Foreign Policy Blogs

Energy & Environment

Round 18: Climate Talks Start in Doha

Round 18: Climate Talks Start in Doha

The United Nations climate change negotiations, or the long form: the 18th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 8th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties (CMP) to the Kyoto Protocol, got underway today […]

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U.S. to Overtake Saudi Arabia in Oil Production by 2020 — Not So Fast…

U.S. to Overtake Saudi Arabia in Oil Production by 2020 — Not So Fast…

    In a recent report by the Paris-based IEA, it was forecasted that the United States would become the largest global oil producer, thereby overtaking Saudi Arabia, by around 2020. Not so fast! As Jen Alic of Oilprice.com rightly points out: “We cannot compare total combined liquid hydrocarbons produced by the U.S. with Saudi Arabia’s strictly crude […]

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Britain Announces Energy Efficiency Strategy

Britain Announces Energy Efficiency Strategy

In the field of energy, conservation is about the least sexy topic out there. However, it is also the one area that can affect the picture immediately, and for that reason, we ought to be paying greater attention to it. For its part, the British government has just released its first Energy Efficiency Strategy. I […]

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President Obama Re-elected and Keystone XL Pipeline Revisited

President Obama Re-elected and Keystone XL Pipeline Revisited

    The Foreign Policy Association has recently released results of its 2012 National Opinion Survey with some interesting insights regarding the geopolitics of energy. Among other things, the survey finds that a total of 57 percent of the balloters believe that constructing the Keystone XL pipeline is in the U.S. national interest. This seems to […]

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Going green in a traditionally unlikely region

Going green in a traditionally unlikely region

  Growing global demand for energy continues to strain resource availability, which has spurred increased exploration for unconventional oil and gas, as well as accelerated exploitation of traditional fossil fuels. Renewable energy has increased exponentially worldwide over the past decade to combat these facts. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and especially the Gulf […]

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Climate Change and the Economy? Not in this Presidential Debate

Climate Change and the Economy? Not in this Presidential Debate

While climate change is an established reality in much of the world, the United States continues to lag behind in recognizing the truth, despite recent gains. The U.S. is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China, but it does not have an official dedicated policy to confront that fact. One need not look […]

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Baghdad’s Oil Payment Deal with Kurds Helps Boost Exports

Baghdad’s Oil Payment Deal with Kurds Helps Boost Exports

Iraq’s oil minister Abdul Kareem Luaiby anticipates his country’s exports for September to exceed 2.6 million barrels a day, a figure not reached in the last 20 or so years. Part of this increase stems from a deal cut between the central government and the Kurdish autonomous region. The Kurds had stopped exporting oil back […]

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Thoughts on Japan’s First Post-Fukushima Energy Policy

Thoughts on Japan’s First Post-Fukushima Energy Policy

  Japan is reversing its decades-long advocacy of nuclear power as Bloomberg reported last Friday. In its first post-Fukushima energy policy approved by Prime Minister Noda a cabinet panel endorsed and outlined the potential next steps to phase out nuclear power plants by 2040. In general, that is in line with Japanese public opinion. A report […]

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Scottish Government Unveils Plans for World’s Largest Wind Farm

Scottish Government Unveils Plans for World’s Largest Wind Farm

As August ended, the Scottish government unveiled plans for the world’s largest wind farm in the Moray Firth, in the country’s far northeast. The government plans to spend £4.5 billion to erect 339 wind turbines off shore which would generate 1,500 MW, about the same as a conventional power plant. This is part of the […]

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Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions in Light of the UAE – Australia Uranium Deal

Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions in Light of the UAE – Australia Uranium Deal

Only in December 2011 did Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ruling Labor Party vote to overturn a long-standing ban on Australian uranium exports to India in order to strengthen diplomatic ties between those two countries, thus elevating the relationship to a more strategic level while boosting Australia’s resources-dominated economy. Australia, holder of the world’s biggest known […]

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Drought in U.S. today, trouble for world tomorrow

Drought in U.S. today, trouble for world tomorrow

Posted by contributor Andres Santamaria. The recent drought that has been spreading throughout the Midwest portion of the United States could now potentially create another global food crisis like the one in 2008, according to an article by Suzanne Goldenberg, U.S. environment correspondent for the Guardian. Why is there such a danger now?  Extreme heat […]

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Warm Sea Water Forces Reactor Shut Down

Warm Sea Water Forces Reactor Shut Down

  The consensus about Fukushima’s nuclear disaster holds that human error caused the partial meltdown. Failure to anticipate what went wrong is at the heart of the matter. Over the weekend, a reactor at the the Millstone nuclear power plant in Waterford, Conn., closed down because its designers back in the 1960s failed to anticipate […]

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Flooding furthers North Korea’s need for food aid

Flooding furthers North Korea’s need for food aid

Although recent media attention on North Korea has focused on its new first lady, the emergence of a significant humanitarian crisis has quickly replaced the sensational headlines.  Compounding recent reports of malnutrition among North Korean children and the “…[estimation] that two-thirds of North Korea’s 24m population suffer from a chronic shortage of food…” , the […]

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Run 10 feed 10 campaign fights child hunger

Run 10 feed 10 campaign fights child hunger

Want to tackle child hunger in your area?  This fall, “Run 10 Feed 10” campaign, launched by Women’s Health magazine and FEED Foundation, aims to raise funds through a series of 10K runs in selected cities and an online fundraising effort for those who cannot participate directly. According to the Run 10 Feed 10 campaign, […]

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Indian Blackout Lesson: Invest in Infrastructure

Indian Blackout Lesson: Invest in Infrastructure

A couple of days ago, over 600 million people (that’s not a typo, six hundred million – 600,000,000) lost electrical power when three electricity grids in India collapsed. The cause was simple, demand outstripped supply, and the mechanisms in place to manage the imbalance were just not up to the job. This is not just […]

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