Barack Obama: A Quiet Revolutionary
He has been lambasted by liberals and Greens for being too centrist and failing to show leadership on climate change -- yet while the Left remains busy polishing its critical blogs and columns, Obama's Recovery Act is quietly beginning to transform America.
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By Jerome E. Roos, Breakthrough Fellow
This article was cross-posted from Reflections on a Revolution
Barack Obama is not stupid. It was probably clear to him from the very start that taking a radically centrist approach would alienate his liberal friends without necessarily bringing him any closer to his conservative opponents. Yet on a range of issues, from health care to climate change, Obama stoically -- or stubbornly, according to some -- continued down his Middle Path.
Granted, his seemingly tepid approach may not be earning him friends. But it is allowing his administration to lay low while it unleashes the most radical transformation of the American economy since World War II. As Michael Grunwald reported in this fascinating article in TIME Magazine yesterday, Obama's Recovery Act is quietly beginning to revolutionize the U.S. energy sector -- the very backbone of the nation's flailing economy -- tearing down an entire economic paradigm in his wake.
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In Defense of Our Generation
In this week's cover story of the New York Times Magazine, Robin Henig asks why we millennial kids are taking so long to grow up. I think she is just jealous - and here is why.
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By Jerome E. Roos, Breakthrough Fellow
This article was cross-posted from Reflections on a Revolution
So we are moving back in with our parents, we are delaying real-life commitments, we keep changing rooms and jobs practically every year, and somehow we seem more amped to travel or do another masters degree than to take up that lucrative 9-to-5 job and start a professional career.
As a result, over the past couple of years, we have been dubbed anything from the Boomerang Generation to the Peter Pan Generation, because - apparently - we are simply refusing to grow up. And to a lot of self-involved, soul-searching baby boomers just emerging out of midlife-crisis, this is a horribly terrifying trend.
Adding onto the dogpile of quasi-academic abstractions, Robin Marantz Henig of the New York Times this weekend asked the same uninformed question all over: why is it taking the millennials so long to grow up? Instead of actually heading out into the real world and asking the millennials herself, she did what every smart baby boomer would do: ask a bunch of other boomers - preferably from the dusty ivory tower of academia.
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A Greek Tragedy
The EU and IMF are showering the Papandreou government with praise, but for most Greeks the real tragedy is only just beginning.
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By Jerome E. Roos, Breakthrough Fellow
This article was cross-posted from Reflections on a Revolution.
Last week, financial bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington let out a sigh of relief. Not only did the Papandreou government survive the first three months of the EU-IMF rescue package, earning it the next 9 billion euro tranche of its 110 billion euro bailout package, but the government actually managed to surpass its creditors' expectations.
According to an EU-IMF statement, "the programme has made a strong start." The institutions are showering the centre-left government with praise for its "vigorous implementation" of reform measures and its successful spending cuts ahead of schedule.
But what officials are failing to mention is the other side of the story. In an attempt to appease investors, the EU and IMF are obscuring an unfolding human tragedy. If we do not change course quickly, we may condemn millions of poor Greeks to years, if not decades, of unnecessary suffering.
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A Meditation on Harmony
What does it mean to live in harmony with nature? To learn how to live in concord with our natural environment, we need to reassess our idealization of nature, embrace the Buddhist principle of impermanence, and go back to the roots of the concept of harmony in Greek mythology.
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By Jerome E. Roos, Breakthrough Fellow
For many years, a key focus of the environmental movement has been the quest of finding a way to live in harmony with nature. But what does this mean? Do we really understand the meaning of the concept of 'harmony'? Do we have any idea how to attain it? Unfortunately, the stereotypical environmentalist conception of harmony, stripped of its social and economic context, turns out to be a romantic idealization of an otherwise highly impermanent and profoundly humanized natural world.
In order to come to an understanding of what harmony truly means, and how we can attain a state of concord with our natural environment, we need to first reassess our idealization of nature - embracing instead the Buddhist principle of impermanence. Subsequently, we need to go back to the roots of the concept of harmony in Greek mythology, recognizing that it is fundamentally intertwined with both security and prosperity - issues which are still mostly overlooked within the environmental movement.
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Cap & Fail: The Collapse of our Climate Policy Paradigm
Cap and trade is dead - and that is a good thing. It is time to move on and embrace a bold new approach in the fight against climate change.
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By Jerome E. Roos, Breakthrough Fellow
Cap and trade has died. Last week, Democrats pulled the plug on an ill-fated climate and energy bill. The climate policy paradigm that reigned supreme for over a decade has finally collapsed under its own weight. And - believe it or not - that is a good thing for us all.
Cap and trade was structurally flawed from the outset. From Kyoto to Copenhagen, it left a trail of failed climate conferences, false promises and stillborn bills in its wake. It is time to move on and embrace a bold new approach in our fight against climate change - one revolving around epic government investment aimed at unleashing a clean energy revolution. Rather than trying in vain to make fossil fuels more expensive, we should focus our efforts on making clean energy cheap.
