Energy & Environment

He’s been called “the Mandela of the Maldives.” And like the anti-apartheid icon, Mohammed Nasheed began public life as a democracy activist who was jailed for years by a regime he eventually helped overthrow. Also like Mandela, Nasheed went on to win the first free and fair elections ever held in his country, a scattering of 2,000 low-lying islands off the tip of India that boast some of the most beautiful beaches and high-end resorts on earth.

ABSTRACT: The political scene about how ExxonMobil became a finance arm of the Republican Party. In late February, President Obama proposed, not for the first time, that Congress end four billion dollars’ worth of subsidies for oil and gas companies. He seemed to be signalling that he will be running for President this year, as he did four years ago, in open opposition to the American oil industry. The President’s policies toward the oil industry are not easy to categorize.

On March 22, the National Intelligence Council, a senior body of U.S. government intelligence analysts, released an unclassified report on global water security. The report assesses the effect of global water problems on geopolitics to 2040, the next thirty years. Annual global water requirements will reach 6,900 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2030, 40 percent above current sustainable water supplies.

As gasoline prices passed $3.50 a gallon nationally, the politicking predictably kicked into overdrive. “There’s no reason we can’t get gasoline down to $2 and $2.50 a gallon,” said Newt Gingrich, who in February promised he would accomplish this via an agenda he called “Drill here, drill now, pay less.” Two days later three prominent Democrats, including Representative Ed Markey, called for President Obama to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices.

This week, the first film based on the blockbuster young-adult book trilogy The Hunger Games will open, crowning its stars heartthrobs and, likely, making Lionsgate, its studio, a mint.

Much discussion has focused on The Hunger Games as commentary on the popularity of reality television; actress Jennifer Lawrence, who stars as the temperamental heroine Katniss Everdeen, said as much in a recent interview. But barely mentioned in the film—if at all—is another, subtler lesson currently in vogue among young-adult fiction: the societal implications of climate change.

The MIT Sloan Management Review in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group recently released a report, “Sustainability Nears a Tipping Point.” In a survey of over 4,000 managers from 113 countries, the study found “70% of companies have placed sustainability permanently on their management agendas.”

Sustainability is here and it is the future. It is transforming companies, commercial networks, and industries. Will the tipping point soon reach government?

Counterterrorism Research Fellow Brian Fishman and Schwartz Fellow Steve Levine explore the real challenges facing the U.S. in Afghanistan and rising gas prices at home. Pamela Chan hosts.

Afshin Molavi and Sam Sherraden discuss The tensions surrounding Iran’s nuclear development program, the state of manufacturing jobs in the US, and how China’s growing influence is affecting economic and political relations around the world. Pamela Chan hosts.

Since 2007, California has experienced a solar boom. Photovoltaic panels rest on 107,159 rooftops, as of this writing (the numbers are updated here every Wednesday). Driven by incentives that are bankrolled by every Californian who pays a utility bill, Californians now have more than one Gigawatt of solar capacity installed over our heads That’s a lot: one Gigawatt is roughly the size of one of the state’s four nuclear power plants, although solar PV panels do not produce power at the steady, even rate that nukes do.

While winter is in full swing in Tehran with snow blanketing the capital, senior officials of the Islamic Republic can be forgiven for feeling hot. Over the past three weeks, the major powers have dramatically turned up the pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme. We have now entered the oil-squeeze phase.