Category: Environment

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.

The Risk of Not Worrying about the Bomb

The nuclear sword of Damocles has been dangling over humanity for so many years that it’s taken for granted, even amid the U.S. State Department’s juvenile jousting over Ukraine. But carelessness could make it more likely to fall with unspeakable…

The Age of the Oligarchs

Exclusive: The concentration of power in the hands of billionaire “oligarchs” may be most alarming in places like Ukraine but the United States is moving in the same direction as wealth is consolidated at the top — and both elections…

Six Decades of H-Bomb Cover-ups

Hydrogen bomb explosions six decades ago gave the world a glimpse into the apocalypse and spread radioactive fallout around the globe but the worst suffering was inflicted on natives of U.S. protectorates in the Pacific Ocean, writes Beverly Deepe Keever.