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'Skeptical Environmentalist' Embraces Breakthrough Narrative
After years of putting climate change mitigation at the bottom of his list of global priorities, Bjorn Lomborg has finally come around to advocate what the Breakthrough Institute and experts like Robert Pielke, Jr. have been arguing for years: the only way to combat climate change is to make clean energy cheap. But until Lomborg disavows the Copenhagen Consensus and fully embraces the Emerging Climate Technology Consensus, we should remain skeptical of the skeptic himself.
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By Jerome E. Roos, Breakthrough Fellow
In today's Project Syndicate column, Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg - author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming - makes a striking observation: the only way to comprehensively deal with climate change is to make clean energy affordable. The observation is not so much striking for its content, as it is for its unlikely source.
For many years now, the Breakthrough Institute and leading energy experts like Roger Pielke, Jr. have been arguing for massive government investment in research and development (R&D) of clean energy technology. All the while, Lomborg was busy wasting everyone else's time obstructing decisive action and piecing together a farcical Copenhagen Consensus, which relegated climate change mitigation and clean energy R&D to the bottom of its list of global priorities.
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Where Is the Revolution?
While millions of gallons of crude oil continue to gush into the Gulf of Mexico every single day and the global climate is showing unabated signs of warming from year to year, we need to ask ourselves an important question: how much longer can we tolerate the savage onslaught of our fragile economies and ecosystems at the powerful hands of global capital?
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By Jerome E. Roos, Breakthrough Fellow
Why is it taking us so long to rise up to the injustice and destruction wrought by large corporations in our very backyard? In a recent op-ed in The Guardian, renowned German sociologist - and Breakthrough Senior Fellow - Ulrich Beck poses this pointed question in historical perspective:
Why hasn't the Deepwater Horizon spill, one of the worst ecological disasters in US history, led to a storming of the Bastille of Big Oil? Why aren't the most urgent problems of our time - environmental crises and climate change - being confronted with the same energy, idealism and optimism as past tragedies of poverty, tyranny and war?
The short answer, at the expense of oversimplification, is that Big Oil has got us by the proverbial balls. And we won't break out of its deadlock until we invent our way out of this predicament.
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Elementary Particles, Complex Challenges
In light of advances in climate science and nuclear safety, it is time for the environmental movement to re-evaluate nuclear power.
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By Mark Caine, Breakthrough Fellow
Environmentalists have long couched their opposition to nuclear power in the argument that tinkering with elementary particles to produce energy is inherently unsafe. But advances in climate and nuclear sciences suggest that the dangers posed by today's nuclear technology are far less serious than the risks of tinkering with global climate systems.
In 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave the go-ahead for the Trinity test, the first human-induced nuclear explosion. As he observed the massive explosion unleashed by his creation, he uttered the now-famous phrase:
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
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Harnessing the Power of Hubbert: Reducing our Exposure to the Oil Risk
The "peak oil" theory may be false or misleading, but it does create a powerful motive for change: governments and businesses should make large-scale investments to reduce their exposure to the oil risk.
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David Mitchell, Breakthrough Fellow
Many "peak oil" theorists suggest we will reach peak oil production by the year 2020. I argue that this peak is artificial, occurring only due to economic, technological and political limitations. While I contest the "peak oil" theory, I do believe that we can harness the real power of its assertions: governments and businesses should make large-scale investments to reduce their exposure to the oil risk. We can therefore get to the "End of Oil" without adhering to the "Peak Oil" theory. Today we need a new logic - one of environmental protection, energy security, and national prosperity - for ending our addiction to oil.
In 1956, M. King Hubbert produced his famous symmetrical exhaustion curve, forecasting a peak in global oil production. The curve that he constructed is both simple and logical, and appears to work well for the U.S. Yet this seemingly inescapable curve was wrongly fitted to the total, global oil resource. In reality the geological fact that oil, a finite resource, is depleting has thus far been estimated, as Stouteberg (2008) shows, with a wide range of uncertainty.
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Creative Education: China v. United States
China and the United States are at different places in their innovation and therefore have different needs in public education systems.
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By Rachel M. Young, Breakthrough Fellow
Previously, I posted on the need to reform the public education system in the United States. I discussed the need to emphasize creativity just as much as other subjects. I stated that the United States must build up the minds of the new innovators of the world for a creative driven economy.
A few days later I received a response to that post stating that the United States has an incredibly greater emphasis on creativity in education in comparison to China. Therefore, the United States is ahead of the curve in creativity and there isn't a need to increase creativity in public schools. There instead should be an emphasis on increasing the creativity in the Chinese public school system.
This is true, the United States education system does have a greater emphasis on creativity than China, but we also have an economic system that is the driver of new ideas, organizations, and products. The demand a new, more creative education system in the United States is based on the theory of "innovative economics."
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