Opeds

2013 News Items

• May 07, 2013 - Jeremy Grantham Has Bad News and Good News
  Jeremy Grantham, the famed investor and co-founder of GMO, one of the world's most successful investments firms, has both bad news and good news for us. The bad news, briefly stated, is that we are on the road to economic and ecological ruin. Grantham's good news, if I can characterize it, is that there may yet be some hope.
• April 29, 2013 - Egypt: Too Big, Too Late to Save?
  With the world's attention riveted on war-torn Syria, far too little attention has been focused on Egypt's economic woes and their long-term implications for the region. Heavily dependent on food imports for survival, Egypt desperately needs cash, but its foreign currency reserves have been shrinking dramatically and without more external aid, it's difficult to see how Egypt will manage to feed itself. In the end, Egypt may be too big and too late to save.
• April 24, 2013 - Holy Holocene, It's the Anthropocene
  The current geologic epoch, which began with the end of the last Ice Age, has long been called the Holocene, but a growing number of scientists want to rename it the Anthropocene (i.e. "the Age of Man") in recognition of the enormous impact that humanity now has on the planet's ecology.
• April 16, 2013 - A 'Texas-sized' Earth Day
  In most communities today, Earth Day celebrations attract small audiences and a fraction of the attention that Earth Day celebrations did four decades ago. The concerns that led to the original Earth Day have not gone away. They are, if anything, magnified several times over, but the crowds continue to dwindle, and in many towns Earth Day today is hardly recognized.
• April 11, 2013 - No More Men on the Moon
  It has been 40 years since a man last walked on the moon, and NASA announced this week that it had no plans to send another manned mission to the moon anytime soon. If someone had told me 40 years ago that there might not be another U.S. manned mission to the moon in my lifetime I would have scoffed at their lack of vision. Hopes were high that we would be sending a manned mission to Mars within 20 or 30 years, and the moon would be our launching pad. The sky was no longer the limit.
• April 06, 2013 - Bob Walker on family planning funding's global value
  In the grand scale of federal spending, international family-planning assistance is miniscule, less than one-fiftieth of 1 percent. But dollar for dollar, it may be our best investment in a peaceful and prosperous future for all.
• April 02, 2013 - Egypt: The Endangered Country
  In a rapidly changing world, nation states -- just like plant and animal species -- must evolve, adapt or perish. When the conditions that gave rise to their existence cease to exist, change must come. It can come in the form of a political breakup, as it did in the case of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or, more recently, Sudan, but it can also take a more sinister form, as is now happening in Egypt.
• February 20, 2013 - Egypt Heads Toward the Cliff
  When we look at the Arab world through a political lens we focus on the political maneuverings of the moment and lose sight of the epic forces that are shaping the future of the Middle East. That is particularly true with respect to Egypt, where the growing political unrest is the story of the day. The great dilemma facing Egypt today is not whether the Morsi government or democratic rule can long survive; it is whether Egypt itself can long survive.
• February 11, 2013 - When Enough Is Enough
  Since the dawn of civilization humanity has been engaged in the relentless pursuit of more. Our relentless desire for more has led us to procreate more, extract more, harvest more, trade more, build more, produce more, sell more, promote more, and consume more.
• January 29, 2013 - Losing Mali
  A year ago, virtually no one in Washington was paying any attention to Mali. Few Members of Congress would have been able to locate it on a map, and even fewer would have been able tell you much, if anything, about it. Not so today. Thanks to a coup and an Islamist insurgency that has seized half the country, Mali is now front-page news. Today, many in Congress and elsewhere in Washington regard Mali as a grave threat to the stability of the region and a potential source of global terrorism.