To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
The talk explores: the dependencies of human well-being on environmental conditions and processes; the causes and consequences of environmental disruptions in less developed, rapidly developing, and industrialized economies; the central role of civilization's energy sources in generating many of the most dangerous and intractable environmental problems at all levels of economic development; the reasons for considering disruption of global climate as ultimately the most challenging of these problems; what we ought to be doing about this challenge; and why we are not doing it.