In The News

Overheated Planet Seeking Solutions: Emissions Fix May Lie Beneath Us

Laurie Goering October 16, 2007
Early in 2007, businessman and environmentalist Richard Branson offered a $25 million prize for developing a technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An existing technology, however, promises to capture those emissions before they begin warming the planet. Carbon sequestration involves trapping carbon emissions from power plants or other polluters, pumping them deep underground...

IMF Fuels Critics of Globalization

Bob Davis October 16, 2007
Technology and foreign investment do not distribute their vast benefits in evenhanded ways, suggests a new report from the International Monetary Fund. “The report is an unusual admission by the IMF of the downsides of globalization,” reports journalist Bob Davis for the Wall Street Journal. The IMF also points out that benefits from trade do have a wide distribution, but anti-globalization...

Inequality in India and China: Is Globalization to Blame?

Pranab Bardhan October 15, 2007
Globalization undoubtedly has many complex and unintended consequences. However, Pranab Bardhan, economist at University of California, Berkeley, argues that globalization cannot be credited as either an evil force responsible for rising inequality or a virtuous one behind falling poverty rates in the developing world. Conventional wisdom holds that notable increases in inequality and steep...

Global Population: From Explosion to Implosion?

Koïchiro Matsuura October 15, 2007
The planet has some new patterns in population: Elders now outnumber the young, more people live in cities than in the country and more people live in nations where fertility rates fall below the replacement rate for population. But population continues to grow, and the increases predicted for later in this century will be a major historical event, with more than 9 billion people expected to...

India Getting on Board

Ernesto Zedillo October 15, 2007
India is a case study in how excessive government regulation, even with the best intentions, does little to eliminate poverty, according to Ernesto Zedillo, director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, in his column for Forbes. A heavy-handed approach – with strict limits on foreign trade, high tax rates and rigid rules for the labor market – disrupts both trade and innovation....

Gore and UN Panel Win Peace Prize

Walter Gibbs October 12, 2007
As an issue, global warming has gained new prominence, with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, former US vice president, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The UN committee is a network of more than 2,000 scientists who have researched the issue for more than 20 years. The award serves as a vindication of science over the skeptics on global warming and could spur...

Arctic Melt Unnerves the Experts

Andrew C. Revkin October 12, 2007
Geologists who study the Arctic will remember summer of 2007 for a massive melt-off. Another surprise for scientists was that moving ice contributed so much to the meltdown. “The pace of change has far exceeded what had been estimated by almost all the simulations used to envision how the Arctic will respond to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases linked to global warming,” writes Andrew...