Syndicate:
Reports
Recent Releases
By Sustainable Energy and Economy Network
By Sustainable Energy and Economy Network Researcher Janet Redman
After years of waning global influence, the World Bank has attached itself to the climate crisis like a patient on life support. Facing a crisis of legitimacy over its failed economic policy proscriptions and long track record of boondoggle projects, the aging institution is attempting to give itself a makeover. No longer is it just the Bank whose “dream is a world free of poverty.” Now it is the Bank that can solve the climate crisis. The facelift includes a $2 billion portfolio of trust funds that channel carbon finance – money used to buy cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from projects in developing countries – from polluting industrialized countries in the global North to some of the most ecologically destructive industries in the global South.
This report exposes the World Bank for what it is – and names it as such – a “climate change profiteer.” The World Bank irresponsibly and recklessly continues to perpetuate the world’s dependence on climate-altering fossil fuels while profiting from carbon trading, which is a dubious remedy to climate change.
The Unfinished Business of Nuclear Disarmament
By Nuclear Policy Senior Scholar Robert Alvarez
The legacy of the Cold War nuclear arms race remains a danger to the world. The United States and Russia are still possess tens of thousands of intact nuclear warheads with no clear plans for their dismantlement. Meanwhile, efforts to control the global spread of nuclear weapons are being undermined by the radical Bush Administration policy authorizing preemptive nuclear attacks against nations that may be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
Both Republican and Democratic Congresses have consistently rejected proposals to design and build new nuclear weapons. Also, Congress has convened two separate panels to conduct a "Nuclear Posture Review" that outlines future nuclear weapons policies. There appears to be growing sentiment, particularly among House members of the Armed Services Committee in reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 500 active and 500 reserve weapons.
The only verifiable nuclear arms agreement still in force is the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). However, The expiration of the START I Treaty in 2009 will become an important benchmark for the future of nuclear arms reductions.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2010 provides an important opportunity for the United States to take bold steps in reducing nuclear arms.
Restructuring the U.S. government’s programs will be required to meet NPT policy goals.
Books
Recent Releases
Lessons From Iraq: Avoiding the Next War
Contributor(s):
Edited by William D. Hartung and Miriam Pemberton.
IPS research fellow and FPIF peace and security editor Miriam Pemberton has teamed up with New America Foundation scholar William D. Hartung to produce a new book that pulls together the thinking of some great minds on the lessons we should be able to take from the Iraq War disaster.
This war may actually have an upside: it should permanently discredit quite a few policies and practices. Preventive war. Politicized intelligence. Coalitions of the coerced. New frontiers of media manipulation. This book's editors drew up a list, and asked the experts on each to boil down what they know for the rest of us. The authors include The Three Trillion Dollar War's Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, pre-war UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, National Book Award winner Frances Fitzgerald, NYU legal scholar Aziz Huq, and artist-restauranteur-activist Anas Shallal.
Lessons From Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Publishers, 2008) is short, accessible and affordable. As Barbara Ehrenreich said, "Read this compelling set of essays and join the movement to prevent the next war."
The Moral Measure of the Economy
By Inequality and the Common Good Director Chuck Collins and Mary Wright
“By the end of this book you may not be able to explain how the Federal Reserve Bank works, but you will be very clear about the moral values that measure economic health.”
It is twenty years since the U.S. Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter on the U.S. economy. Since then striking changes have occurred as the U.S. has become dramatically more unequal in terms of wealth, income, and opportunity. The signs are everywhere, from the fantastic salaries of corporate CEOs, the skyrocketing rates of personal and public debt, tax cuts for the wealthiest, increased job insecurity, and shrinking public services. Catholic social teaching supplies a set of criteria for evaluating the moral health of an economic system, though for most people these principles are a well-kept secret. In this clear and penetrating book, Chuck Collins and Mary Wright draw on these principles to evaluate our economy and lay out practical steps toward establishing an economy “as if people mattered.”