The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
A global-scale climate catastrophe should provide sufficient incentive for cooperation between great powers. Drawing evidence from the trajectories of US-China relations, Lu examines China's role in the global climate governance from a geopolitical perspective. For China, striking a climate deal helped usher in a new area of cooperation to avoid the dangerous decoupling and potential conflict with the United States. Lu will also discuss policy implications of great power competition on the future of global climate governance.
Jiaqi (Jackie) Lu is a predoctoral research fellow in the Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP) and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) Program. He is also Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies (joint Ph.D. program) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include the political economy of energy transitions and climate change, as well as the intersection of governance and technology development. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Nature Geoscience, Energy Policy, and Environmental Research Letters. Before returning to academia, he spent over three years as a research analyst at the Brookings Institution.