea, hydro-electric from Scandinavia and the Alps and a complement of biomass and marine energy could render carbon-based fuels obsolete for electricity by 2050, said the report.

Under a variety of business-as-usual scenarios, the EU's projected to import about 70 percent of its energy by 2050, including loads of natural gas from Russia, which hasn't always been the most stable of suppliers. So the EU has plenty of reasons beyond climate change to want to decarbonize.

Most of today's cars are already pretty quiet, but Ford's new electric vehicle makes practically no sound at all. In fact, the dashboard dials coming to life are the only indication that it's running. This is a reminder that the car runs on a 300-volt Siemens AC induction electric motor and not a fuel-fired internal combustion engine.

The Transit Connect Electric has just a single-speed automatic transmission, so in addition to not hearing the hum of an engine, there's no shifting between gears

Cost might also be a factor. Ford hasn't announced pricing, but it is expected to far exceed the $21,000 for a gas-powered Transit Connect.

At the moment, Republican leaders are trying to demonize the Affordable Care Act, so they have little incentive to point out that it's basically Romneycare plus cost controls.

Romney's position is basically that socialist tyranny is okay as long as it's imposed on a state-by-state basis. I don't see this argument winning over the GOP base.

Some legal scholars say the new states’ rights drive has more smoke than fire, but for lawmakers, just taking a stand can be important enough.

It is that states can be laboratories where the country experiments to ascertain which mix of taxes, incentives and public administration works best when it comes to health care.

Hearing the Indiana details, one is tempted to pick at them like a statistics professor. But whether Healthy Indiana is perfect isn't at issue. The issue is that an experiment proceeded.