Climate change what the Pentagon calls a “threat multiplier” could put the world on course toward worsening chaos or even extermination as nuclear-armed nations scramble to cope with environmental dislocations and resource shortages, a danger that could define the future,…
Category: Environment
The Self-Interest in Climate ‘Denial’
Even in the face of new scientific reports on the escalating dangers from global warming, the “deniers” continue to pick at the now overwhelming data and pick up their checks from oil and other industry groups, write Bill Moyers and…
The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis
Exclusive: Given the very high stakes of a nuclear confrontation with Russia, some analysts wonder what’s the real motive for taking this extraordinary risk over Ukraine. Is it about natural gas, protection of the U.S. dollar’s dominance, or an outgrowth of neocon extremism, asks…
Postponing Costs for Bad Decisions
Politicians from Washington to Beijing to Tel Aviv like to put off the negative consequences of their decisions as long as possible, but that often adds to the eventual costs to their people and the world, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul…
The Back Story of ‘Citizen Koch’
Exclusive: The documentary, “Citizen Koch,” was deemed unfit for PBS as the network sidles up to David Koch’s wealth, but the film’s weakness actually is that it doesn’t focus enough on how the Koch brothers have corrupted the U.S. political process,…
Iraq’s Depleted Uranium Threat
Over the past two dozen years, the massive damage that the U.S. has inflicted on Iraq’s population, infrastructure and environment includes the residue from American “deplete uranium” weapons that can cause cancer and other illnesses, writes John LaForge.
Avoiding the Iraq-Syria Abyss
The urge to expand wars in the Middle East, rather than find pragmatic ways to tamp them down, is even more absurd when set against the potential for peaceful cooperation in the region and the desperate need for the world to address existential…
Obama Takes Lead on Climate Change
Though the future of the planet is at stake, President Obama’s latest moves to reduce carbon pollution are drawing the predictable denunciations from right-wing talkers and from politicians afraid of offending the coal lobby, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
The Commandment to Save the Planet
America’s right-wingers are so hostile to the federal government and to the Constitution’s commandment to “promote the general Welfare” that they reject action even when needed to save the planet. A resistance that continues whatever the evidence, as ex-CIA analyst Paul…
Beneath the Ukraine Crisis: Shale Gas
Exclusive: Behind the geopolitics pitting Russia against the West and the ethnic tensions tearing Ukraine east and west another backdrop for understanding this deepening conflict is the big-money competition for Ukraine’s oil and natural gas, writes Nat Parry.